2024-01-13
NEAR Protocol founded by Alexander
Skidanov and Ilya Polosukhin. It is a layer 1 blockchain that emphasizes on
speed, security, and scalability. It launched in April 2020.
Sharding
NEAR Protocol uses sharding technology
called Nightshade to increase throughput and speed of the network.
It wants to solve Ethereum scalability
problem. The reason why Ethereum has low throughput because every node in the
network needs to process every single transaction.
NEAR Protocol uses sharding to solve
scalability problem of the blockchain. NEAR breaks the blockchain into mini
blockchains called Shard.
Each shard has its own set of
validators. Each node in the shard only does a subset of the total amount of
work. Sharding helps split the work of the node.
NEAR Protocol can process 100,000
transactions per second at an average cost of $0.001 per transaction. NEAR time
to finality is about 2.4 seconds.
Proof-of-Stake
NEAR Protocol is a proof-of-stake
blockchain. It is an energy-efficiency blockchain. In 2021 NEAR Protocol was
awarded the Climate Neutral Product Label.
According to NEAR docs, NEAR Protocol
consumes in a year the same energy Bitcoin consumes in 3 minutes.
NEAR token
NEAR tokens use for paying network transaction fees.
NEAR’s inflation rate is determined by
the number of daily transactions. NEAR tokens can become deflationary if NEAR
has more than 1.5 million daily transactions. NEAR current inflation rate is
about 5%.
NEAR Protocol can connect to other
blockchains through the Rainbow Bridge.
NEAR initial supply was 1 billion
tokens. NEAR currently has a circulating supply of 1,004,666,471 NEAR.
NEAR Ecosystem
NEAR uses JavaScript and Rust for its
programming languages. Developers can deploy Ethereum dApps and smart contracts on NEAR blockchain using Aurora.
Ref.finance is a decentralized exchange
on NEAR. Burrow.finance is a lending platform on NEAR.
