Near Protocol Future Metrics

 

The future, like the Internet, can be configured in an unlimited number of ways. We don't know how it will appear, but we can identify some of the fundamental factors that will shape it and forecast some of the primary instruments that will help us get there.

Privacy:

On the blockchain, all activity and data is visible by default. The core of privacy, on the other hand, is the ability to choose whether their activities should be visible or hidden. While the default technical tooling does not give this level of privacy protection, a variety of solutions built on top of it do.

Data can be encrypted before being written to the chain in the weak form. This secures the data's integrity, but it still leaves transactions exposed to tracking, and excellent analysis can often piece together what happened. As a result, new technologies such as zero knowledge proofs offer an intriguing chance to make not only data but also the computations that modify it secret.

This technology isn't built into the NEAR platform from the start, but it is conceivable to implement if the community pushes for it.

Private Shards:

Not all blockchain use cases necessitate the public chain's full security and protection for each transaction. A group of users, or even a single organization, may elect to run their own chain, in which they manage all validation and periodically checkpoint back to the main chain for security, verification, and activity communication. In this situation, specific shards might be programmed to employ a specific set of specified validators, effectively making them "private."

Sharding is a horizontal scaling approach in which the network's overall processing power is proportionate to the number of CPUs connected to it. Simply put, the more devices that support the community cloud by participating in the validation process, the higher the network's transaction throughput will be.

Across the globe, there are billions of devices with functional CPUs. By utilizing even a portion of the more resilient of these devices, the network will be able to attain incredible scalability. However, if more capacity is needed, the constraints for running nodes can be changed so that even mobile devices can participate. While the engineering constraints are significant, this might enable access to another billion nodes in everyone's pockets, making it a promising field for future research.

Internet of Things (IoT):

IoT devices are even more specialized than mobile devices because they have the smallest processing power and the most CPUs accessible.

The Open Web's Composable Components:

It begins with a worldwide, free currency and progresses to unkillable applications, but the open web's ambition eventually becomes one in which all existing applications may be simply combined to generate new functionality. Consider the hardware analogy of what the current smartphone's GPS, camera, and internet connection have unleashed, then apply the fluidity of software to it. In a world where this is feasible, there's no telling how quickly innovation can happen. This future will become a reality because to NEAR's global state, which will be accessible to all apps.