NEAR Protocol is a smart contract capable, public Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that was conceptualized as a community-run cloud computing platform. Built by the NEAR Collective, NEAR was designed to host decentralized applications (dApps), and strives to compete with Ethereum and other leading smart contract-enabled blockchains like EOS and Polkadot. NEAR’s native token is also called NEAR, and is used to pay for transaction fees and storage. NEAR tokens can also be staked by token holders who participate in achieving network consensus as transaction validators.
NEAR Protocol is focused on creating a developer and user friendly platform. To accommodate this mission, NEAR has incorporated 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.
Projects building on NEAR include Mintbase, a non-fungible token (NFT) minting platform, and Flux, a protocol that allows developers to create markets based on assets, commodities, real-world events, and more.

NEAR Protocol Technology

As dApps have grown in popularity, the crypto community has faced a growing scalability problem. Scalability in this context refers to a blockchain’s ability to handle a large number of transactions with reasonable speed and cost. Ethereum has particularly faced scalability challenges due to the high demand for its usage, and while some people advocate for scaling solutions to be built on top of Ethereum (Layer-2 solutions), other projects like NEAR have decided to build entirely new blockchains with different architecture.
NEAR Protocol’s proposed solution to this scalability problem is the implementation of sharding. Before diving into what this means, it’s useful to identify the three main functions of blockchain nodes: they process transactions, communicate validated transactions and completed blocks to other nodes, and store the state and history of the entire network. As network congestion increases, these tasks become more and more demanding for the nodes.
Sharding lessens the computational load by splitting or partitioning the network into shards (or fragments). With this tactic, every node is not required to run all of the network’s code — just the code that’s relevant to its shard — so shards can conduct computation in parallel with one another, thereby scaling the network’s capacity as the number of nodes in the network increases.
To achieve consensus among the nodes in the network, NEAR uses a PoS system. With PoS, nodes who wish to become transaction validators must stake their NEAR tokens to be considered for participation. Token holders who do not want to operate a node can delegate their stake to validators of their choice. NEAR uses an auction system to choose validators every epoch (approximately every 12 hours), and validators who have larger stakes have more influence in the consensus process.
Some validators are responsible for validating “chunks” — an aggregation of transactions from a shard — while others are tasked with producing blocks, which contain chunks from all the shards. Other nodes, called “fishermen,” observe the network and detect and report malicious behavior. If a validator behaves badly, their stake will be slashed.