Feb 10
Get started with NEAR Protocol
Are you interested in finding out what is NEAR, how does it work, what are its features, and how you can easily get started with it? This guide is designed to help you in learning key features of NEAR and explain to you what is everything about. Below you will learn more about the NEAR Protocol, so you can get involved in the topic as soon as possible without any hussle.
💡 The authors are not responsible for the services described in this article. Please do your own research.
What is Near?
Website: https://near.org/
Docs: https://docs.near.org/docs/concepts/new-to-near
Block explorer: https://explorer.near.org/
Coin: NEAR
Consensus: TPoS
Average block time: 1s
Average Network Transaction Fee: <$0.01
NEAR is a decentralized development platform that uses a thresholded proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and will eventually feature a sharded architecture to scale transaction throughput. Its block generation scheme is called Doomslug and its proposed sharding design is dubbed Nightshade. These technologies will work together to scale the network and minimize congestion. From Messari report.
How is Near different?
NEAR Protocol was created from the ground up to be one of the most user-friendly platform in the world for developers and their end-users. It also provides the scalability and security that those users want. If to dive deeper, NEAR’s design opens doors to such great advantages as:
Scaling problem solution
The NEAR blockchain development team seeks to solve the scaling problem by enabling resource-intensive decentralized applications (dapps). NEAR blockchain development is based on thresholded Proof of Stake (TPoS). The system uses an innovative consensus mechanism called Nightshade with the implementation of sharding, due to which, in theory, has no restrictions on the network bandwidth.
User-friendly platform
NEAR has incorporated features like human-readable account names as opposed to only cryptographic wallet addresses, and the ability for new users to interact with dApps and smart contracts without requiring a wallet at all.
Token-based storage
NEAR token holders have the right to store data on the chain. For example, if someone holds a balance of 1 NEAR, it means that the person can store nearly 10 KB of data on the account. This model is similar to how checking accounts in banks require a minimum balance to have an account. It allows contracts that are maintaining important state to pay validators proportionally to the amount of data they are securing.
How does Near work?
NEAR is a thresholded proof of stake (TPoS). The general idea is that they want a deterministic way to have a large number of participants that are maintaining network maintenance thereby increasing decentralization, security and establishing fair reward distribution.
In NEAR case, they want a large pool of participants (“witnesses”) to be elected to make decisions during a specific interval of time (default to one day). Each interval is split into a large number of block slots (default to 1440 slots, one every minute) with a reasonably large number of witnesses per each block (default to 1024). With these defaults, NEAR end up needing to fill 1,474,560 individual witness seats.
NEAR blockchain uses sharding to optimize performance. However, unlike sharding in other cryptocurrencies such as Polkadot, all shards on NEAR are viewed as part of the same blockchain.
This is all thanks to a mechanism called Nightshade. With Nightshade, only a snapshot of the current state of each shard is added to a block on the NEAR blockchain. Each shard is sustained by its own set of validator nodes, which broadcast the state of its shard every time a block is produced.
Another important component of NEAR is a mechanism called Doomslug. Without getting technical, this makes it possible for validator nodes on the network to take turns generating blocks. This happens every epoch, and each epoch is 12 hours long. A new block is generated on NEAR roughly every second.
Block rewards on NEAR come from inflation which is currently around 5% per year (more on this later). 90% of every block reward goes to staking validators and delegator staking pools, and the remaining 10% goes to the NEAR treasury which is currently managed by the NEAR Foundation.
Near assets
NEAR
- the base currency for the payment of transaction fees;
- governance token
Stables
- USDC
- USDT
- atUST (Wrapped Terra UST)
- TUSD
Other top 3 tokens
- Ref finance (REF)
Project: https://www.ref.finance/
Market Cap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ref-finance/
CoinGeсko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ref-finance - Meta pool (META)
Project: https://metapool.app/ - Oin finance (OIN)
Project: https://oin.financ
Market Cap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/oin-finance/
CoinGeсko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/oin-finance
See more NEAR tokens:
https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/near-protocol-ecosystem
NEAR ecosystem
What CEXes support NEAR?
There are some crypto exchanges where you can buy Near assets:
NEAR Wallets
🖥 NEAR Wallet
NEAR blockchain offers its own web NEAR wallet.
Step-by-step guide you’ll find here: https://nearhelp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500002248242-Creating-a-NEAR-Wallet-account
🖥 📲 Math Wallet
A multi-platform (mobile, desktop extension, and hardware), universal crypto wallet. More detail: https://mathwallet.org/en-us/
📲 Trust Wallet
Trust Wallet is a mobile cryptocurrency wallet that supports over 160 digital assets and enables users to stake their coins in order to gain interest.
More detail: https://trustwallet.com/
NEAR Bridges
You can bridge tokens to/from NEAR.
To do this, you can use the following bridges:
📌 Allbridge: Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Aurora, Avalanche, HECO, Fantom, Celo, Solana, Terra, Harmony, Fuse.
📌 Rainbow bridge: Aurora, ETH, Near.
Bridge guide: https://docs.allbridge.io/guides/how-to-bring-assets-from-solana-to-near-ecosystem-using-allbridge
NEAR DEX
Ref.finance: https://app.ref.finance/
NEAR Yield Farming
Ref.finance
DEX
https://app.ref.finance/
https://guide.ref.finance/
Ref Finance is one of the core projects in the DeFi ecosystem on NEAR Protocol. Its main objective is to bring together the core components of DeFi, namely, decentralized exchange (DEX), lending protocol, synthetic asset issuer, and so on, into a single, synchronous DeFi platform.
Oin Finance
Landing protocol
https://near.oin.finance/
https://oin-finance.gitbook.io/925/
A decentralized multi-chain stablecoin issuance protocol.
Meta pool
Liquid staking
https://metapool.app/
Meta Pool is a liquid staking protocol built on NEAR. People stake their NEAR tokens with Meta Pool using automatic staking strategies and receive “staked NEAR” tokens they can use in the DeFi NEARverse or they can be swapped any time back to original NEAR tokens to unstake.
DeFi Aggregators
NEAR DeFi projects gallery
https://awesomenear.com/projects/
DeFi Lama
https://defillama.com/chain/Near
