NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Price

NEAR Is Starting off as An AI Company

What Is NEAR?

NEAR Protocol (NEAR) is a blockchain platform designed to be user-friendly and efficient, addressing some of the challenges faced by other blockchains like slow transaction speeds and difficulty of use.  Built with scalability in mind, NEAR utilizes a sharded architecture to handle a high volume of transactions.  

Another key feature is its focus on usability. Unlike many blockchains that use complex cryptographic addresses, NEAR allows for human-readable account names, making it more approachable for everyday users.  This focus on usability extends to developers as well, with NEAR aiming to be a platform that fosters the creation of decentralized applications (DApps). By combining scalability, ease of use, and a developer-friendly environment, NEAR strives to be a foundation for a new kind of open web.

How Does NEAR Protocol Work?

NEAR Protocol is designed with a focus on simplicity and usability, making it easy for developers to build and deploy decentralized applications. The protocol features a unique consensus mechanism called "Doomslug," which is used to achieve network consensus efficiently. Furthermore, NEAR has implemented a sharding mechanism, allowing it to scale effectively by distributing network activity across multiple parallel shards, thereby improving throughput and scalability.

The ecosystem has been rapidly expanding, driven by NEAR's commitment to an intuitive user experience and simplified project deployment. Recently, NEAR launched a public beta of its non-custodial mobile wallet, Sender. The wallet, whose Android APK is available from Sender Labs' website, is integrated with over 20 leading projects in the NEAR ecosystem and has seen over 300,000 downloads of its web extension. Sender Labs has also secured funding from Binance Labs and Metaweb Ventures, and successfully completed a private funding round.

Since its mainnet launch in 2020, NEAR Protocol has supported the launch of nine decentralized applications (dApps) with a total value locked (TVL) of approximately $285 million at the time of writing. In August 2022, NEAR introduced a JavaScript Software Development Kit (JS SDK) to lower the barrier of entry for developers. The NEAR JS SDK allows developers to use JavaScript to build on the blockchain, which is particularly significant as JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages globally. This initiative is expected to onboard millions of Web2 developers into the Web3 space, helping to grow the NEAR ecosystem even further.

NEAR Protocol's Founding Team

NEAR Protocol was founded by Erik Trautman, an entrepreneur with experience on Wall Street and the founder of Viking Education. He was joined by co-founders Illia Polosukhin, who brings over a decade of industry experience, including three years at Google, and Alexander Skidanov, a computer scientist who previously worked at Microsoft and later joined memSQL, where he served as director of engineering.

The NEAR Protocol team is composed of highly skilled developers, including several International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) gold medalists. The team has extensive experience in building real-world sharded systems, which is a core component of NEAR's approach to improving blockchain scalability. The collective experience and expertise of the NEAR team are instrumental in their ongoing efforts to make blockchain technology more accessible and practical for a broad range of users.

How NEAR's Narrative Boosts Its Price?

According to the above description, the highlights of NEAR are quite limited. Indeed, the description shows NEAR is a good protocol as it is simple to use, infinitely scalable, and super secure. But this kind of narrative obviously is not as attractive as categories like DePin, AI, and others. Fortunately, this is about to change as NEAR is starting off as an AI company.

NEAR is making efforts to create a future where AI and Web3 can complement each other, as the blockchain technology can help solve the security and centralization issues in AI via a decentralized approach. Unlike some blockchain projects aiming to attract users and developers through incentives, Near Protocol is going to achieve this goal instead by making NEAR more easy and friendly to use.  

Take NEAR Tasks as an example, this is a solid use case demonstrating NEAR is making the convergence of AI and Web3 a working reality. On the platform of NEAR Tasks, direct human feedback could propel AI training model, recognizing a vital role of human involvement for AI data labeling and validation. 

Furthermore, Illia Polosukhin, CEO of Near Protocol, is going to attend a panel at the Nvidia conference, hosted by Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. His attendance has sparked the discussion that NEAR may work with Nvidia in the convergence of AI and blockchain in the future, resulting in its recent price surge.

In a nutshell, NEAR's narrative shows it's going to ride the wave of AI during this round of bullish market.

Near’s Tokenomics

NEAR Protocol is a layer-one blockchain designed as a community-run cloud computing platform, addressing issues like low transaction speeds, throughput, and interoperability. Built by the NEAR Collective, its goal is to create a secure, scalable, and user-friendly platform for DApps, with projects like Flux and Mintbase being developed on it.

The total supply of Near is currently capped at 1.22 billion tokens, with allocations as follows:

•    Foundation Endowment 7.79%
•    Community Sale 9.35%
•    Small and Large Backers 18.44%
•    Core Contributors 10.91%
•    Operation Grants 8.89%
•    Community Grants 13.41%
•    Epoch Rewards 22.09%
•    Early Ecosystem 9.12%