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About NEAR Protocol
Key Points
- NEAR Protocol is a layer-one blockchain designed for community-run cloud computing and DApps.
- It eliminates limitations of competing blockchains, such as low transaction speeds and poor interoperability.
- NEAR uses human-readable account names and has a unique consensus mechanism called “Doomslug.”
- The protocol is being built by the NEAR Collective, a community that updates the initial code and releases updates to the ecosystem.
Founders and Team
- Founded by Erik Trautman, Illia Polosukhin, and Alexander Skidanov.
- The team includes
Introducing NEAR Protocol: A Revolutionary Blockchain Ecosystem
Introducing NEAR Protocol (NEAR): A Revolutionary Blockchain Ecosystem
NEAR Protocol is a pioneering layer-one blockchain, conceived as a community-driven cloud computing platform, which effectively mitigates the limitations that have hindered competing blockchains, including sluggish transaction speeds, inadequate throughput, and poor interoperability. This creates an optimal environment for decentralized applications (DApps) and fosters a developer- and user-centric platform. Notably, NEAR employs human-readable account names, diverging from the cryptographic wallet addresses characteristic of Ethereum. Furthermore, NEAR introduces innovative solutions to scaling conundrums and boasts its proprietary consensus mechanism, dubbed “Doomslug.”
NEAR Protocol is being developed by the NEAR Collective, a community-driven entity that is continually refining the initial codebase and rolling out updates to the ecosystem. Its stated objective is to create a platform that is “sufficiently secure to manage high-value assets, such as financial resources or identities, and performant enough to render them accessible and practical for everyday individuals.”
Notable examples of projects being built on NEAR Protocol include Flux, a pioneering protocol that empowers developers to create markets centered around assets, commodities, and real-world events, as well as Mintbase, a cutting-edge NFT minting platform.
The Visionary Founders Behind NEAR Protocol (NEAR)
NEAR Protocol was established by Erik Trautman, a seasoned entrepreneur with a background in Wall Street and founder of Viking Education. He was joined by co-founders Illia Polosukhin, who brought over a decade of industry expertise, including a three-year stint at Google, and Alexander Skidanov, a computer scientist with a distinguished tenure at Microsoft and memSQL, where he rose to the position of director of engineering. The NEAR Protocol team boasts an impressive roster of experienced developers, featuring multiple International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) gold medalists and winners. Notably, the team comprises individuals with hands-on experience in building large-scale, real-world sharded systems, a solution the protocol is actively pursuing to enhance blockchain scalability.
Unveiling the Uniqueness of NEAR Protocol (NEAR)
NEAR leverages its innovative Nightshade technology to dramatically enhance transaction throughput. This proprietary technology is a variant of sharding, wherein distinct sets of validators process transactions in parallel across multiple sharded chains, thereby significantly augmenting the blockchain’s overall capacity. Unlike traditional sharding, Nightshade’s shards produce a fraction of the next block, referred to as “chunks.” As a result, the NEAR Protocol achieves an impressive throughput of up to 100,000 transactions per second, coupled with near-instant transaction finality, thanks to a rapid one-second block cadence, all while maintaining transaction fees at a negligible level.
NEAR Protocol revolutionizes the onboarding experience by introducing human-readable addresses, thereby simplifying the process. Furthermore, it streamlines the development of decentralized applications by adopting a familiar registration flow, reminiscent of what users have grown accustomed to. Additionally, the protocol empowers developers with modular components, enabling them to rapidly initiate projects, such as token contracts and NFTs, with ease.
The Circulating Supply of NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Coins: An Overview
The total supply of NEAR tokens is capped at 1 billion, with a carefully crafted distribution plan as follows:
- 17.2% – Allocations for Community Development Grants
- 11.4% – Operational Expenditure Grants
- 10% – Foundation’s Endowment Fund
- 11.7% – Early Ecosystem Development
- 14% – Core Contributors and Maintainers
- 17.6% – Strategic Backers and Partners
- 6.1% – Small-scale Backers and Supporters
- 12% – Community-driven Token Sale
On April 22, 2020, the NEAR Protocol successfully launched its mainnet, introducing an initial 1 billion NEAR tokens at genesis. To sustain the network, an additional 5% of the total supply is issued annually as epoch rewards, with 90% allocated to validators (constituting 4.5% of the total) and 10% reserved for the protocol treasury (equivalent to 0.5% of the total). Furthermore, 30% of transaction fees are reimbursed to contracts that interact with a transaction, while the remaining 70% are eliminated through burning. The NEAR token serves multiple purposes, including:
- Transaction processing and data storage costs.
- Operating validator nodes on the network by staking NEAR tokens, thereby contributing to the validation process.
- Utilized for casting governance votes, which dictate the allocation of network resources.
The Security Paradigm of the NEAR Protocol Network
NEAR employs a modified proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, dubbed Doomslug. This innovative approach involves a two-round consensus process, wherein a block is deemed finalized upon completion of the initial communication round. This design enables near-instant finality, as validators take turns producing blocks in a sequential manner, rather than competing directly based on their stake.
