NEAR Protocol is a collective, a foundation, and a development platform built on a new layer-one blockchain. It was designed as a community-run cloud computing platform and it tackles some blockchain limitations, such as low transaction speeds, low throughput and poor interoperability. These features provide the ideal environment for DApps and creates a developer and user-friendly platform.
The NEAR Foundation (NF) helped to launch both a technological platform (the NEAR Protocol) and the ecosystem around it. According to NEAR’s website “through simple, secure, and scalable technology, NEAR empowers millions to invent and explore new experiences. Business, creativity, and community are being reimagined for a more sustainable and inclusive future.”
NEAR is also described on the website as sustainable and its PoS network was certified as carbon-neutral in February 2021. It has lower transaction fees for users and developers earn 30% of transaction fees, so it is cost-effective, as well as “secure, friendly, harmonious and pragmatic.”
Besides, according to CoinMarketCap, what makes this token unique is that it uses “Nightshade technology to improve transaction throughput massively. Nightshade is a variation of sharding, in which individual sets of validators process transactions in parallel across multiple sharded chains, improving the overall capacity of the blockchain.” Thanks to Nightshade, NEAR can achieve up to 100,000 transactions per second and transactions are almost instantaneous thanks to a one-second block cadence while simultaneously keeping transaction fees at virtually zero.At the time of writing, the NEAR Protocol price is US$9,89 with a 24-hour trading volume of US$1.431.739.701. Its current CoinMarketCap ranking is number 30, with a live market cap of US$5.743.275.156 USD, a circulating supply of 580.811.196 NEAR coins and a maximum supply of 1.000.000.000 NEAR coins. During the last 7 days, NEAR’s price rose 29.3%, according to CoinGecko.
