Table of Contents
What Is Near Protocol?
NEAR Protocol is a layer-one blockchain created as a community-run cloud computing platform that deletes most inadequacies bogging competing blockchains, such as low transaction speeds, low throughput, and poor interoperability.
This gives the ideal environment for DApps, making it a developer and user-friendly platform.
For example, NEAR uses human-readable account names, unlike the cryptographic wallet addresses familiar to Ethereum. Near protocol started in July of 2018. NEAR Inc.’s location is in San Francisco, California.
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How Near Protocol Works And What It Is Trying To Deliver?
NEAR Protocol’s focus is to be the most accessible and reliable network worldwide for developers and their users, while still ensuring scalability and security to serve those same users.
To make this possible, it allows for the building of decentralized applications and gives users an excellent experience and scaling applications.
NEAR tries to achieve its mission through its two key features, Thresholded Proof-of-Stake (TPoS) consensus and Nightshade Sharding design.
Thresholded Proof-Of-Stake (TPOS) Consensus Mechanism
It operates by ensuring that transactions are validated correctly. According to NEAR, TPoS makes it difficult and expensive for an enemy to attack the network and validate false information.
NEAR uses an election mechanism called Thresholded Proof of Stake (TPoS).
The general idea is that we want a deterministic way to have a large number of participants that are maintaining network maintenance thereby increasing decentralization, security and establishes fair reward distribution.
The closest alternative to our method is an auction, where people bid for fixed number of items and at the end the top N bids win, while receiving a number of items proportional to the size of their bids.
In our case, we want a large pool of participants (we call them “witnesses”) to be elected to make decisions during a specific interval of time (we default to one day).
Each interval is split into a large number of block slots (we default to 1440 slots, one every minute) with a reasonably large number of witnesses per each block (default to 1024).
With these defaults, we end up needing to fill 1,474,560 individual witness seats.
https://medium.com/nearprotocol/thresholded-proof-of-stake-67b74e616a92
Nightshade Sharding Design
According to Nightshade’s technical overview, the reason behind the low throughput of early blockchain is that every node in the network needs to process every single transaction. Many solutions have been suggested to address the issue of throughput on the protocol level.
Another approach is Sharding, where work is shared among all the participating nodes. In this method instead of running one blockchain, multiple blockchains called shards are used. Each shard has its own set of validators.
But NEAR uses a unique Sharding design called Nightshade, in which the team has modelled the system as a single blockchain. According to the company:
In Nightshade we model the system as a single blockchain, in which each block logically contains all the transactions for all the shards, and changes the whole state of all the shards. Physically, however, no participant downloads the full state or the full logical block. Instead, each participant only maintains the state that corresponds to the shards that they validate transactions for, and the list of all the transactions in the block is split into physical chunks, one chunk per shard.”
NEAR INC.
This design is what makes NEAR unique and outstanding. Using the Nightshade design Near protocol can achieve up to 100,000 transactions per second and achieve near-instant transaction finality thanks to a one-second block cadence while simultaneously keeping transaction fees at virtually zero.
How Many Near Protocol (NEAR) Coins Are There Circulation?
The total supply of NEAR is 1 billion tokens, according to the following token distribution:
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 Inc launched its main net on April 22, 2020, with 1 billion NEAR tokens created at the beginning. 5% of additional supply is issued each year to support the network as epoch rewards, of which 90% goes to validators (4.5% total) and 10% to the protocol treasury (0.5%). 30% of transaction fees are paid as rebates to contracts that interact with a transaction, while the remaining 70% are burned.
The NEAR token is used for:
• Fees for processing transactions and storing data.
• Running validator nodes on the network via staking NEAR tokens.
• Used for governance votes to determine how network resources are shared
What Is The Near Token?
Like the majority of blockchains, NEAR also has its own native utility token named ‘NEAR’. It is used for incentivizing nodes on the NEAR network and is also used for powering transactions and the numerous NEAR smart contracts.
As a community-governed platform, NEAR token holders can participate in the on-chain governance of the NEAR platform, or they can have a validator vote on their behalf.
Discussions about the development and marketing of NEAR products and the surrounding NEAR ecosystem are currently held on the governance forum. Users can also submit their suggestions to the NEAR Enhancement Proposals repository (NEPs) on Github.
How To Buy Near Tokens?
Step 1; Open an online account.
NEAR is available on a few trading platforms, including Binance and Crypto.com. However, Binance only supports NEAR on Binance.com, which isn’t available to U.S customers.
Because of this, Crypto.com will likely be the best place to purchase NEAR for U.S. investors. Crypto.com has a sleek and powerful application on iOS and Android phones.
