fun fact: $NEAR got into crypto because its founders had no good way to pay their data labelers. back in 2017 Illia had just co-written the transformer paper (the T in ChatGPT). he left Google and started NEAR as an AI company trying to teach computers to write code. for training data they hired students from China to Eastern Europe to write small programs. then they actually had to pay them. a lot of those students couldn't easily get paid in dollars, and PayPal worked in some countries but not others. so they went looking for a blockchain that could pay anyone anywhere, didn't find one good enough, and built their own. now NEAR AI runs an agent market where you hire an AI agent to build a site or do research and pay it in USDC. it's basically the 2017 setup again, except the workers are AI agents now. the students could at least use PayPal sometimes. an agent can't open a bank account at all, so it can only get paid onchain. AI is about to hit the same wall, just way bigger, and NEAR has spent 8 years building the fix. that's my favorite reason to be long.

a launchpad called Hoot was always going to get a coin called $HOOTERS. the surprise is who launched it: not some anon chasing a pun, but Vadim, a real OG. his name alone should be worth more than the coin's $15k mcap. and the meme itself delivers. the pfp is exactly what the ticker promises, and it even has its own song. it slaps. Vadim already asked @aescobar0g, COO of @rhea_finance, to buy "The Best Pair on NEAR" and whitelist it on NEAR's main DEX. his answer: "Yes sir". for now, the market cap is the only small thing about $HOOTERS. NFA