Crypto Staking & Exchanging

Your ear will perk up when you  hear mention of the name NEAR because it is up more than 50% in a little more than 4 weeks in March 2022, but currently gave up all its gains by the start of May. However this coin has potential due to its advanced Nightshade sharding technology that allows it to process up to 100,000 transactions per second. What makes NEAR Protocol unique is that it makes it easier for developers to create Dapps by creating the infrastructure needed to run the Dapps within its distributed networks. Think of it like the cloud for Dapps.

Let's take some more time to get acquainted with NEAR. In this article you will learn about the background of the project, the tokenomics, historical price data, technology and more.

 NEAR Protocol first started out as a machine learning project in 2017. Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov found the project back then and while they were working on their machine learning project they&ndashlike many others during the 2017 crypto craze&ndashdiscovered crypto currency and became fascinated with what it could do. However, while they researched blockchain and crypto currency technologies they discovered that none of the technologies out there could match what they wanted to do. They needed something fast and scalable. Since there was nothing available for them to use, they created it themselves. That's how NEAR went from being a machine learning project to its own blockchain and crypto currency. 

 In modern computing, application and web hosting have all moved to the cloud and there are only a handful of major cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Services that allow for cloud hosting. This has a lot of advantages for most. However, the major drawback to this is that it does not allow for true decentralization, because your dapp is hosted on a centralized service.

This is where NEAR Protocol comes in because it offers the hosting capabilities that are distributed and decentralized. It gives you the decentralized hosting that Amazon and Microsoft can't because they are centralized companies and go against the whole idea of decentralization.

Almost every crypto currency attempts to solve a problem in a unique way. NEAR solves the problem of centralized cloud computing. Now that you know that, let's move on to tokenomics and learn more about how the financial part of NEAR operates.

The NEAR Protocol mainnet was launched in April 2020 with 1 billion tokens created in the genesis block. More than 2 years later, there are more than 670 million tokens in circulation with a price at $11.80 USD that sets the market cap at $7,972,602,157 at the time of writing and pushes it up to #16 on CoinMarkeCap's ranking. It sits just below Shiba Inu Coin on the ranking index.

NEAR is a Proof-of-Stake token so it has a system of validators that stake their tokens in order to become a validator and earn rewards on validating blocks. Fees for transactions are very, very low and the transaction rate is very, very high. This is the common theme for the third generation crypto currencies. All transaction fees are burned by NEAR which means the more people that use the token, the more valuable it will become as tokens are removed from circulation. This is a built in feature to get a grip on inflation and stay ahead of the fiat currencies. It's only been on the market for 2 years but lets see how well the price has performed.

In this section, you will learn about the cool technology that NEAR Protocol is using. Since NEAR is operating on a simple and efficient means, it is not overloaded with features and functions. It has the technology to do what needs to be done and no more. Its most notable features are the Nightshade Sharding Technology, which allows for super fast processing of transactions and the Rainbow Bridge which allows users to exchange Ethereum for NEAR tokens.

NEAR Protocol includes an application called the Rainbow Bridge that allows users to easily transfer Ethereum tokens back and forth between Ethereum and NEAR. This bridge is required because they are separate blockchains and you cannot just exchange any tokens on them. Normally, you need to exchange tokens like for like, so any ERC20 token is exchangeable with any token made on the Ethereum blockchain. So because you can't exchange the tokens directly, a smart contract works within the rainbow bridge to exchange the tokens in the following process.

In order to move tokens from Ethereum to NEAR Protocol, a user would first deposit tokens in an Ethereum smart contract. These tokens are then locked, and new tokens would be created on NEAR's platform representing the original ones.

Since the original funds are held in storage through the smart contract, the process can be reversed when the user wishes to retrieve their original tokens.