NEAR

NEAR Protocol is a layer-1 blockchain that uses a sharded architecture (Nightshade) and a proof-of-stake consensus variant called Doomslug, which reaches practical finality after one communication round and full BFT finality after two. The network reports deterministic transaction finality in about 1.3 seconds, average transaction fees of roughly $0.002, and storage costs that are refundable when data is deleted. Its mainnet launched on 22 April 2020 with 1 billion NEAR tokens created at genesis, with 5% of additional supply issued annually as epoch rewards (90% to validators, 10% to a protocol treasury); 30% of transaction fees are rebated to contracts involved in a transaction and the remaining 70% are burned.

Developer tooling centers on WebAssembly smart contracts written in Rust, with community SDKs for JavaScript, Python and Go, plus scaffolding tools such as cargo near and create-near-app, testnet accounts and a faucet. The platform also supports Chain Signatures, which lets a single NEAR account control accounts on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and other chains, and NEAR Intents, an abstraction layer intended to allow goal-driven cross-chain transactions without bridges. Additional stack components include tokens and primitives (fungible tokens, NFTs, DAOs, linkdrops, staking, oracles, off-chain compute), data infrastructure for indexing and querying on-chain data (NEAR Lake, BigQuery, indexers), and AI agent tooling including llms.txt, a documentation MCP server, agent skills and on-chain MCP tools. The project describes itself as an AI-native blockchain combining user-owned AI agents, intents and chain abstraction, and sharded execution, and supports running AI inference inside Trusted Execution Environments for verifiable outputs.

Founding story

Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov founded NEAR Protocol in 2018 with the aim of building a scalable, usable blockchain. The pair had previously started NEAR AI in 2017 as a startup focused on teaching machines to code, then encountered Web3 as users and decided to apply their distributed systems background to designing a new protocol. Polosukhin was previously a machine learning researcher at Google and a co-author of "Attention Is All You Need," the paper introducing the transformer architecture. Skidanov was engineer #1 and director of engineering at Microsoft's SingleStore and an OpenAI contributor.

Business model

NEAR operates as an open blockchain network funded and governed around the NEAR token. The token is used to pay fees for transaction processing and data storage, to stake for running validator nodes, and for governance votes on the allocation of network resources.

Network usage generates transaction and storage fees denominated in NEAR; 30% of transaction fees are rebated to the contracts involved in a transaction and 70% are burned. Annual issuance of 5% of supply funds epoch rewards, of which 4.5 percentage points go to validators and 0.5 to the protocol treasury.

Traction

As of the latest market data, NEAR had a market capitalization of about $2.45 billion, 24-hour trading volume of roughly $231.6 million, a circulating and total supply of about 1.3 billion tokens, and approximately 12.88 thousand holders. Its all-time high price was $20.42 on 16 January 2022 and its all-time low $0.526 on 4 November 2020. The network holds a CertiK rating of 4.5.

Latest developments

Current developer documentation covers AI agent tooling, including llms.txt support, a documentation MCP server, agent skills and on-chain MCP tools, alongside Chain Signatures for controlling accounts on Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana and TEE-backed agent inference.