What is NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?

What is NEAR and why is NEAR ?

What really is NEAR protocol and its coin, NEAR?

Prepare to have these questions answered as Bitkub Academy will take you on a journey through the insights of NEAR Protocol!





What is NEAR Protocol?



NEAR Protocol is an infrastructure or blockchain network suitable for creating decentralized applications (dApps) with lower costs, in comparison to that of Ethereum. NEAR also utilizes the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm, which is in addition to the platform’s prioritization of users’ accessibility.





Developers



NEAR Protocol is a blockchain network infrastructure designed by Alex Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin, an individual experienced in top companies, like Microsoft, Google, and MemSQL. The two had also previously collaborated at Y Combinator, a startup accelerator program that ventures into technological projects, such as Coinbase, Dropbox, and Airbnb.



NEAR Protocol has drawn the attention of developers and investors worldwide, with both founders being able to raise over 500 million baht during its fundraising phase. In contemporary times, NEAR Collective has accumulated over 50 developers for the NEAR Protocol platform.





Interesting Points



1. Scalability NEAR Protocol can accommodate a constant daily increase in users with a suitable transaction processing speed and fees.

In detail, NEAR can process transactions within merely 2-3 seconds, with fees cheaper than 0.34 baht, resolving issues found in Bitcoin and Ethereum.



2. Interoperability with Ethereum



Rainbow Bridge is a tool users can employ to transfer ERC-20 tokens (such as USDT, UNI, AAVE, and COMP) between other platforms on Ethereum and NEAR conveniently, quickly and with low costs.



3. User-friendliness



Besides the fast transaction processing capabilities and cheap fees, many features on the NEAR Protocol platform were also developed with user experience kept in mind, namely the readable wallet address, differentiating from other platforms’ wallet addresses that appear in a hash function form, making NEAR Protocol unique and increasingly accessible for users.



4. Developer-friendliness



The NEAR Collective recognizes the complexities involved in developing and creating popularity for dApps and smart contracts, which can include the area of learning computer languages fit for various blockchain networks. As a solution to the difficulties involved, the NEAR Collective developed two tools to help with the processes: 4.1 Online Integrated Development Environment (IDE): a tool developed to accommodate developers in creating smart contracts from their web browsers. 4.2 NEAR Command-Line Tools: a set of basic commands used in creating, testing, and distributing dApps right from the developers’ computers.





Interesting Technology



A notable piece of technology on NEAR’s platform is Nightshade Sharding, which takes care of dividing data into many sets, while sending them for storage on a large number of nodes’ computers.



By doing so, users would not be required to process the entire set of data in the process of validation and would instead be responsible for the given portion they’d receive, making data processing parallel and much more efficient, without scalability issues.





Interesting Points



NEAR is NEAR Protocol’s utility coin used mainly for fees in processing transactions and storing data on the network. NEAR is also a governance token, giving its holders the power to propose systematic changes or vote for others’ proposals, in addition to being used to lock with validators that govern the network, which require NEAR to maintain the system’s integrity. 





In reference to statistics from Coinmarketcap on October 12, 2021, NEAR is ranked as the 46th highest in terms of market capitalization, with around 3.5 billion U.S. dollars or around 119 billion Thai baht. NEAR’s maximum supply is fixed at 1,000,000,000 tokens.

Additionally, NEAR once made an all-time high at 397 baht and is hovering around the price of 250 baht at the time of writing.





Conclusion



NEAR Protocol is a new generation Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain network utilizing a unique night sharding approach to handle scalability issues, while also allowing users to create Decentralized Applications (dApps) that are distinctively easy to use and accessible for both developers and users.





References:

Blockspaper , Medium , Coinmarketcap , Near , Gemini , Coinbureau , dyor-crypto , Medium