Original author: Alfred, LD Capital
1. Fundamental overview
Introduction: NEAR Protocol is a first-layer blockchain based on sharding and PoS designed to incentivize computer networks to run a platform for developers to create and launch decentralized applications.
Unlike other blockchains, the NEAR Protocol network was built from the ground up to be easily adopted by developers and their end-users, while still providing the scalability needed to serve those users. Specifically, NEAR is designed to make it easier to achieve the following goals:
(1) Build decentralized applications - Whether you are an experienced blockchain developer or are only used to building using traditional network or application concepts, NEAR makes it easy to build the next generation of decentralized applications .
(2) Provide users with a smooth experience — even if they have never used cryptocurrencies, tokens, keys, wallets, or other blockchain artifacts.
(3) Seamlessly scale your application - the underlying platform automatically scales capacity through sharding without any additional cost or effort on your part
NEAR currently has three main narratives, namely Chain Abstraction (CA), Data Availability (DA) and AI
1、CA
There are two main lines of development in the evolution of the public chain track: modularization and chain abstraction. NEAR Protocol has made achievements in both aspects. First, chain abstraction has been the main development direction of NEAR Protocol in the past three years, and has now become the leader in the field of chain abstraction. One of the header protocols.
Most Dapps today are not actually Dapps (decentralized applications). If the user needs to leave the app to start using it, its not actually an app, its just a front-end. If users have to manually register and manage multiple accounts, gas fees, and bridging through an exchange, this is not a decentralized application. The core goal of chain abstraction is to solve the problem of increasing fragmentation of Web3.
NEAR Protocol achieves chain abstraction through three parts: (1) underlying data availability and decentralized sorter (2) account aggregation with unified identity and security. Users can have an address on all possible chains and freely move on Move assets between them. From the users perspective, this should be a single account where they can interact with applications on different chains and assets are automatically bridged or exchanged. : (3) Unified experience layer: Provides a way to interact with applications on different chains without requiring users to switch or leave a single interface
On the front-end interface, NEAR Protocol has launched a new blockchain operating system BOS, aiming to become an open source alternative to Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft. It is a secure, transparent and accessible carbon-neutral platform that eliminates the need for Web3 Due to the complexity of the space, when you open the NEAR website, you can see an interface similar to the Web2 portal, and you can launch multiple types of DAPPs under one account.
2、DA
NEAR Protocols DA will expand the modular ecosystem and defragment all Web3, and is also the bottom layer of the development direction of CA and AI. According to official data, NEAR currently has the cheapest transaction fees among all Web3 networks. NEAR DA is 85,000 times cheaper than publishing blob submissions on Ethereum and 30 times cheaper than on Celestia.
Data availability and NEAR DA play an important role in chain abstraction. Since zero-knowledge technology can unify cross-chain security through state proof, settlement data will be easier to obtain from different networks. Thanks to account aggregation and decentralized front-ends, dapps become truly multi-chain applications, making it easier to query data from multiple chains when the data is all published in one place. Doing this on NEAR Protocol would be much cheaper for rollups. NEAR DA provides developers with an out-of-the-box solution that makes it easy for rollup builders to fully leverage NEARs infrastructure - with over three years of reliability behind it. In November 2023 NEAR releases a data availability layer for ETH rollups and Ethereum developers that can be integrated into any OP Stack, Polygon CDK or Arbitrum Nitro rollup.
3、AI
In terms of doing AI, NEAR Protocol has a unique advantage, that is, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin. Before founding NEAR, he was an artificial intelligence researcher, worked at Google AI, contributed to TensorFlow, and eventually worked with several A colleague published a paper called Attention Is All You Need. The paper introduces the Transformers architecture that powers ChatGPT, Bard, and most of the well-known LLMs behind last years explosive growth in AI.
Secondly, with the popularity of Web AI, NEAR will return more focus to AI based on the good development of CA and DA. In November 2023, NEAR released NEAR Tasks to train and improve artificial intelligence models. Simply put, the model training requester (Vendor) can issue task requests on the platform and upload basic data materials, and users (Taskers) can participate Answer tasks and perform manual operations such as text annotation and image recognition for data. After the task is completed, the platform will reward the user with NEAR tokens, and these manually labeled data will be used to train the corresponding AI model.
In January 2024, Illia Polosukhin released a speech on NEARs vision to build digital self-sovereignty. In the future, NEAR Protocol will be developed into a completely independent operating system equipped with a personal AI assistant that can be optimized for user needs without Will disclose private information about user data or assets. It should also be able to interact and trade peer-to-peer with other people’s AI and the community’s AI. I call this user-owned AI. That is, the AI Agent is developed based on NEAR’s existing foundation.
At the GTC 24 conference on March 20, Illia Polosukhin will share insights on AI models and technologies as one of the eight authors of Attention is All You Need.
2. Team and investment
Illia Polosukhin is the co-founder and foundation CEO of NEAR Protocol. Previously, he worked on the MemSQL, Google AI, and Tensorflow teams. While at Google, he served as a major contributor to TensorFlow and led the team to provide question and answer solutions for core Google search. He is passionate about machine intelligence and natural language processing, and was a former ICPC finalist.
Alexander Skidanov is the co-founder of NEAR Protocol. Alexander Skidanov led the development team at MemSQL, starting his career at Microsoft in 2009, and then joining MemSQL in 2011, where he worked as an architect and development director for a total of 5 years. He has won ICPC medals twice, bronze in 2005 and gold in 2008
Kendall Cole is currently the product director of NEAR Protocol. Previously, he was specifically responsible for the construction of the Kauri.io project at ConsenSys, and also participated in the founding of OilFront, EntryWire and other projects.
NEAR Protocol has received investment and support from top Crypto capitals such as a16z, Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, and Hashed.
3. Token situation
The current market value of NEAR is 8.512 billion, FDV is 9.529 billion, and the circulating supply is 1.052 billion. Trading venues include mainstream exchanges, including Binance, OKX, and Coinbase. The recent trading volume is around 1 billion to 1.5 billion.
The current TVL of NEAR is 280 million, and the ecosystem is in a relatively early stage. However, in the official user data disclosure in January, since the launch of the mainnet in October 2020, the uptime of the four shards has reached 100%, and has been registered The number of accounts exceeds 100 million, and the number of monthly active accounts (MAA) reaches 16 million. Through the development of chain abstraction and AI popularity, it has certain potential for capital growth.
The current market value of NEAR is approximately 0.019 of ETH, 0.098 of SOL, and 0.4 of AVAX. Although the on-chain ecology is in its early stages, the chain itself has strong technical strength and a public chain with CA+DA+AI triple narrative overlay. Combined with the current K-line pattern, the token price may rise further under the background of strong AI narrative.