Before you can purchase NEAR you will need to verify your exchange account. In the U.S. this usually entails providing your address, Social Security number and a picture of your driver’s license or passport. If you plan on using your NEAR tokens on DApps on the network, you will need to set up a wallet to store and transfer the tokens.
Other Exchanges that you can buy Near from without verification are;
Step 2; Buy a wallet (optional).
You could simply leave your NEAR in the exchange you purchased it from, but without a hardware or software wallet, you can’t do much with the token beyond price speculation.
Moving your tokens to a personal wallet also gives you more control over your tokens. Successful hacks on major exchanges have lost users millions of dollars worth of cryptos over the years.
Even though the largest exchanges today like Crypto.com are extremely secure, hardware wallets eliminate the risk of cyberattacks.
Step 3; Make your purchase.
Now that your account is set up and verified you can fund your account and start trading NEAR. The easiest and fastest method to fund your Crypto.com account with U.S. dollars is through instant ACH deposits.
The app guides you through the simple steps to link your bank account to make your deposit. You can also send other supported cryptos to your Crypto.com account and trade them for NEAR.
Once your account is funded, just find the trading pair you want with Near such as NEAR/tether (USDT) and make your purchase.
Best Software Wallet; Near Wallet
Near Protocol is designed for decentralized applications, and a software wallet is often necessary to interact with these types of programs.
NEAR isn’t supported by most of the major software wallets such as MetaMask and Coinbase Wallet, but the company has a proprietary wallet to use with its token. Unlike wallets on Ethereum, Near Wallet requires a small amount of NEAR token to open an account.
You will need to buy some on an exchange or get a friend to send you the required 0.2 NEAR first. Once your account is set up you can transfer ERC-20 tokens from your Ethereum wallet to your Near Wallet and start using DApps on the exciting new network.
Tip: Adoption is probably the most important factor in the growth of Near Protocol. It is already an efficient smart contract platform with the potential for great DApps, but it may need more users and developers to see greater success.
Trade, Sell Or Convert Your Near
NEAR is a volatile asset and that won’t change any time soon. Smaller volumes of trading can push the price up or down because of its relatively small market capitalization. Also, if the network doesn’t attract enough developers and users on major applications, NEAR’s price may be severely affected in the long term.
For these reasons you need to know how to close your NEAR position. Luckily, Crypto.com and Binance make it easy to do so. Just go to either exchange you have a verified account on, find the trading pair you want and complete the transaction.
How Is The Near Protocol Network Secured?
NEAR uses a series of proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms called Doomslug. Doomslug focuses on two rounds of consensus, where a block is considered finalized after it has received the first communication round.
The protocol allows for near-instant finality by having validators take turns producing blocks rather than competing based on their stake.
The NEAR Foundation is a Swiss-based non-profit dedicated to protocol maintenance, ecosystem funding, and guiding the protocol’s governance. The protocol has also built a bridge to Ethereum, allowing users to transfer ERC-20 tokens from the Ethereum blockchain to NEAR.
Is Near Protocol A Good Investment?
The focus of NEAR Protocol has been to meet growing Consumer Demands by unlocking the power of Blockchain and be prosperous in drastically increasing the speed, cost, and trustworthiness of multitudes, especially in the way they handle transactions.
NEAR protocol has also significantly eroded the duty of intermediaries by bringing all financial solutions on a decentralized infrastructure.
NEAR coin is an obvious choice of investors due to high-speed, cost-efficiency, and dependability collateral. Near protocol, in a way, can be called a synonym to “facilitator of smart contract and public Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain with a mindset to be user-friendly incorporating features like human-readable account names as opposed to only cryptographic wallet addresses, and the ability for new users to interact with DApps and smart contracts without requiring a wallet at all.
Pros Of Near Protocol
- NEAR allows developers and other users to build, deploy, and manage DApps seamlessly.
- NEAR uses advanced Sharding technology that makes scalability infinite, in theory.
- NEAR is open-source and completely.
Cons Of Near Protocol
- NEAR stands in direct competition with giants such as Ethereum.
- There is a lot of competition in the crypto space with new and rising technologies.
- NEAR stands in direct competition with giants such as Ethereum.
- There is a lot of competition in the crypto space with new and rising technologies.
NEAR Token Price Projection
At the time of press, NEAR was trading around $9.4431 on the Kucoin exchange, down from an all-time high of $13.2197. Even in this bearish market, NEAR is performing remarkably well. This gives room for upward projections and the price of NEAR could easily rise to $50 by 2025.
In Brief
NEAR is a smart contract-capable blockchain that launched its main net in 2020. It features a unique scaling solution known as Nightshade and a powerful consensus engine called Doomslug. We believe these technologies incorporated into NEAR makes it a good candidate for growth.
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