Near Protocol

NEAR Protocol (NEAR) is a decentralised autonomous platform that utilises blockchain technology. Founded in 2017 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov and headquartered in San Francisco, NEAR was optimised for programmability and aimed for developers to build, experiment, and deploy applications that securely handle a broad range of digital assets. As former employees of Google and Microsoft, the founders created NEAR because they could not find a blockchain platform suited for their requirements. They made it a point to create an easily scalable platform for launching decentralised apps (DApps) using the Proof-of-Stake mechanism. Its mainnet was launched in April 2020, and network validators voted to enable token transfers by October 2020. NEAR is backed up by numerous venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz’s A16Z, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com, and Baidu Ventures. NEAR uses a block generation scheme called “Doomslug” and a technique called “sharding”, which splits the network into several pieces to allow computation to be done in parallel. These two combined technologies enable easier scalability and minimised network congestions. As of October 2021, there are currently more than 1.3 million active accounts on the network, and total value locked has exceeded $150m, including NEAR native assets along with Ethereum network assets. Learn more about cryptoassets and the NEAR price on eToro.