NEAR Protocol

What is NEAR Protocol

Near Protocol is a sharded decentralized computing platform that targets low-end devices. Both processing of transactions and the state are sharded, making Near Protocol future-proof in terms of both compute and storage. Enabling low-end devices to participate in the operation of the network allows significantly more nodes to participate, bringing higher potential throughput and lower centralization of the system.

Building sharded systems is an extremely hard engineering problem. Even outside of the blockchain world, there are likely only around a dozen production-tested sharding implementations in the world. The NEAR Protocol core team previously built one of these, which included sharding and distributed transactions, at MemSQL, a distributed database that has large cluster deployments powering analytics at Uber, Pinterest, Goldman Sachs, Akamai and other large corporations.

Why NEAR Protocol

Blockchain so far has found only limited usage. Developers, users and enterprises are now educated about the existence of such a platform but most are not yet ready to use it. Scalability, availability, price and security through decentralization are key dimensions that people typically consider along the path to adoption.

Scalability is a pressing issue that has attracted a lot of attention in existing projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Many incumbents try to address the transactions per second constraint with approaches that are just temporary fixes or constant-factor improvements on the status quo. Given the extreme complexity of the design of such systems, updating an existing ecosystem with a more novel design is extremely hard.

Even though Bitcoin and Ethereum compete on their level of decentralization, they actually suffer from many centralization issues. Bitcoin, for example, has 53% of its mining power controlled by just three pools. On top of that, running mining nodes currently requires expensive hardware, which increases barriers to entry and reduces the incentives for nodes to join over time.

An alternative approach is to use the Proof of Stake consensus, which doesn’t require the wasted energy and custom chip design of Proof of Work. Unfortunately, current implementations of this, such as those used by EOS or Steemit, end up even more centralized.

NEAR Protocol brings together the mobile-first nature of the modern world, industry proven sharding design and priority on end user and developer experiences.

By connecting millions of mobile devices into the network and using a new way of selecting witnesses to run consensus (named ”Thresholded Proof of Stake”), NEAR enables a much more decentralized blockchain. The protocol, which shards both the state of the network and the processing of the transactions, scales capacity linearly with the number of nodes and provides a future-proof platform for decentralized applications.

Even though there are early adopters currently building decentralized applications on other protocols, it’s a very small community. NEAR’s go-to-market strategy is to go after developers who are not currently building these applications and who may not even be aware of the potential of blockchain platforms by directly addressing the pain points of current platforms:

Historically, the most successful developer platforms have also offered a channel to connect with end users. Current blockchain solutions are very limited in their ability to offer user acquisition channels because they don’t run natively where the users spend their time. NEAR Protocol, by virtue of running natively on the mobile phones of end users, allows developers to directly access these users through the platform.