NEAR Protocol was established by Erik Trautman, an entrepreneur with significant experience on Wall Street and the founder of Viking Education. His co-founders include Illia Polosukhin, who brings over a decade of industry expertise, including three years at Google, and Alexander Skidanov, a computer scientist who previously worked at Microsoft before joining memSQL, where he served as the director of engineering. NEAR Protocol boasts a comprehensive team of seasoned developers, including several International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) gold medalists and winners. The team asserts that it comprises individuals with the expertise to develop some of the few real-world sharded systems at scale, a solution the protocol is leveraging to enhance blockchain scalability.

NEAR Protocol leverages its Nightshade technology to significantly enhance transaction throughput. Nightshade employs a form of sharding, where individual validator groups process transactions concurrently across multiple sharded chains, thereby increasing the blockchain's overall capacity. Unlike traditional sharding, Nightshade shards generate segments of the upcoming block, referred to as "chunks." This enables NEAR Protocol to handle up to 100,000 transactions per second and achieve nearly instant transaction finality due to a one-second block interval, all while maintaining transaction fees at nearly zero. Additionally, NEAR Protocol streamlines the typically complex onboarding processes of other blockchains by offering human-readable addresses and facilitating decentralized application development with registration flows similar to existing user experiences. Furthermore, it equips developers with modular components, aiding them in initiating projects such as token contracts or NFTs more efficiently.

The total supply of NEAR is 1 billion tokens, distributed as follows: * 17.2% - Community Grants * 11.4% - Operation Grants * 10% - Foundation Endowment * 11.7% - Early Ecosystem * 14% - Core Contributors * 17.6% - Backers * 6.1% - Small Backers * 12% - Community Sale NEAR Protocol launched its mainnet on April 22, 2020, with 1 billion NEAR tokens created at genesis. Each year, an additional 5% supply is issued to support the network as epoch rewards; 90% of these rewards (amounting to 4.5% of the total) are allocated to validators, while 10% (0.5% of the total) are directed to the protocol treasury. Of the transaction fees, 30% are distributed as rebates to contracts involved in the transaction, and the remaining 70% are burned. The NEAR token is utilized for: * Fees for transaction processing and data storage. * Running validator nodes on the network through staking NEAR tokens. * Participating in governance votes to decide the allocation of network resources.

NEAR employs a variant of the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism known as Doomslug. Doomslug operates through two rounds of consensus, with a block being deemed finalized as soon as it completes the first communication round. This approach facilitates near-instant finality by having validators alternate in block production instead of engaging in direct competition based on their stakes. The NEAR Foundation, a Swiss-based non-profit organization, is responsible for the maintenance of the protocol, providing ecosystem funding, and overseeing the governance of the protocol. Additionally, NEAR has developed a bridge to Ethereum, enabling users to transfer ERC-20 tokens from the Ethereum blockchain to NEAR.

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On October 25, 2021, NEAR announced an $800 million ecosystem funding initiative, aligning with similar efforts by Layer-1 blockchains such as Avalanche, Fantom, and Celo. This fund aims to support initiatives that will drive growth within the NEAR protocol ecosystem. It includes $350 million in funding from Proximity Labs. Of the total fund, $250 million is designated for scaling existing projects, and $100 million will be directed towards the Startup Grant Pools, providing $5 million each to 20 startups. NEAR is committed to supporting teams focused on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) that are actively changing and redefining our interactions with money. Additionally, NEAR is actively seeking projects related to NFTs, DAOs, and gaming. Separately, NEAR recently secured $150 million in seed investment, led by Three Arrows Capital and joined by Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Jump, Alameda, Zee Prime, and others. This investment will be used to accelerate the adoption of Web3 technologies.

The vision of NEAR Protocol to make blockchain technology accessible to everyone continues to propel the development efforts of NEAR Collective and its community. In August 2022, the NEAR team announced the release of a JavaScript Software Development Kit (JS SDK). The NEAR JS SDK is anticipated to provide an entry point for over 20 million programmers using JavaScript in the Web2 space to transition into blockchain and Web3. According to the NEAR team, this audience is significantly larger—tenfold—than the approximately 2.5 million programmers globally who utilize popular blockchain programming languages such as Rust and Solidity. The NEAR JS SDK is designed to capitalize on JavaScript’s user-friendly nature and simplicity for developing smart contracts. “Developers can spend less time learning a new language and more time building their application in a language they already know. Millions of developers already know how to program in JavaScript; enabling this group to build novel applications on NEAR is a critical step in achieving our vision of a billion users interacting with NEAR,” stated Illia Polosukhin, a co-founder of NEAR. The SDK, developed by Pagoda—the engineering team responsible for building and maintaining NEAR Protocol and essential tools for decentralized application (dApp) development—is implemented in TypeScript and provides developers with everything necessary to "dive right into blockchain development."

The NEAR Protocol, known for its emphasis on user-friendliness in project deployment and user experience, has been experiencing significant growth. The network recently introduced the public beta version of its non-custodial mobile wallet app, Sender. The Android APK of the Sender wallet, which is integrated with over 20 prominent projects within the NEAR ecosystem and has achieved over 300,000 downloads of its web extension, is now available for download from the Sender Labs website. Sender Labs secured seed funding from Binance Labs and Metaweb Ventures last year, and this year completed a private funding round. Since the network's mainnet launch in 2020, the NEAR Protocol has seen the development of nine decentralized applications (dApps) with a total value locked (TVL) of approximately $285 million, as of the current reporting date.

Rainbow, a bridge between NEAR and Ethereum, effectively prevented two attacks, with the second attempt resulting in the hacker losing 2.5 ETH. In September 2022, NEAR Protocol further revealed that it had successfully addressed two vulnerabilities on Aurora, its Ethereum sidechain, via its bug bounty program. The team behind the dynamically sharded, Proof-of-Stake, carbon-neutral blockchain—designed for usability and scalability—continues to express confidence that by leveraging the strengths of both PoS and sharding, NEAR Protocol can emerge as one of the most scalable, secure, and sustainable blockchain networks in the cryptocurrency space.