NEAR is a simple, scalable, and secure blockchain platform built to give developers and users the best experience.

What is Near protocol ($NEAR)?

Near Protocol, like Ethereum, is a smart contract-enabled blockchain that was released in 2020 to encourage developers to create and deploy more decentralized apps (dApps). NEAR blockchain to leverage the full advantage of NEAR’s ecosystem, including its high speed, scalability, sharding solutions, interoperability, and low fees. This blockchain, which is distributed across hundreds of machines worldwide, is structured in such a way that it is permissionless, performant, and safe enough to serve as a foundation for the future web’s decentralized data layer.

NEAR is a Proof-of-Stake Blockchain that uses sharding technology to achieve scalability. Sharding is the process of dividing the main blockchain into sub-chains or shards, much like a tree’s branches. Each branch or shard is capable of processing independently and has its own set of validators (or nodes). This way, each shard bears just a part of the entire weight. This construction unclogs the main chain and distributes the load horizontally, resulting in increased operating speeds.

The Near Protocol is not controlled by a single entity but is instead run by the computers that comprise its network. This enables developers to build apps and publish them on the blockchain without first developing the underlying infrastructure. NEAR is the Near blockchain’s native token.

Outstanding Features

What is the project trying to achieve?

The NEAR platform’s design and development are influenced by a handful of fundamental ideas. These ideas capture the underlying problems in today’s centralized and decentralized systems.

Usability: End users should find it smooth to utilize the platform’s applications, and developers should find it effortless to create them. Wherever feasible, the underlying technology should blend into the background or be totally invisible to end-users. Developers should employ familiar languages and patterns wherever possible during the development process. Simple apps should be easy and straightforward to develop, but more powerful applications should remain secure.

Scalability: The platform should expand indefinitely as long as economic reason exists to serve enterprise-grade, globally utilized applications.

Simplicity: Each component of the system should be designed as simply as feasible in order to accomplish its primary function. Prioritize simplicity, practicality, and readability over theoretical perfection.

Sustainable Decentralization: The platform should promote considerable decentralization both in the short and long term to ensure the platform’s value is adequately secured. The platform — and community — should be open to everybody without requiring permission and aggressively promote decentralization and participation. To ensure long-term viability, both technology and community governance methods must allow for practical iteration while preventing long-term capture by any single party.

What is the unique selling point?

The Most Usable Layer1

The NEAR Protocol has been designed in such a way that any newbie from Web 2.0 or Crypto can rapidly and simply establish a presence in the Ecosystem. Numerous features enable end-users to interact with numerous operations in a straightforward and natural manner.

• Human-readable account IDs: One of NEAR’s most distinguishing characteristics is its usage of human-readable account IDs rather than a public key hash. This dramatically enhances the user experience by providing a sense of familiarity and making it easier to recall.
• Users can stake straight from their Native Web Wallet: Staking on NEAR is really easy and can be done immediately from their Wallet. To add to the convenience, NEAR wallet is mobile-friendly.
• One-Click Integration of the NEAR Wallet with NEAR Dapps: The NEAR Wallet is designed to interface with all Dapps created on top of NEAR in a single click.

Scalability Through NightShade Sharding

Cos of Sharding, NEAR’s scaling system is horizontal. Sharding is the process of distributing computing among several parallelized shards. When more hardware is added to a system, the overall processing power of the network is proportional to the number of CPUs in it. The more devices and nodes that support the validation process, the higher the network’s throughput.

NEAR employs a unique sharding design known as NightShade. NightShade expects that all shards join together to form a single block. Because each block contains transactions from all shards, each block modifies the state of all shards. No participant downloads the whole blockchain; instead, they just keep the state associated with the shards for which they validate transactions.

NEAR will be able to process 2500-3000 transactions per second with four shards. NEAR’s NightShade TPS may be made potentially unlimited by increasing the amount of shards. NEAR plans to introduce dynamic resharding in the future after it has a working mainnet with a set amount of shards. As a result, the network will have the ability to dynamically divide and combine its shards.

Access Almost All Compatible Chains With Rainbow Bridge 

The NEAR team released their bridge solution in April 2021, which will enable users to move assets effortlessly from the Ethereum network to NEAR.  The bridge, dubbed the Rainbow bridge, will let token holders use their Ethereum-based assets to transfer to NEAR. They may then access dApps built on the NEAR protocol and take advantage of the underlying network’s fast finality and cheap transaction cost.

Aurora – An Ethereum Layer-2 Experience

NEAR is EVM-compatible via Project Aurora. Aurora enables easy migration of Ethereum-based decentralized applications to NEAR, while also operating as an L2 on NEAR and exploiting its high throughput and scalability. It is powered by two vital components: the Aurora Bridge and the Aurora Engine. Here are some of the features that Aurora includes:

• The capacity to handle thousands of transactions per second, which is a 50x improvement over Ethereum.
• A block finality time of 2 seconds, as opposed to Ethereum’s single block confirmation time of 13 seconds.
• With NEAR’s sharding method, EVM can scale horizontally.
• Aurora’s fees are 1000 times cheaper than Ethereum’s.
• Aurora provides unrivaled interoperability with Ethereum via the NEAR Protocol.

Interoperable App Chains

Octopus is a network of app chains that are interoperable with NEAR including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot & Cosmos. An app chain, or application-specific blockchain, is an independent blockchain used explicitly for a specific set of custom-designed applications. The Octopus Network is a multichain cryptocurrency network that enables the creation and operation of Web3.0 application-specific blockchains referred to as app chains. Appchains on the Octopus Network benefit from flexible and cost-effective leased security (LPoS), out-of-the-box multichain interoperability, a robust infrastructure, and a community that is eager to participate. The Octopus Network is built on the Octopus Relay – a collection of smart contracts that operate on the NEAR blockchain, called the main chain, and implement the security leasing market.

Technical Data

Token Metrics

• Token Name: Near
• Ticker: Near
• Blockchain: NEAR Protocol
• Token Standard: NEP-141, ERC-20, BEP-20
• Contract:
  0x1fa4a73a3f0133f0025378af00236f3abdee5d63 (BEP-20)
  0x85F17Cf997934a597031b2E18a9aB6ebD4B9f6a4 (ERC-20)
• Token Type: Utility, Governance
• Total Supply: 1,000,000,000
• Circulating Supply: 638,887,279

Token Allocation

Token Sale

On August 11, 2020, NEAR had sold NEAR tokens via a tiered price sale using CoinList

Token Release Schedule

Token Use Case

• Pay the system for transaction processing and data storage.
• Participate in the staking process by operating a validating node as part of the network.
• Participating in governance procedures allows you to influence how network resources are dispersed and where the network’s technological direction will go in the future.

Backers

Team

Investors

Verdict

NEAR Protocol was formed by a former Wall Street executive with extensive entrepreneurial experience, as well as Illia Poposukhin and Alexander Skidanov, who formerly worked at Google and Microsoft. Investors have been extremely interested in investing in the Near Protocol owing to the business-minded individuals and engineers behind it, which explains the protocol’s amazing development since its inception. I believe that NEAR has a lot of potential given the market adoption it has achieved and the level of hype it can sustain.

Find more information about:

Website: https://near.org/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nearprotocol

Telegram: https://t.me/cryptonear

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/UY9Xf2k

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuKdIYVN8iE3fv8alyk1aMw

Medium: https://medium.com/nearprotocol

Docs: https://docs.near.org/docs/develop/basics/getting-started

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or ideas about the project, please email [email protected].

DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary, and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

Marshall

Coincu Ventures