What is NEAR Protocol & How does it work? Should you buy NEAR Protocol Crypto?

Disclaimer: User Generated Content – Original Content created by a member of BITS Pilani, Vipul Walunj, Gautam Goyal, Saatvik Mittal, under the consultation of Dr. Amit Dua, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus in association with CoinDCX. The views and opinions expressed within this post belong solely to the author.
Author: Vipul Walunj, Gautam Goyal, Saatvik Mittal.

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What is NEAR Protocol?

Near Protocol is a decentralized application (DApp) platform. Its main focus is on usability among developers and users. Near Protocol can be used to make smart contracts and relies on a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain, just like Ethereum. In POS, the blocks are verified by the machines of coin owners where the owners keep their coins as collateral to validate blocks. This reduces the amount of computational work, compared to the POW model, needed to process transactions and verify blocks in the blockchain. 

NEAR Protocol Crypto 

The unique feature of Near is that it uses sharding technology to achieve scalability. Sharding in database terms means splitting the database horizontally to spread the load. When it comes to Ethereum, by the process of sharding, new chains called “shards” will be created, which will increase the number of transactions per second, i.e. decreasing block time, and reducing the gas fees per transaction.

NearProtocol’s native token is called NEAR, which can be used for transaction fees and storage on the Near crypto platform. NEAR Protocol crypto investors who wish to become transaction validators can stake their NEAR tokens and help achieve network consensus. NEAR is a developer platform for the Open Web. This means that NEAR is a set of protocols and tools that enable people to build a new wave of community-owned applications. Principles of OpenWeb allow developers to develop projects that are governed by the community, open and permissionless, hackable and composable, user-first and sovereign, open markets. 

Many projects built on the NEAR protocol have already started to gain traction like Mintbasea and Flux. Near was founded by the NeaCollective and conceptualized as a community-run cloud computing platform designed to host decentralized applications. It was built to be both developer-friendly and user-friendly, and it has features such as account names that are human-readable (instead of having cryptographic wallet addresses). It also enables users to interact with smart contracts and DApps without linking a wallet at all.

Check out the latest Near Protocol Crypto Price, Charts and Data 

Visit Near Protocol Crypto – NEAR/USDT to NEAR/INR Convertor

How does NEAR Protocol work?

NEAR started with an aim to build a strong base for a far better internet that puts the user in control of their identity, their money, their data, with the perspective of creating composable open-state services, NEAR kick-started the biggest wave of innovation — and business progress — since the Internet. This vision is the biggest sort — there are few opportunities in the world larger than the one we are tackling. 

NEAR uses Sharding, it abandons the notion that every node in the network must run all of the code, as this would basically create a single large wasteful bottleneck that would slow down all of the other alternatives. Unlike many other sharding systems, NEAR’s strategy allows nodes to remain small enough to run on simple cloud-hosted instances, lowering the ability of more individuals to participate in the network. 

Developers may incorporate extensive rights into their apps and sign transactions on behalf of users thanks to NEAR’s contract-based account architecture. They also have access to a set of tools that make app creation simple, as well as the chance to receive a protocol-level price refund for producing popular apps and important system infrastructure.

End-users benefit from the flexible account model’s “progressive UX”; which means they don’t have to touch wallets or tokens until they’re ready because the app hides them behind the scenes. The way our accounts are set up enables for a smoother onboarding experience for its end-users, with fewer steps and less intrusive wallet pop-ups. Having access to “delegation” at the contract level allows validators to develop indefinitely diverse service offerings, making NEAR a very appealing area to run validating nodes. 

Additional Read: Near Protocol Crypto Price Prediction

Architecture 

NEAR provides community-operated cloud infrastructure for deploying and running decentralized applications. It combines the features of a decentralized database with others of a serverless compute platform. The infrastructure which makes up this cloud is created from a potentially infinite number of “nodes” run by individuals and organizations around the world who offer portions of their CPU and hard drive space — whether on their laptops or, more likely, professionally deployed servers.

NEAR’s community-operated cloud uses a novel consensus algorithm and a scalable sharding architecture to achieve its high level design goals. 

The key elements of NEAR’s technology are: 

• Sharding: The system is designed to scale horizontally and near-infinitely by distributing computation across multiple parallelized shards.
• Consensus: Consensus is achieved across all of the nodes which make up the network operators across all of the shards using the new Nightshade algorithm.
• Staking Selection and Game Theory: To participate in the validation process, stakers are selected using a secure randomized process that optimally distributes seats across parties and provides incentives for them to operate with good behavior.
• Randomness: NEAR’s randomness approach is unbiased, unpredictable, and can tolerate up to 1/3 of malicious actors before liveness is affected and 2/3 of malicious actors before anyone can actually influence its output.

