What is NEAR Protocol?

NEAR Protocol is created by the NEAR Collective as a community-run cloud computing platform that can achieve up to 100,000 transactions per second. It also features human-readable addresses and a more straightforward onboarding process for DApp (decentralised application) developers. Blockchain projects being built on NEAR Protocol include marketplace creation platform Flux and NFT minting platform Mintbase.

A brief history of NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol is the brainchild of Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin. Founded in 2017, NEAR Protocol started out as a machine learning project before it became a blockchain development platform. In its first 4 months, NEAR managed to raise US$50 million, despite not having even begun development. The network launched in April 2020, became community-operated in September 2020, and launched its mainnet in October 2020. In January 2022, NEAR announced that it had raised $150 million in seed investments to accelerate the adoption of Web3 technologies.

How NEAR Protocol works

NEAR Protocol uses proof of stake (PoS) consensus to secure and validate transactions on the blockchain. Its unique selling proposition is its Nightshade technology, a variation of sharding, that enables individual sets of validators to process transactions in parallel across multiple chains. In effect, Nightshade improves the overall capacity of the blockchain and makes its 100,000 transactions-per-second network speed possible. NEAR also has its own consensus mechanism, called Doomslug.

What is NEAR Protocol used for?

NEAR, the native token of the NEAR Platform, is mainly used by validators for staking and is distributed as rewards to these validators in exchange for serving the network. NEAR also serves as the core medium of exchange within the platform’s ecosystem.