NEAR — what is it, no, really, what is it?
NEAR is an amazing protocol which is potentially misunderstood.
This article and others in the series seeks to answer the question and explore NEAR’s values and potential.
It is arguable that there is one single thing slowing the adoption of Crypto-technology. The paucity of good real-world applications.
Before I antagonize all those talented people who have developed applications, let me try to explain what I mean. I am talking about ubiquitous applications, truly focused on the needs of the consumer, THAT PERVADE our daily lives because they really make a difference. Here are some already working on this goal:
Secure sharing of medical data
NFT marketplaces
Music royalties tracking
Cross-border payments
Real-time IoT operating systems
Personal identity security
Anti-money laundering tracking system
Supply chain and logistics monitoring
Voting mechanism
Advertising insights
Original content creation
Cryptocurrency exchange
Real estate processing platform
With thanks to Sam Daley’s article: 30 Blockchain Applications and Real-World Use Cases Disrupting the Status Quo.
The difficulty is in creating more and fostering the right environment whereby more and more brilliant, genuinely helpful and easy to use applications come through as quickly as possible.
Which is where NEAR comes in…………
Building applications is challenging, building good applications is even more so, particularly if the technicalities get in the way.
NEAR is a Layer 1, developer-friendly, sharded, proof-of-stake public blockchain with a simple ethos:
…to enable people to more easily build better applications that will encourage more use.
Key principles
NEAR is very developer friendly because it adheres to 4 strong principles:
Usability: with applications deployed to the platform that are easy to create for developers and straightforward for end-users with the underlying technology completely unobtrusive, thus making applications both intuitive and secure.
Scalability: Limitless provided there is economic justification.
Simplicity: Optimized for simplicity and ease of understanding.
Decentralization: In both the short and long term to avoid dominance by any single party.
(The platform is also designed to easily store and move around unique digital assets, such as Wrapped BTC, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Stablecoins can be used to pay for goods and services on NEAR applications.)
How it works
NEAR combines features of a decentralized database with serverless computing. This, and the applications built on it, run and interact via the NEAR token. The result is a community-operated cloud-based infrastructure for deploying and running dapps.
This decentralized infrastructure comes from multiple “nodes” either run by professional organizations such as LunaNova or individuals who provide some of their computational resources to the network. To ensure performance nodes put a portion of value at ‘stake’ as a deposit, known as Proof Of Stake (POS).
Developers are thus able to create censorship-resistant smart contracts for applications that deal with high-end data like money, identity, and assets. It is similar to a decentralized version of the cloud-hosted services provided by Amazon or Google….but on steroids.
Today’ s centralized web services take fees up-front. Blockchain services use micropayments (gas costs) whereby users get charged immediately. (NEAR provides initial users with a web2 experience by purchasing gas directly from a developer’s account.) These fees are 10,000 times lower in cost than Ethereum.
With the lid off
NEAR technology can use multiple parallelized shards to enable horizontal scaling and near-infinite capacity with a new consensus algorithm called Nightshade
Node selection uses a secure randomized process that distributes seats across parties and provides incentives for good behavior.
The randomness approach can tolerate up to 1/3 of malicious actors before any network affect and 2/3 of malicious actors before output is influenced.
NEAR development suite
The NEAR platform has been designed to be used in a permissionless way; a set of community-built tools and reference guides have been created to help developers.
NEAR has a full Software Development Kit (SDK) which includes standard data structures, examples, and testing tools for Rust and AssemblyScript languages to write smart contracts.
NEAR uses Gitpod, an existing technology to provide an “Integrated Development Environment” (IDE) to ease the onboarding experience for developers so that they can easily write, test and deploy smart contracts from a web browser.
NEAR Wallet, where developers and end-users store the assets they need to use the network, is provided as a reference implementation to enable application developers design more effective user experiences.
NEAR Explorer presents information from the blockchain in an easily digestible web-based format to aid debugging of contracts and understanding network performance.
NEAR has straightforward command-line tools to enable easy creation, testing and deployment from local environments.
In-summary
NEAR is uniquely focused on one of the biggest challenges with today’s blockchains — usability,
Usability is being provided for developers and end-users; for developers by providing for browser-based debugging and familiar programming languages and for users via a security model for wallet interactions and by encouraging developers to create comfortable and familiar user experiences.
But ………NEAR is not just about the code
To understand more about NEAR see our next blog post.
LunaNova will continue to keep you informed of developments in NEAR’s governance. If you have any questions about this or any aspect of our NEAR validator services, please contact us via our website.
A pdf detailing our NEAR validator service is available here.
