Near Protocol is currently the Layer 1 public chain with the highest hype, and many people are predicting it as the next Ethereum. Recently, Near eco-stable coin USN has been officially launched, which means that the development of Near ecology has taken another step forward.
Zoran Kole, founder of Crypto Insiders, has said that Near's scalability, transaction throughput, and developers have all grown significantly, so the future will be Near's. But will Near become the next Ethereum, or will it be used only by venture capitalists as an exit liquidity medium? We'll take a deeper look at what the Near protocol has to offer.
What makes Near different?
NEAR Protocol is a fully decentralized, community-driven Layer1 blockchain protocol and smart contract platform. It is a developer-friendly, POS blockchain that leverages sharding technology and is a scalable, low-cost platform on which developers can create decentralized applications.
Most people will introduce Near this way, saying that it is another Layer 1, which promises to be faster, cheaper and more secure than Ethereum. We've heard this kind of talk countless times, so what makes the Near protocol different and why is it getting so much attention right now?
Scaling through dynamic slicing
The first thing is that on the technical side, Near scales by slicing, which may sound familiar to you because once upon a time Ethereum also hoped to be able to implement it by 2023. And Near has now successfully implemented this technology, where sharding splits the data into parts so that they can be processed in parallel with each other.
The dynamics mean that Near can resize the shards according to demand, which will keep the costs low. Because of its sharding technology, Near has the potential to scale infinitely. We can see that Near has a TPS of over 100,000, which is more than enough to exceed Visa's actual usage.
Beyond this time, Near also has other interesting technologies.
1. Private Slicing: Enterprises can create private slices to keep their data more secure.
2. Doom Slug: Reaching the end of the line in seconds.
Stacking Development Team
The core members of NEAR team have enough development experience and participation experience, and also have worked in large enterprises such as Google, Facebook, etc..
Two of the core founders and developers are: Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin.
Alexander Skidanov: Partner, ICPC Gold Medalist (International Collegiate Programming Competition), former MemSQL Project Director at Microsoft.
Illia Polosukhin: Co-founder of Near Protocol, 2008 ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) finalist, and a major code contributor to Google's TensorFlow open source AI project, producing programming tools used by thousands of teams in the machine learning space.
Illia was also the project leader of Google's deep learning group and led the core search algorithm business for nearly 10 years.
Meanwhile, there are a total of 26 backers/investors appearing in NEAR's official website, including some well-known investment institutions such as a16z and coinbase.
Meanwhile, there are a total of 26 backers/investors appearing in NEAR's official website, including some well-known investment institutions such as a16z and coinbase.
There are several main roles of NEAR tokens.
1. NEAR is the native pass of NEAR protocol, and the first role is to secure the network. As the running nodes need to pledge NEAR tokens, once the nodes are evil they can be punished, this mechanism can effectively protect the network security.
2. Medium of exchange. Users need to use NEAR as a medium of exchange when trading in NEAR.
3. It is used for network governance voting to decide how to allocate network resources and the future technical direction of the protocol.
The initial supply of NEAR tokens is 1 billion. An additional 5% of the supply is issued annually as a block-out bonus, of which 90% is allocated to verifiers (4.5% in total) and 10% to the protocol reserve pool (0.5% in total). 30% of the transaction fees are paid as rebates for contracts that interact with transactions, and the remaining 70% is destroyed.
The NEAR token issuance is not simply inflationary, but a dynamic mechanism whereby NEAR will enter a deflationary phase when the transaction size reaches a certain point.
In recent times, Near does seem to have attracted a lot of Crypto twitter attention. There are a lot of tailwinds happening in the ecosystem, and more are on the way.
On April 25, the NEAR eco-stable coin USN officially went live. Prior to this, Crypto Insiders founder Zoran Kole revealed that Near will launch an algorithmic stablecoin called USN, a digital asset that will be deployed in partnership with "other well-capitalized stablecoins". The USN is understood to be a decentralized stablecoin similar to Terra USD (UST) and Frax Finance (FRAX), which are softly anchored to the U.S. dollar but do not hold U.S. dollar cash reserves, and can be minted by depositing NEAR tokens as collateral.
Why USN?
First of all, the large market demand for USTs actually stems from Anchor Protocol and its 19.5% p.a. Anchor Protocol may soon reduce its rate. If Near can offer an APR of about 20% or higher, then they will be able to attract many users.
With the surge in attractive stablecoin yields, this will lead to comparisons between Near and Terra (LUNA). Terra currently has a market cap of about $40 billion compared to Near's $10 billion. The above catalysts will strengthen Near's fundamentals in the short and long term and could lead to at least 100% appreciation in its market cap in the coming months.
The Real Ether 2.0?
The topic of Near becoming a true Ether 2.0 has been a hot topic of public discussion. Indeed, Near is indeed a PoS blockchain that competes with ETH. It supports some features that have not been implemented in the ETH 2.0 upgrade, such as higher DeFi gains and lower Gas fees.
At this stage, Near has already gained a lot from ETH's proposed PoS model. Although Near is currently much smaller than ETH in terms of market capitalization and its user adoption is incomparable to Ether. As of now, issuing the stablecoin USN will give Near a lot of resources and make it easier to be used in Ref, Burrow, Bastion, Aurigami and other eco-projects as native stablecoins to be integrated.
But it is believed that this will gradually change as more capital flows into its chain. Although Near may not surpass Ether, it will definitely be the next "Ether" after Ether's success.