The crypto community has faced a significant scalability
difficulty as dApps have risen in popularity. The ability of a blockchain to
handle a high number of transactions at an acceptable speed and cost is
referred to as scalability in this context. Due to the huge demand for
Ethereum, scalability issues have arisen. While some argue for scaling
solutions to be implemented on top of Ethereum (Layer-2 solutions), other
projects, such as NEAR, have chosen to develop totally new blockchains with
distinct design.
The deployment of sharding is the NEAR Protocol's proposed
answer to this scaling challenge. Before going into detail about what this
entails, it's important to understand the three primary tasks of blockchain
nodes: they process transactions, relay validated transactions and finished
blocks to other nodes, and store the network's state and history. As network
congestion grows, these jobs become increasingly difficult for nodes to do.
By breaking or partitioning the network into shards,
sharding reduces the computational strain (or fragments). With this strategy,
each node is only required to perform the code that is relevant to its shard,
allowing shards to run computation in parallel, increasing the network's
capacity as the number of nodes grows.
NEAR employs a PoS approach to reach network-wide
consensus. To be considered for participation in PoS, nodes who want to be
transaction validators must stake their NEAR tokens. Holders of tokens who do
not want to run a node can delegate their stake to validators of their choice.
Every epoch (about every 12 hours), NEAR chooses validators using an auction
method, and validators with bigger stakes have more impact in the consensus
process.
Some validators are in charge of validating
"chunks," which are collections of transactions from several shards,
while others are in charge of generating blocks, which contain chunks from all
shards. Other nodes, known as "fishermen," monitor the network for
harmful activity and report it. A validator's stake will be reduced if they
behave improperly.
NEAR Token Economics
The NEAR token is primarily used to pay transaction fees and
as collateral for blockchain data storage. NEAR tokens are also used to reward
numerous blockchain stakeholders. Transaction validators receive an NEAR token
reward per epoch in exchange for their efforts, which equates to 4.5 percent of
the total NEAR supply on a yearly basis.
Developers that build smart contracts also get a cut of the
transaction fees generated by their contracts. The remaining transaction fees
are burned, enhancing the NEAR token's scarcity. NEAR has also established a
protocol treasury, which receives 0.5 percent of total NEAR supply each year in
order to reinvest in ecosystem development.
In addition to NFTs, the NEAR Protocol can support tokens
that are "wrapped" from other chains. Similarly, NEAR has built a
bridge with Ethereum that enables users to send ERC-20 tokens from Ethereum to
NEAR.
NEAR Platform
Governance
The NEAR Foundation, a Switzerland-based non-profit
dedicated to protocol maintenance, ecosystem funding, and directing protocol
governance, distributes funds to the protocol treasury. The Reference
Maintainer, who is chosen by the NEAR Foundation board, is in charge of
technical changes to the NEAR crypto network, albeit all nodes in the network
must agree to updates by upgrading their software. The Reference Maintainer
will eventually be overseen by community-elected representatives.
NEAR Protocol strives to stand out in the crowded field of
Web 3.0 infrastructure providers by offering unique developer and user-friendly
capabilities.
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