Competitors of NEAR Protocol

SKALE is the biggest competitor of NEAR right now. Other competitors include Solana LAbs, Eth2, Bloom, ArDrive, Contractium.io and Novel etc. 

SKALE Labs is working to solve the challenge of blockchain scalability. The SKALW network protocol is an open-source project that combines best-in-class cryptography and decentralization, and since NEAR also claims to be a game-changer in open source, SKALE becomes a direct competitor of NEAR. 

Solana Labs provides a web-scale blockchain infrastructure. Developers can get the specific software development kit and start constructing decentralized applications based on the new chain through the Solana development network. 

NEAR is a relatively recent initiative in comparison to its competitors, with the mainnet only launching in April 2020. Unlike Ethereum, NEAR’s consensus method tries to stabilize fees, and the protocol’s website claims that it will speed up the creation of decentralized apps.

Near Protocols’ network activity has risen significantly, over the past three months. 

Tokenomics of NEAR Protocol Crypto

Presently, NEAR Protocol has a rank in the top 22 cryptos by market capitalization. Current market capitalization is close to $4 billion dollars with NEAR trading at the price of $5.7, at the time of writing this report. It is interesting to note that it is down approximately 72 percent from its all time high(ATH).

Source: CoinMarketCap

The NEAR Protocol Crypto is being used as collateral for storing data on the blockchain and to pay transaction fees. Several stakeholders in the blockchain are rewarded with NEAR crypto tokens. 

NEAR Protocol’s issuance of tokens, or inflation, is necessary to pay network operators, called validators. There is fixed issuance around 5% of the total supply each year, 90% of which goes to validators in exchange for computing, storage, and securing the transactions happening on the network. 

Developers who create smart contracts on the protocol also get rewarded a portion of the transaction fees that is generated by their contracts. Further, to increase the scarcity of the NEAR protocol crypto and to increase its value, the remainder of each transaction fee is burned.

NEAR Protocol also supports tokens that are “wrapped” from other chains in addition to NFTs. Additionally, NEAR has also constructed a bridge with Ethereum, allowing users to transfer ERC-20 tokens from Ethereum to NEAR. 

The maximum total supply of Near is 1000,000,000 NEAR and presently, 705,675,585 NEAR are in circulation.Near is a blockchain that has been built from the ground up to be high-performant, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable all while supporting sustainability.

Roadmap and Vision of NEAR Protocol Network

Some of the main features planned are: 

1. Gas Price Auction: A new feature has been planned by which users can specify the maximal gas price that they are willing to pay for a transaction. After that the network will take transactions in the decreasing order of gas prices specified by different users. It means that the user who is willing to spend more on gas will be given priority over someone who is willing to pay less for something like an auction.
2. Nightshade: Most of what is described in the original whitepaper will be implemented by the end of 3rd quarter of 2022 except the hidden validators. After delivering the simple nightshade all that will be left will be to implement dynamic sharding which isn’t a top priority since it’s implementation will likely take some time due to its technical complexity.
3.  Improvements to Smart Contract Development: A lot of optimizations to reduce the cost of contract calls and make the overall developer experience better has been planned. Some of them are:

           a) Reducing storage IO cost by rewriting the storage to make reads and writes faster.

           b) Introducing synchronous shards on top of asynchronous shards for providing a form of synchronous execution environment that is heavily used in financial applications.

How To Buy NEAR Protocol Crypto In INDIA? 

Use this three-step process to buy your first NEAR Protocol crypto coin  using the CoinDCX crypto investment app

• Sign Up for the CoinDCX account: Enter a valid email address and a user name on the sign-up page. Once the Email Id has been verified, set a strong password to secure your account.
• Verify the account: You need to complete your KYC, to buy NEAR on the CoinDCX platform. All you need to do is upload the documents and your account will be set up in 15 minutes.
•  Buy NEAR Crypto: After the account has been verified, you can deposit as low as INR 100 and start your crypto journey!

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Disclaimer: User Generated Content – Original Content created by a member of BITS Pilani, Vipul Walunj, Gautam Goyal, Saatvik Mittal, under the consultation of Dr. Amit Dua, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus in association with CoinDCX. The views and opinions expressed within this post belong solely to the author.
Author: Vipul Walunj, Gautam Goyal, Saatvik Mittal.

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