NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol (NEAR) is a Layer 1 smart contract blockchain designed for scalability and ease of use, and more recently positioned as a platform for AI-native applications. It was founded by Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin — the latter a co-author of the influential "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper — and its mainnet launched in 2020 after development by the NEAR Collective. Backers have included Andreessen Horowitz, Pantera Capital, and Coinbase Ventures.

How it works

NEAR is a Proof of Stake network whose defining technical feature is sharding: its Nightshade design splits the work of processing transactions across multiple shards so capacity can grow with demand, while keeping the network usable as a single chain. Validators stake NEAR to produce blocks and earn rewards, and the protocol burns most transaction fees. Usability is a core focus — NEAR accounts use human-readable names rather than only cryptographic addresses, and features like meta-transactions let applications cover gas costs for their users.

The NEAR token is used for transaction fees, staking, storage on the network, and governance. It launched with an initial supply of 1 billion tokens and has no hard cap: new tokens are issued at around 5% annually to reward validators, offset by fee burning.

Role in the ecosystem

Beyond hosting DeFi, NFT, and consumer applications, NEAR has invested heavily in chain abstraction — tooling such as intents and cross-chain signatures that let users act across multiple blockchains without handling each one's mechanics. The project now frames itself as "the blockchain for AI," building infrastructure for user-owned AI agents that can transact autonomously on-chain. This combination of sharded scalability and abstraction tooling defines NEAR's niche among Layer 1 platforms.