Near Protocol |Easy Explanation

Danader Nisral
10 min readMar 21, 2022

What near protocol
How does near protocol work
What is near trying to deliver
What is so special about near protocol
The consensus mechanism of near protocol
Near Protocol Tokenomics

The Near protocol was created by former Microsoft employee Alexander Skidavon and developer Ilya polosukhim.

The work on the project began late in 2018. The team has since grown to 50 people and includes developers from Facebook, Google and Niantic, as well as numerous medalists and finalists from international sports programming competitions.
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It was launched in July of 2018 and is based in San Francisco California. NEAR mainly focuses on making it easy for developers to develop DApps and maintaining them even when they scale to millions of users.

Near protocol is a public pos blockchain that uses sharding technology and is very developer friendly when creating apps on its platform, It also has a solid foundation and it takes all the best aspects from all the different blockchains in the crypto space and combines them together.

How does near protocol work?
Well, as we said, this blockchain uses sharding technology.

Sharding technology essentially means Rather than having the main blockchain process every incoming transaction, the workload is split between multiple blockchains on the network, and these additional blockchains are known as the Shard chain.

Sharding is a method of partitioning data that aims to offload the system while providing quick access to all stored data.
Each separate but connected to each other parts of the database call fragments. Each database fragment is stored on a separate server.

This leads to quicker transaction time, more transactions taking place, cheaper transactions and less issues.

In addition to that, NEAR is a community-managed cloud infrastructure for deploying and operating decentralized applications. It offers the characteristics of both decentralized database and a serverless computing platform. The token that enables this platform to function also enables applications built on it to interact in novel ways.

SO, It is a complex technology whose sole purpose is to enable engineers and innovators to easily create products that protect high-value assets such as money and identity while performing and useful for the users.

NEAR is designed from the bottom up to provide end users with simple interactions, expand capacity across millions of devices, and enable developers with new sustainable monetization models for their apps.

As a result, NEAR is building the world’s first community-managed cloud capable of expanding the reach of open finance and securing the future of the open web.

It is a blockchain-based decentralized application platform that is designed to be permissionless, highly functional and secure enough to produce a powerful and decentralized data layer for the future web, and it runs on hundreds of servers worldwide.

So in simple words, NEAR is basically a platform for hosting apps that have access to a shared, secure pool of money, identity, and data that their users control. In terms of technology, it integrates partition-resistant networking, serverless computing, and distributed storage into a new system.

For example, in the old obsolete bitcoin or Ethereum blockchain which processes each transaction individually every second, the network is normally overwhelmed with transaction load as more and more users use the network.

With sharding technology, this is no longer a problem, and if there is no problem with transactions on one of the shard side chains, it does not affect the process of other transactions that occur on different fragments on the network, this allows it to process up to 100,000 transactions/second.

What is Near Protocol trying to provide?

Near protocol aims to be the most accessible network in the world for developers and their end users, while ensuring the scalability and security to serve those same users.

To make this possible, it allows building decentralized apps and onboarding users with great experience and scaling apps.

NEAR attempts to accomplish its mission through its two key features: Thresholded Proof-of-Stake (TPoS) consensus, Nightshade Sharding design.

Threshold proof-of-stake (TPoS) consensus mechanism
Near protocol uses a new consensus mechanism called Thresholded Proof-of-Stake (TPoS) to ensure that transactions are properly validated. According to NEAR, TPoS makes it difficult and costly for an adversary to attack the network and validate false information.

According to Stakin, an infrastructure operator for public Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains, the idea behind TPoS systems is that “a predetermined way of creating a large number of participants maintaining the network will increase decentralization and safety and will create a just reward. delivery system.
Network participants have called witnesses in the case of Near, staked tokens to produce and verify blocks, and in return they receive block rewards. Unlike other PoS platforms where validators are only rewarded with a portion of transaction fees, on NEAR they earn rewards from token supply inflation, transaction fees, and storage fees .

All validators must stake a certain amount of Near’s native token called Near, which represents a guarantee against their dishonest behavior. The Near protocol automatically selects the best validators with an auction at the end of each epoch. The duration of each Near epoch is approximately 12 hours.

Through a complex auction process, Near automatically selects the nodes with the highest stake, making them eligible to generate new blocks and earn rewards. If the staked amount is too small, the validator node will not receive a validator seat and will function as a normal relay node, waiting for the next epoch. Validators can also increase their rewards by requesting delegation.

Each shard requires you to stake a different number of Near tokens on the network to become a validator.
Validators are rewarded with additional tokens for helping and supporting the network and validating transactions on shard chains.

Users who stake their tokens can vote on who will process the next blockchain on the Near blockchain, the person who processes the next blockchain is known as the delegator, and for the process in this block they will also earn extra Near reward tokens.

So there is an incentive for validators and delegators to support the Near network process and validate transactions.

Near Protocol Token

The Near token is the ecosystem’s primary native asset, and all accounts have access to it. Each token, identical to Ether, is a one-of-a-kind digital asset that may be used to:
● For completing transactions and keeping data, you must pay the system.
● Participate in the staking procedure to run a validating node as part of the network.
● Participating in governance procedures can help influence how network resources are distributed and where the network’s future technological direction will go.

Near token facilitates the economical synchronization of all network members, as well as novel behaviors among the apps created on top of the network.

