Executive Review of NEAR
Intro
Blockchain is a rapidly evolving ecosystem and sometimes it can be difficult to differentiate genuine products from trash. In this article we will explore NEAR protocol; its unique features and why it is worth giving a thought as an investor and as a developer.
We will attempt to understand NEAR from the following heading:
How does NEAR work?
How does NEAR compare with other competing technology?
What is the investment potential of NEAR?
Without any delay let's jump into the meat of this article.
How does NEAR work?
No simple statement can satisfy what NEAR is, as such we shall define NEAR as a blockchain, as a collective, and as a foundation.
As a blockchain, NEAR is a sharded, proof-of-stake, layer-one blockchain that is simple to use, secure and scalable.
As a collective, NEAR consists of an ever-expanding network of global community members, developers and creatives.
As a foundation, NEAR exists to foster ecosystem development and innovation through grant funding.
You can easily see that NEAR takes an all encompassing approach to empower millions of people to invent and explore new experiences for a more sustainable and inclusive future.
As a developer is a highly scalable, available, maintainable, and reliable distributed system with sharded computation and database. NEAR enables you to quickly and easily bring your idea to life by offering state-of-the-art-infrastructure, technical community and financial assistance.
For more details on the technical implementation of NEAR, visit NEAR official documentation.
To learn how to build on NEAR, visit NEAR SDK documentation.
How does NEAR compare with other competing technology?
As with any technology, NEAR does not exist in isolation. Several projects and companies but traditional and web3 want a piece of the pie of the future NEAR has envisioned. Some of NEAR outstanding competitors include; Ethereum, and Polkadot.
Ethereum is a pioneer of sophisticated smart contracts on blockchain, thanks to Ethereum Virtual Machine(EVM) and Solidity(its programming language). Ethereum is a technology that's home to digital money, and global payments through DeFi. However, it is this very success of Ethereum that is its biggest curse; Ethereum is very difficult to scale, it is very slow, difficult to maintain, and worse it is unsafe for the environment, courtesy to Ethereum proof of work consensus.
NEAR rises above this limitation by having a truly distributed network that operates via a much more environmentally friendly proof of stake consensus. NEAR has seen rapid development in DeFi, NFTs, Games and is currently the only layer 1 blockchain that has achieved true blockchain interoperability. NEAR can run ethereum smart contracts on its EVM; Aurora. NEAR can also communicate with any blockchain that implements Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol via its layer 0 relayer; Octopus. NEAR practically communicates with more than half a dozen blockchains.
Polkadot, a platform for web3 that enables a completely decentralized web where users are in control. Polkadot facilitates an internet where independent blockchains can exchange information and transactions in a trustless way via the Polkadot relay chain. Polkadot’s sharded architecture shares strong resemblance with NEAR but they also strongly differ in many ways. A glaring difference is the way Polkadot focuses on building parachains and parathread while NEAR supports smart contracts of varied nature as well as appchains.
NEAR offers all that Polkadot can offer and much more while keeping the cost relatively very low. NEAR directly supports EVM smart contracts unlike Polkadot as well as wasm smart contracts. The NEAR relay system for appchains is more decentralized than Polkadot’s relay system. In a nutshell, NEAR gives you all you can expect from a modern blockchain with minimal downsides.
What is the investment potential of NEAR?
$NEAR has grown over 2000% since its launch in 2020, with a market capitalization over $10.4B and liquidity of above $1.1B. NEAR has raised over $450M in 8 funding rounds, and has 65.9% of total $NEAR in circulation.
NEAR has 150+ diverse applications running on NEAR. These applications are built by a diverse group of innovators and teams, cutting across a wide array of use cases and industries. Some of them solve hard problems while others take novel approaches to make life easier. Some of the popular applications and use cases include:
Community: Astro, Sputnik DAO, and Guilds
Creators: Satori, Mintbase, and Paras
DeFi: Ref finance, Proximity, and Flux
For a comprehensive overview of applications on NEAR, visit NEAR app store. A lot of these projects are early stage and very early stage start-ups. They are fast growth companies with very high ROI. Look through them and invest in the ones you analyze to have a high chance to succeed.
Conclusion
NEAR and its ecosystem is rapidly moving to onboard the first 1B web3 users by offering state-of-the-art sharded proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain that emphasizes scalability and usability. Explore the NEAR ecosystem to fully understand how NEAR is consistently driving its vision.
Written by Chinedu E. Nwadike
