Near Platform: Bringing Scalable Blockchain Technology

Near was designed from the ground up to provide end-users with intuitive experiences, scale capacity across millions of devices, and give developers new and sustainable business models for their apps. As a result, Near is building the first community-run cloud capable of expanding the scope of Open Finance and powering the Open Web's future.

Bitcoin, the first blockchain, established in 2008, is now a store of value with a network valued at over $600 billion. Ethereum, the first global computer launched in 2014, has dozens of unique applications ranging from gaming to decentralized banking.

Unfortunately, neither these original networks nor any subsequent networks have been able to bridge the gap between general adoption of the applications built on top of them, nor have they been able to provide the scale required to sustain a whole Web.

There are two significant factors:

System design is essential because other platforms' technical architecture causes significant challenges with usability and scalability, making adoption practically unattainable for all but the most technically savvy entrepreneurs. End-users abandon applications at a rate of 97-99 percent, and developers find the process of developing and maintaining their applications endlessly unpleasant.

Fixing these issues will bring significant changes to current protocol structures, which existing organizations have not demonstrated they can achieve shortly. Instead, they generate multi-year specification design and implementation backlogs, causing their technology to lag further behind.

The framework and organization of NEAR are expressly designed to address the issues outlined above. The technical design is obsessed with making the world's most valuable and scalable decentralized platform, allowing global-scale applications to gain widespread usage. The organization and governance structure are built to ship and evolve the protocol quickly, never to become obsolete.

How does Near Works?

Near is a community-run cloud infrastructure used for the quick deployment and smooth operation of decentralized applications. It combines the benefits of both a decentralized database and a serverless computation platform. The token that allows this platform to function enables applications to interact in novel ways.

These characteristics enable developers to design censorship-resistant backends for apps that deal with high-value data such as money, identity, assets, and open-state components that interact easily.

Smart contracts are the name for these application backends and components. However, I will refer to them collectively as applications here. The cloud's infrastructure comprises an almost unlimited number of nodes maintained by individuals and organisations worldwide who volunteer portions of their CPU and hard drive space, whether on personal laptops or, more commonly, professionally used servers.

Developers write smart contracts and deploy those contracts to this cloud as if they were deploying to a single server, similar to how existing centralized clouds distribute apps.

Once a developer has deployed a smart contract and marked it as unchangeable immutable, the application will continue to run for as long as at least a few members of the Near community survive. End users would interact with the deployed application through a familiar web or mobile interface, just as users interact with millions of apps.

Consensus Mechanism of Near

Nightshade is the name of the consensus process used on Near. Nightshade represents the system as a single blockchain. Each block's transaction list is broken into physical parts, one for each shard. All of the chunks combine into a single block. It's worth noting that chunks can only be confirmed by nodes that keep track of the shard's state.

Each logical block should theoretically contain all transactions for all shards. A logical block is never launched because it would be too expensive to send across the network. Instead, each network participant keeps track of the state corresponding to the shards for which they validate transactions and any additional shards.

The heaviest chain consensus is used to get an agreement. When a block producer publishes a block, validator nodes' signatures are collected. The cumulative stake of all the signers whose signatures are included in the block is then the weight of the block. The sum of the block weights determines the chain's weight.

A finality device is also used in the consensus, which offers extra slashing conditions for increased chain security.

Tokenomics

The Near protocol's native currency is NEAR. For native transactions, it serves as the primary medium of trade and unit of account.

Its primary functions are as follows:

Staking: Stakers get rewards in NEAR by staking their tokens and helping to secure the network. Sybil is protected from DDoS (distributed denial of service) assaults thanks to NEAR's Proof-of-Stake (PoS) usage.

Network Fees: The network provides utility by storing application data and allowing users to update it through transactions. For processing changes to this stored data, the network charges transaction fees. The Near network collects and burns these fees automatically. Thus increased usage means more NEAR tokens are destroyed. Developer awards are granted a minimum percentage of smart contract usage costs. This incentive effectively encourages the development of early applications that boost network usage.

When a contract is invoked, a percentage of the network's transaction fees is automatically given to the contract. A minimum value has been defined as a system-level parameter, and developers can choose any value between that and the minimum value.

Token Distribution

Source: Near.org

During the introduction of its mainnet on April 22, 2020, the NEAR protocol created 1 billion NEAR tokens, which were continuously distributed to individuals and organizations.

The final phase of NEAR's mainnet rollout, which began on October 13, 2020, does not include inflation, transfers, or vesting schedules.

Each year, 5% of new supply is released as epoch incentives to help support the network, with 90% going to validators (4.5%) and 10% going to the protocol treasury (0.5 percent total).

The remaining 70% of transaction costs are incinerated, with 30% paid out as rebates to contracts that engage with the transaction.

Every token that isn't locked up at a specific time is considered a circulating supply. Long-term lockups of the tokens are applied to the vast majority of NEAR's original supply. So the Foundation's liquid endowment plus reserves for a communal sale make up the initial circulating supply. By month 60, all supply from the beginning has been unlocked.

Projects in the Near Ecosystem

Near's native L1 is used in the following projects:

Fixed Income: Burrow — Burrow is an interest rate protocol developed by Proximity Labs, a DeFi research organization focused on the Near ecosystem, that allows users to borrow and lend interest-bearing assets such as staked NEAR ($stNEAR) and staked ETH ($stETH).

It uses Alchemix's self-repaying loans framework to gradually pay down debt by leveraging interest from deposited collateral. Burrow is now in testnet and will be released soon.

Order-Book DEX: Orderly is an on-chain order book DEX created in partnership with Woo Network that intends to allow spot trading, margin trading, perpetual swaps, and lending and borrowing. By Q2, an open beta will be available, followed by a full public release.

Creator Economy: Capsule Social — Capsule Social is a Web3 publishing platform that empowers writers by enabling censorship-resistant content using IPFS, OrbitDB, and the Near blockchain.

Notable projects on Aurora, where users can use existing Ethereum infrastructure like a MetaMask wallet, include:

Trisolaris DEX

Trisolaris is a Sushi fork AMM that presently offers liquidity rewards in $TRI tokens and chosen project tokens (such as $AURORA, $atLUNA, and $FLX). The native $TRI tokens of the system can be staked for $xTRI, which earns a 0.05 percent fee on every trade on the DEX.

A vote-escrow system similar to Curve's is also being considered, and the addition of stablecoin exchanges.

Aurigami

Aurigami is a Compound fork with a unique token structure in which issued tokens are released in stages over 54 weeks. More tokens are locked for vesting, and earlier users can claim their tokens.

This prevents the influx of mercenary capital, limits the common farming and dumping strategy, and users with Aurigami's long-term prosperity remain. Although Aurigami begins as a fork, the team hopes to expand in the future by adding yield hedging and rate switching capabilities.

Vaporwave Finance

Vaporwave Finance is a Beefy Finance fork that Paladin Finance has audited. It allows users to maximize yield by automatically compounding incentives from other Aurora farms. The platform will shortly deploy $VWAVE tokens on Aurora's NearPad launchpad. Staked $VWAVE receives a share of the $WETH earned by the platform.

According to the creator economy, Endemic is an NFT platform that connects real-world artists to the NFT environment. The team has handpicked 50 artists and plans to expand into collectables and products once the mainnet is fully operational. They also intend to debut on Near and Polygon.