Participating in development bounties, operating a community that enables people to build on Near, winning a Near hackathon, or being an active member of the community are all ways to earn the Near token.

Near Protocol Tokenomics

The total and maximum token supply of Near tokens is 1,000,000,000 while the current circulating supply is 599,351,223.00 NEAR.

Advantages and disadvantages of the Near protocol

  • Advantages
  1. It takes the best part of each blockchain and combines them together.
  2. It processes a lot of transactions/second
  3. It has good sharding technology which helps in scaling cryptocurrency issues in general
  4. Applications are very easy to build on a near-protocol platform.
  • Disadvantages
  1. There is still a long way to go before it is adopted globally
  2. Other sharding competitors in the crypto space using their own version of sharding technology so close have some competition.

As we said earlier !!!. Near is a decentralized development platform designed to provide the ideal environment for dApps by overcoming some of the limitations of competing systems such as low throughput, slow speeds, and poor cross-comparability.

It runs on top of a close protocol, developer-friendly proof-of-stake, blockchain that is in the business the number of steps to increase scalability, reduce cost for developers and users.

Its intervention includes a unique stake on sharding and a powerful new consensus mechanism known as ‘DOOMSLUG

DOOM SLUG is Near Protocol’s block production technique. It enables the network to achieve practical finality after one round of communication, with a finality gadget providing BFT finality after the second round.

IT’s built by the near collective (a worldwide community of researchers, developers and thinkers)
They wrote the ignition codes for the near protocol and continue to support the project by releasing bug fixes, updates, and building the surrounding near ecosystem.

Since near’s code is open source, anyone can join the collection and contribute to its development.

Near can be described as the base layer blockchain, which means it’s the foundation upon which other applications are built and deployed .

It uses a technology known as nightshade to achieve its massive throughput capabilities.

It was built to simplify things for developers and also give them a powerful toolkit to build a next generation application with.

What’s nightshade?
Night Shade is a Near protocol sharing design
Let’s focus on a problem that has low throughput and this problem occurs because all the nodes in the blockchain network have to validate all the transactions that come into the network.

Now imagine, the more nodes that join the network, the longer it will take for all those nodes to work together and process transactions.

So far, many solutions have been offered by the developers to solve this particular problem, and one of the solutions that the Near protocol is based on is known as sharding

Sharding is a process of dividing the blockchain network into separate components (called shards) that contain their own data separate from other shards, each node in the network does only a subset of the total work.

Talking of sharding, As we all know, a blockchain is nothing but a blockchain network containing the set of nodes that process all these transactions and put them into blocks.

So a blockchain itself is divided into smaller blockchains and each of these are known as shards, and each of these shards contains its own data validates and processes a set of transactions that are given to that particular shard.

What is unique about the design of Near protocol sharing (Nightshade)

Even though it is a sharing system, the whole system is considered as one blockchain.
Imagine you have several shards, maybe you have more than thousands of shards. Now in order to maintain these shards for network maintenance..

How does it work ?
1. Each block logically contains all transactions for all shards.
2. Each network participant maintains only the state that corresponds to the shards for which it validates transactions.
3. The list of all transactions in the block is divided into physical chunks/fragments.

Let’s understand Nightshade under the hood.

So imagine that the blockchain is divided into different shards, so the chunks are natimb The transactions that occur in the shards
And these chunks will then be put on the block. Thus, a block contains different chunks that correspond to different shards, and all these blocks are connected to each other.

Near uses a contract based, so developers can build advanced apps that can sign transactions on behalf of users, allowing them to execute agreements without the user needing to be physically available to confirm the action.

SO the special thing about Near protocol Is that
Near is designed to be a next generation platform for d’apps, to achieve this it takes some of the longest standing issues in the blockchain space.

It is incredibly fast which is able to process 100,000 transactions /second
And regular users are able to access D’apps built on Near with a similar registration flow, which they have already experienced with , this could help developers to reach a broader audience and also reduce friction for those using d’apps.

Why we support NEAR
The Near protocol has a lot to offer. it has a strong team, lots of funding, and lots of friends in the cryptocurrency space who helped NEAR make the most of the first two facts. There’s only one thing it has yet to fail to do, and that’s an essential part of being a successful cryptocurrency project: generating hype.

As a result of trying to catch up with other smart contract cryptocurrencies in the space, Near has sacrificed marketing in favor of development. This puts it in the same category as other incredibly promising cryptocurrency projects such as Loopring which have flown under the radar due to a lack of exposure. To be fair this has paid off, as Near has some of the most impressive stats of any cryptocurrency blockchain out there right now.

That said, the tide seems to be turning for Near. A Binance listing is a big deal in the cryptocurrency space, and it was one of the first places the Near token was available for trading after launch. It is almost certain that more exchanges will start listing the token, which will only serve to raise awareness of the project and increase liquidity for traders.

Whether Near can ever dethrone Ethereum or even catch up with Polakdot is debatable but certainly not impossible. If possible, NEAR should instead focus on creating its own niche instead of trying to compete with the big guys. If he can do that with the support of his community and a bit of marketing magic, the future could be very, very bright for Near.

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Danader Nisral

Tech enthusiast | Blockchain & Web3 Content Writer | Love, horror Fiction writer| Business articles & content | Stories | GetInTouch: danielcimanuka7@gmail.com