What is NEAR and How Does it Work? | KuCoin Crypto Gem Observer

2022/06/29 09:54:36

While the internet has evolved severally over the years, the current form still limits how users interact with one another. This is because a small group of big centralized organizations controls how developers build and deploy applications on the internet.

This restriction effectively denies developers freedom for data, suppressing the growth of the web. These restrictions are evident in cases where big tech companies lure users to embrace their platforms before holding their data and preventing them from moving to other platforms.

Another example is where large organizations entice developers to build on their protocols before cutting off access or opposing developer interests when their applications become successful.

Blockchain technology has proven an effective solution to ending the reign of big tech. The blockchain’s permissionless nature allows developers to create content and decentralized applications without seeking anyone’s consent. This property has helped foster the creation of transparent applications, which encourage an honest and collaborative relationship with users.

However, the low scalability of blockchain hinders its development. Hoping to address this issue, the NEAR protocol went live in 2017.

Take a look at the top DeFi projects on NEAR Protocol.

What is NEAR?

NEAR is a decentralized application platform that seeks to let developers and entrepreneurs build and deploy smart contracts seamlessly and sustainably. Additionally, NEAR aims to ensure that dApps running on its platform are intuitive to increase usability among end-users.

In so doing, NEAR hopes to create a community-operated network that is strong enough to further the reach of open finance and power the future of an open web. To achieve this feat, NEAR taps the same technology that makes Bitcoin an unkillable currency and combines it with other state-of-the-art technologies in community consensus, database sharding, and usability.

NEAR smart contracts have access to a shared and secure pool of money, identity, and data that the smart contract users own. The platform merges features like partition-resistant networking, serverless computing, and distributed storage.

NEAR ensures transparency by hosting smart contracts on the cloud and allowing a global community to control them. Additionally, the community members create redundancies that help eliminate the possibility of having a single point of failure. To this end, NEAR is ideal for storing sensitive items like identity documents and money.

How Does NEAR Work?

Building on the achievements and failures of the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain networks, NEAR solves the three issues inhibiting the networks from going mainstream. These are usability, scalability, and security.

The design of the NEAR protocol focuses on making it easy for end-users to use the network. To achieve this, the platform features simple onboarding, easy subscriptions, familiar interfaces, and predictable price. As for developers, NEAR offers familiar languages, robust tools, developer business models, and predictable pricing.

As for scalability, NEAR leverages a sharding approach, which allows the network to increase its capacity as more nodes join and participate. This mechanism enables the NEAR protocol to scale accordingly as demand increases.

Regarding security, NEAR uses a Thresholded Proof of Stake (TPoS) consensus model, which encourages broad participation from nodes. This helps make the network more decentralized and secure. To achieve this, the TPoS model does not incentivize the pooling of large validators because they are likely to create a single point of failure compared to distributed nodes.

Who Created NEAR?

NEAR protocol came to be after former Alexander Skidanov teamed up with Ilya Polosukhin and Taj T. Skidanov is a former Microsoft employee. He also worked at OpenAI as a research engineer consultant. On the other hand, Polosukhin is an Artificial Intelligence Researcher that previously worked as an Engineering Manager at Google.

Taj is a Web3 designer, entrepreneur, and investor. He previously worked as a Design Director at Rightpoint.

Apart from the three co-founders, the NEAR executive team features Marieke Flament as the Chief Executive Officer. Before NEAR, Flament served as the CEO of Mettle. He is also an Investor and Advisor at Yayzy.

What is the NEAR Token Used for?

NEAR Protocol (NEAR) is the native token of the NEAR protocol. NEAR holders can use the coin to pay the system for processing transactions and storing data. Users can also use NEAR to run a validating node as part of the network by taking part in the staking process.

Additionally, NEAR plays a vital role in determining the allocation of network resources and the platform’s governance.

Closing Thoughts

By offering developers a decentralized and permissionless blockchain network to create and deploy applications seamlessly, the NEAR protocol fosters the development of the Web 3.0 ecosystem. The platform’s intuitive interface also helps onboard more blockchain users.

NEAR protocol’s Thresholded Proof of Stake (TPoS) consensus model helps keep the network secure, scalable, and decentralized, solving the blockchain trilemma.