A Milk Road PRO member asked why I hold $NEAR when $SOL apps made $365M last quarter, more than any other chain I hold both because they're doing different jobs $SOL is the execution engine for human traders. $NEAR is building the controller layer for AI agents Solana's numbers are real. Q3 was its 10th straight quarter leading every chain in app revenue, and in August its apps made $143M to Ethereum's $47M Alpenglow goes live Oct 21 and cuts finality to about 150ms from about 12.8 seconds When I had 21Shares' Eliezer Ndinga on @MilkRoadDaily, he said well over 90% of tokenized equities volume was on Solana as of their H1 report (my guess is that's SOL's next big value driver) Now to how SOL captures value. 100% of priority fees go to validators, and the base fee burn is about 700 SOL a day against about 66,500 SOL issued, per Blockworks Research That's why August's validator vote matters. 67% approved doubling SOL's disinflation rate, so once it activates, inflation hits its 1.5% floor in 2029 instead of 2032 Where Solana hasn't won yet is deep capital. Its DeFi TVL is $6.0B, Base has passed it at $6.2B, and Ethereum holds $50.1B (DefiLlama) For context, ETH + Base TVL is $56B, almost SOL's entire $62.5B market cap. To me, when it comes to competing on trading fees and volume, the best comparison for $SOL is $HYPE. But that's another story. NEAR is built for a different customer entirely: - $SOL runs one fast global state for traders - $NEAR gives agents sharded state, private compute and one account that signs on 35+ chains 1. Nightshade sharding: state splits across shards, so agent traffic adds shards instead of heavier validator hardware 2. TEEs: agents can run private inference and confidential transactions. NEAR's own dashboard shows Confidential Intents TVL at $155.7M, up 365% in 90 days 3. Intents + Chain Signatures: one NEAR account signs and settles on other chains, w/ $33B+ in all-time volume and $4.8B in the last 30 days (TokenPost, DefiLlama). This is where NEAR found product-market fit IMO NEAR captures value differently. Since February, Intents revenue buys NEAR on the open market, $3.07M in Q3 vs $1.5M in Q2 (DefiLlama) Inflation was halved to 2.5% in Oct 2025, and in July governance voted to burn 100% of gas fees, up from 70% Those buybacks are still small next to a $6.8B market cap, so I'm watching the trend. They doubled in a quarter, and monthly Intents volume is up 896% YoY When I had Bitwise's Matt Hougan and Ryan Rasmussen on @MilkRoadDaily, their base case was $155 per NEAR by 2030, about 30x from $5.22, w/ a bull case above $500. As Matt put it, "It's like a moonshot for free" $SOL is about 9x the size of $NEAR by market cap. If you think agents end up moving real money across chains (which I do), NEAR is the smaller bet w/ the bigger multiple I'm not bearish on Solana, and more Solana episodes are coming on @MilkRoadDaily. I think both chains have plenty of room to win Full disclosure: $NEAR and $SOL are positions in my Milk Road PRO portfolio. Our PRO team was early to $UNI (+54.8%), $AERO (+93.7%), and $SKY (+42.6%) Try Milk Road PRO for $1 for 7 days, link in bio: @BitcoinJesusETH