Near Protocol Project Overview

07.11.2022 |

About Near Protocol

Interest in the field of blockchain technologies is growing annually. This encourages an increase in the number of users and the load on the network. Because of this, many bloggers face the problem of scalability and processing a large number of transactions. There is also a question of interaction between different blockchains, as their number is constantly increasing, and more and more decentralized applications are being developed on their basis.

Near Protocol is one of the solutions to these problems.

What is Near Protocol

It is a cloud infrastructure for the development of decentralized applications (Gapps). Developers can use the platform to build applications from scratch, including backend, frontend, testing and launch. Smart contracts can be written in one of three programming languages: JavaScript, Rust or AssemblyScript.

NEAR is an independent blockchain built without relying on an existing one. Such blockchains are called first-level blockchains. NEAR uses consensus algorithm Proof-of-Stake and smart contracts with cross-chain technologies.

The main essence of the project was launched in April 2020 and by September moved to full community management.

Near Protocol Technologies

The project solves the problem of network scalability and interaction between blockchains due to its technologies.

Nightshade

The main technology of NEAR is Nightshade sharding. Sharding is a variation of the blockchain architecture, in which nodes store only part of the data. Thanks to this approach to building a network, each node does not process all transactions, this increases the processing speed and reduces the commission.

With this format of construction, the blockchain network does not look like one single structure, but a number of shards — blockchains working in parallel. Each of them has its own validators that process part of the network transactions and create a separate block fragment. Nightshade allows you to maintain a single data chain for processing these fragments and adding them to the NEAR blockchain.

Rainbow Bridge

This is a protocol that builds a “bridge” between the blockchains NEAR and Ethereum. It allows you to move tokens and assets of the standard, including NFT. For example, cryptocurrencies can be transferred between blocks:

Assets can be transferred from the MetaMask wallet or other cryptocurrency wallets. The mechanism is built to replace tokens in networks. Since direct exchange between blockchains is impossible, assets are withdrawn from the circulation of the Ethereum network and created in the NEAR network in an equivalent amount, and vice versa.

Aurora

It is a NEAR-based platform that gives developers the ability to transfer Ethereum smart contracts to the NEAR network. This solution helps to use the functionality of the Ethereum ecosystem with greater transaction throughput and reduced fees. Developers do not need to redesign their decentralized applications for the specifics of the NEAR blockchain.

Aurora is built using Ethereum encoding technology (EVM), as well as a cross-chain bridge that allows developers to link their smart contracts and Ethereum assets.

Токен NEAR

This is the main token of the ecosystem, which supports the operation of the network. It is needed for:

  • launching node validators and their remuneration for sending tokens to stacking;
  • payment of commissions and data storage;
  • ecosystem management by voting of community members.

The token is also involved in the system of rewarding developers for transactions made by their smart contracts. Not only project community members or developers can use NEAR. In addition to scalping, currency can be sent to stacking or used in a pool for farming.