The NEAR Foundation, a Swiss-based non-profit organization, is committed to maintaining the protocol, providing ecosystem funding, and guiding the protocol’s governance. Furthermore, the protocol has established a bridge to Ethereum, thereby enabling users to seamlessly transfer ERC-20 tokens from the Ethereum blockchain to NEAR.
Acquiring NEAR Protocol (NEAR): A Comprehensive Guide to Exchanges and Marketplaces
NEAR is proudly listed on esteemed cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Huobi Global, Mandala Exchange, and OKX, ensuring seamless accessibility for traders worldwide.
New to the world of cryptocurrency? Explore our comprehensive guide on entering the market and purchasing NEAR or any other token, available in the CoinMarketCap education portal — Alexandria.
The Near Protocol Ecosystem Fund: Empowering Innovation
On October 25, 2021, NEAR announced a monumental $800 million ecosystem funding initiative, emulating the footsteps of prominent Layer-1 blockchains such as Avalanche, Fantom, and Celo. This substantial fund will be dedicated to catalyzing growth within the NEAR protocol ecosystem. Notably, $350 million of the total fund is contributed by Proximity Labs. The allocation of the fund is as follows: $250 million will be utilized to support the scaling of existing projects, while $100 million will be channeled into the Startup Grant Pools, where 20 innovative startups will each receive $5 million in funding. NEAR will prioritize financing Decentralized Finance (DeFi) teams that are pioneering novel approaches to financial interactions. Additionally, NEAR is actively seeking out projects focused on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and gaming. In a separate development, NEAR recently secured $150 million in seed investment, led by Three Arrows Capital, with participation from esteemed investors including Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Jump, Alameda, Zee Prime, and others. This investment will be leveraged to accelerate the adoption of Web3 technologies.
Unlock the Power of NEAR Protocol: A Comprehensive Guide for Developers
NEAR protocol’s visionary pursuit of democratizing blockchain technology continues to propel the development endeavors of NEAR Collective and the community, fostering an inclusive ecosystem for all.
In August 2022, the NEAR team unveiled a groundbreaking JavaScript software development kit (JS SDK), poised to usher in a new era of innovation. This pioneering toolkit is anticipated to empower over 20 million JavaScript developers, hailing from the Web2 realm, to seamlessly transition into the burgeoning blockchain and Web3 ecosystem.
Notably, the NEAR team highlights that this figure surpasses the global population of approximately 2.5 million programmers who utilize the most popular blockchain programming languages, namely Rust and Solidity. The NEAR JS SDK is poised to harness JavaScript’s renowned ease of use and simplicity, thereby streamlining the development of smart contracts.
“By leveraging their existing JavaScript proficiency, developers can dedicate more time to building their applications and less time to learning a new language. With millions of developers already well-versed in JavaScript, empowering this group to create innovative applications on NEAR is a pivotal step towards realizing our vision of a billion users interacting with NEAR,” Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, stated.
The SDK, meticulously crafted by Pagoda, the esteemed engineering team behind the development and maintenance of NEAR Protocol and a plethora of essential tools for decentralized application (dApp) development, is built using TypeScript and provides a comprehensive, out-of-the-box solution, empowering developers to seamlessly embark on blockchain development.
Unbridled Growth: NEAR Protocol Ecosystem Expansion
With a keen emphasis on seamless project deployment and exceptional user experience, the NEAR protocol has been experiencing rapid growth. Notably, the network has recently witnessed the highly anticipated public beta launch of its innovative, non-custodial mobile wallet app, Sender.
The Android APK of the wallet, already integrated with over 20 prominent projects within the NEAR ecosystem and boasting an impressive 300,000 downloads of its web extension, is now available for download on Sender Labs’ website. Following a seed funding round led by Binance Labs and Metaweb Ventures last year, Sender Labs successfully closed a private funding round this year.
Since the inaugural mainnet launch of the network in 2020, the NEAR protocol has witnessed the successful deployment of nine decentralized applications, boasting a cumulative Total Value Locked (TVL) of approximately $285 million, as of this writing.
The Unwavering Security of NEAR Protocol
Rainbow, a pioneering NEAR-Ethereum bridge, has successfully repelled two sophisticated attacks, with the second audacious attempt culminating in the hacker incurring a loss of 2.5 ETH.
In September 2022, the NEAR protocol proudly announced a significant milestone: the successful mitigation of two critical vulnerabilities on Aurora, its Ethereum-based sidechain, thanks to the diligent efforts of its bug bounty program.
The visionary team behind the dynamically sharded Proof-of-Stake carbon-neutral blockchain, engineered for seamless usability and boundless scalability, exudes confidence in its ability to harness the synergistic power of both PoS and sharding, thereby establishing itself as one of the most scalable, secure, and environmentally sustainable blockchain networks in the cryptocurrency landscape.
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