Why NEAR Protocol is Gaining Traction in the Crypto Community

The Near protocol is a decentralized platform based on the Near blockchain platform. Near is a public, charted, scalable, and proof-of-stake (POS) pattern blockchain network. Developers can use this platform to launch their decentralized applications (such as Ethereum Network). The token of this network is called NEAR, which is the application token of this network.

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In this article, you will be fully acquainted with the Near protocol, its purpose, and features, the use of this network, NEAR tokens, the development team, and the token sticking of this network.

What is Near protocol?

Today, aiming to use a simple application or game that is launched on a blockchain platform, an individual has to go through a complicated process. Hence, the Near network focuses on the usability and user-friendliness of its platform; Developers, programmers, and end-users of products launched on the Near platform will feel better and more comfortable when using it. The network is ideally quite similar to Ethereum and is a platform for launching decentralized applications.

The Near network is actually similar to the Ethereum network. The difference is that this platform tries to offer higher usability, scalability, ease, and ultimately a completely decentralized network.

In the current world, a significant number of projects and applications being developed on blockchain networks remain limited to research projects and are not fully implemented. The life of decentralized protocols depends on the community of developers who launch their projects on these protocols. Take Defi projects, for instance. Almost all of these projects have been launched on the Ethereum network. UniSwap, Ave, Comp, and many more are decentralized applications built into the Ethereum network. The Near Network claims that a network of expert developers and programmers from around the world work on the network.

This protocol provides a platform for programmers to freely submit their programs. Despite such plans, we will have a better world in which people’s property, including money, personal information, etc., is entirely up to them.

History of Near protocol

NEAR started off from a project of machine learning prior to becoming a blockchain development platform. Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov launched NEAR.ai in early 2017 to examine program composition: the context of program automation of human characteristics. The NEAR project, named after the science-fiction novel The Singularity Is Near, is based on the work of Illia as TensorFlow’s main contributor to Google and Alexander as chief engineer at MemSQL.

Research into program synthesis led the team to explore programmable smart contract platforms and cryptographic payments in late 2017 and early 2018. As they explored the solution space and tested a variety of Blockchain protocols, they found that the current state of technology did not suit them. Needed and started designing a blockchain that could. Illia and Alex assembled a team of engineers and officially began building the NEAR protocol in August 2018. The vision for the NEAR platform was to provide developers with an easy way to build decentralized applications that could be used on a large scale. To achieve these goals, NEAR adopted the proof-of-stake (PoS) to support transaction verification and production block.

NEAR combines a horizontal scale approach with a new consensus mechanism that divides the network into parallel segments and dynamically distributes computations to increase network processing capacity. The network was launched in April 2020, socially managed in September 2020, and a vote to enable token transfer was approved in October 2020.

How Does Near Protocol Work?

Like Ethereum, Cardano, and TRON, Near could be described as a “base layer” blockchain. This means that it is the foundation on which other applications were created and deployed.

NEAR uses a technology known as Nightshade to achieve its enormous throughput capabilities. The scaling solution sees a set of validations that process transactions in parallel across multiple split chains to improve the carrying capacity of the entire blockchain transaction. This solution is somewhat different from the sharing system used by other blockchains, as each subset generates a fraction of the next block – known as a “chunk”. These are processed and stored unchanged in the NEAR blockchain to finalize transactions.

The app is built to simplify tasks for developers while giving them a powerful toolkit for building next-generation applications. Since NEAR uses a contract-based account model, developers can create advanced applications that can sign transactions on behalf of users, allowing them to execute contracts without the need for physical availability to verify performance.

Main features of the Near protocol

Suppose you use router program A for driving while driving. Another company called B also offers its own routing program. You ask yourself if there was a Routing plan A, what are the advantages of Plan B over Plan A to encourage people to use it? In the case of the Near network, the same question arises: what is the reason for the developers to use the Near network instead of the Ethereum network? In this section, we will address this issue.

Ethereum Network is a slow and expensive protocol. Developers have the limited speed to use this network, and on the other hand, the cost of transactions in this network is relatively high, which will prevent a storm of innovations.

The reason Ethereum seeks to launch the Ethereum.2 network is to speed up transactions and reduce network costs. So this problem has entered the Ethereum network. Near network solves this problem by using sharding and the transaction speed is high and the transaction cost is low.

Ethereum started operating in 2014. As mentioned, the main problem with Ethereum is its low speed (14 transactions per second on average) and high transaction costs. To solve the scalability problem, the network and Bitcoin used second-tier technologies to make their network more scalable. However, this solution did not gain enough acceptance and the market practically abandoned the idea. Therefore, the problem of scalability remained in the field of digital currencies. Between 2018 and 2019, new networks were launched to solve the problem of scalability (for example, the IAS network). New networks solved the problem of scalability, but this came at the cost of network centralization. These networks perform thousands of transactions per second, but they can no longer be called decentralized networks. So the scalability problem was practically solved, yet the network was centralized.

This led to the arrival of the next generation of blockchain networks. The Near protocol also falls into this category. This platform uses sharding technology to solve the scalability problem. In this model, a transaction no longer needs to be checked by all network nodes. By sharding, a network is transformed into several parallel networks that simultaneously process transactions, so that each transaction is processed on a single shard. As a result, only nodes on one lane will verify the transaction, and other nodes on other network lanes will not verify the transaction. This idea will significantly increase the capacity of the network (Ethereum.2 will use the same technology in the future).

Of course, sharding technology has also been used by other protocols, and therefore Near has not been the first network. Network Nodes that utilize Sharding, require relatively sophisticated hardware to run their node. Accordingly, fewer people are able to set up ninety in these networks. Nevertheless, the Near protocol uses the host’s cloud space to launch the node.

The third feature is the user-friendliness and ease of use of decentralized applications for developers and end-users on the Near network. Using common programming languages ​​is one of the network solutions to solve this issue.

Near protocol TOKEN

The main currency code of the Near protocol is the NEAR token. To create a decentralized network, people must be economically motivated to work as ninety in this network. The NEAR token plays such a role in the Near network. Any transaction made on the Near network requires a fee and this fee is paid as a NEAR token. The Near protocol uses the proof-of-stake (POS) algorithm, and individuals must purchase and stick the NEAR token to participate in the network.

According to the Near protocol, 5% of new NEAR tokens are generated and distributed each year. 90% of this amount will be donated to Near Network nodes and 10% of it will be deposited in the Near Network Fund and will be used for the future development of this network.

In conclusion

Last year, NEAR released its much-anticipated Ethereum Bridge, known as the Rainbow Bridge. This allows users to attach their Ethereum ERC-20 tokens to NEAR for use in the NEAR dapp ecosystem. This is a big step towards NEAR applications to get more access to the platform.

For the next step, NEAR is currently working on implementing Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) support – the software stack that Ethereum uses to run decentralized applications. Once completed, developers can reinstall their Ethereum applications in NEAR without the need for minor changes or without the need to remove the main barrier to cross-chain launch.