NEAR Protocol’s March Toward Mass Adoption
In the past year, NEAR Protocol has witnessed a spectacular growth that earned it a spot among the 25 largest cryptocurrencies in the world. Its growth is the result of NEAR’s commitment to continuously innovate and deliver top quality products to nurture its ecosystem. NEAR’s infrastructure is now more scalable, secure, decentralized, and accessible than ever before, something that did not pass unnoticed by users and developers.So what are the key updates that turned NEAR into a top protocol ready for mass adoption?
Key Infrastructure
Simple Nightshade
In November 2021, NEAR took its first step towards a fully sharded and secure blockchain by launching the Simple Nightshade. Sharding alleviates inefficiency and bottlenecks by partitioning a database into smaller pieces while nodes are divided into small groups and are able to process transactions simultaneously. With it, the inefficiency of one node verifying transactions in one block is supplanted by multiple nodes verifying transactions in multiple blocks. For users this translates into exceptional speed and throughput on the chain and eventually infinite scalability. The introduction of the Simple Nightshade was also followed by an incrementation of the shards which allows NEAR to further decentralize the network, an incredible milestone for the NEAR ecosystem!
Machina
Two months after the launch of the Single Nightshade, NEAR, in collaboration with Aurora and HAPI, introduced Machina, a sharded data storage project designed to provide scalable, cost-efficient, and immediately retrievable information on-chain. Machina makes on-chain data accessible off-chain, along with all of blockchain’s security measures like consensus and decentralization; it can be used by both NEAR apps and Solidity-based smart contracts on Ethereum, positioning itself as another great tool for mass adoption.
Calimero
Calimero Private Shard is a customizable sidechain built on top of NEAR, designed to enable the building of private enterprise shards tailored to user’s needs. Calimero allows users to hold and manage public assets and move them between private shards and other public chains, to benefit from cross shard transactions as well as to interact with third parties on the public chain or other permissioned enterprise shards.
JavaScript SDK by Pagoda
In a bid to democratize access to Web3 building and enforce its community centric approach, NEAR Protocol launched its JavaScript Software Development Kit; this will enable developers to build fast, scalable, and user-friendly decentralized applications using Java, the world’s most popular coding language with over 20 million developers using it.
Funding and Community
NEAR Foundation’s Launch of a $800 Million Fund
One year since the launch of NEAR’s $800 million fund, NEAR has made an undeniable mark in the world of Web3, hitting milestones and backing activities that align with its core values: sustainability, usability, and inclusivity.
The NEAR Foundation has played a key role in helping NEAR adoption grow to an impressive 17x in the past year alone, with wallets going from 1.1 million to 18.2 million as of today. NEAR was also able to show resilience amidst the bear market thanks to the NEAR Foundation’s strategic and conservative approach in capital deployment. Under the leadership of Marieke Flament, the newly appointed CEO, the NEAR Foundation was also able to raise a further $400 million in funding throughout 2022 for early stage ecosystem building blocks, sustainability projects and socially impactful startups.
Regional Hubs
This year, the NEAR community has let their thoughts, feelings, and opinions be heard. This burning passion that drives community engagement has helped NEAR establish a distinct social presence in different communities across continents all around the world. In 2021/2022 NEAR has launched a total of six regional hubs, namely in: Kenya, Ukraine, Balkans, India, Vietnam, and the US. All regional hubs are vital to onboarding users into the NEAR ecosystem and help build a multi-chain, open web future, empowering others to invest and deploy capital on NEAR and fostering local community engagement.
Final Thoughts
In this piece we have only focused on the groundbreaking news from across the ecosystem, however, this is by no means an exhaustive list. There have been plenty of events and exciting launches that significantly contributed to the advancement of NEAR Protocol and its thriving community. Every new project and initiative that is emerging in the ecosystem is playing a fundamental role in paving the road to mass adoption and the creation of new paradigms.
About NEAR Protocol
NEAR is a dynamically sharded Proof-of-Stake, carbon-neutral blockchain built for usability and scalability. NEAR combines the power of both PoS and sharding in a technology called Nightshade, making the chain infinitely scalable without compromising security and decentralization.
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