The value of the NEAR cryptocurrency is growing rapidly, making it one of the most dynamically developing coins on the cryptocurrency market. The rush demand for Bitcoin and Ethereum , supported by stories about fabulous earnings in a short time, did its job: crowds of newly minted crypto enthusiasts began to besiege Ethereum. As a result, the price of GAS – the “fuel” for executing transactions and smart contracts on this blockchain – has increased significantly.
For example, in May 2021, the average price of GAS was around 20 Gwei, but by November of the same year it had jumped to an incredible 700 Gwei. This increase in price led to an increase in the cost of a simple transaction on the Ethereum network to $20-$30, which made Ethereum practically inaccessible to ordinary users.
The NEAR Protocol blockchain and its NEAR cryptocurrency have completely changed the rules of the game. How exactly, and whether the coin still has potential for rapid growth - read in our review.
Content:
- NEAR cryptocurrency that everyone should know about
- Stages of implementation of a grandiose project
- How NEAR Protocol is changing the rules of the game
- The NEAR ecosystem expands integration with cryptocurrency market leaders
- How to buy NEAR on Binance
- Conclusion
NEAR cryptocurrency that everyone should know about
NEAR cryptocurrency is one of the twenty most popular coins in the world. According to the ranking of the most famous cryptocurrency price tracking website CoinMarketCap, this project is ranked 17th with a market capitalization of $5.4 billion.
Anyone who is even slightly interested in cryptocurrencies has probably heard about Ethereum’s malicious competitors, who have received the nickname of its “killers.” These include Polkadot, Cardano, Solana and many other projects, the owners of which, to put it mildly, are not happy with the dominant position of the brainchild of Vitalik Buterin, the Canadian programmer and co-founder of Ethereum. So the NEAR project is one of them.
The NEAR Protocol team is working tirelessly to create the most popular blockchain for Web 3.0 - a technology that will finally allow Internet users to become full owners of their own data. Today this is not the case at all. Most of the information of modern users is stored on the servers of Internet giants like Google and Facebook.
How does this threaten the average user? The fact is that if Google decides one not-so-fine day to change the interface of its Google documents or eliminate this service altogether, you will be left without documents and without the data that was stored in them. In the Open Web, this cannot happen in principle. The data itself, as well as the tools you use to create it, belong only to you. And no Google has the right to decide when and how you use them.
With the development of Web 3.0 technology, the Internet will become more equitable and information will be stored in decentralized networks, giving users more control over what they do on the international web.
Stages of implementation of a grandiose project
The Near cryptocurrency began its journey at the end of 2017. Just at the moment when scammers, who created their coins solely for the purpose of deceiving users and pocketing their money, began to leave the market.
The ICO era was inexorably ending. Many US companies have stopped engaging in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) out of fear of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), fearing that their attempts to attract investment will be seen as selling an unregistered issue of securities.
It was at this time that the American NEAR Inc appeared. with the goal of creating a protocol on which decentralized applications could work in the future. The leaders of the project were two programmers from Ukraine and Russia: ex-Google developer Ilya Polosukhin and ex-Microsoft developer Alexander Skidanov.
NEAR was originally a machine learning and artificial intelligence project. However, after it became clear that the growth of this industry was not as explosive as expected, the project team moved on to writing its own blockchain, which will compete not with anyone, but with Ethereum itself.
Regarding the NEAR Protocol command, we need to say something separately. It includes top programmers from the world's leading IT giants: Google, Facebook, and Niantic. Their level is evidenced by the fact that two team members won the World Programming Championship twice.
The NEAR Protocol mainnet launched in April 2020, providing a layer 1 blockchain for smart contracts used in decentralized applications.
Thus, NEAR is very similar to the Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and other single-level peer-to-peer ledgers. However, there is a nuance: the processing speed of transactions in the NEAR network is noticeably higher than that of competitors, and commissions are lower. This indicates its noticeably higher performance, and the cost per GAS is half that of Solana.
Characteristic |
Ethereum |
Solana |
NEAR |
Operations per second |
15 |
2100 |
4000 |
Block confirmation time |
15 minutes |
12 sec |
2 sec |
Commissions |
$8.57 |
$0.02 |
$0.01 |
Subsequently, the project developed rapidly:
- March 2021 – launch of the NEAR to Ethereum bridge (Rainbow Bridge), with the help of which it became possible to transfer ERC-20 standard crypto assets to the NEAR Protocol and back.
- May 2021 – Aurora launched, allowing Ethereum developers to easily port their applications to NEAR.
- October 2021 – The Swiss non-profit NEAR Foundation was created to finance developers and various projects of the NEAR Protocol ecosystem.
- 2022 – launch of staking for NEAR token holders in order to receive rewards for supporting the network.
- 2023 – NEAR integration with popular crypto wallets (Ledger, MetaMask, WalletConnect, Trust Wallet, imToken, MathWallet) and exchanges (Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Huobi, OKEx).
- 2024 – launch of NEAR Grants, a program aimed at supporting the development of new projects on NEAR.
How NEAR Protocol is changing the rules of the game
Sharding is a method in which data is split into smaller pieces called shards. These fragments are then distributed across different servers or network nodes.
NEAR Protocol in its work uses the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, the essence of which is that the more coins a candidate for the vacancy of a network validator “offers,” the higher his chances of starting to check new blocks and adding them to the blockchain. Validators receive a commission for their work. It is for this that the struggle is going on between them.
The block generation scheme is called “DoomSlug”, and the sharding design is called “Nightshade”.
Both of these technologies in the NEAR Protocol work together to make the network scalable and reduce the likelihood of network congestion. The NEAR blockchain was specifically designed to be convenient for both developers and users.
The initial supply of tokens was created in 2020 and amounted to 1 billion. To date, about 90% of this amount has already been released to the market, and the remaining 10% will be released before the end of 2025.
The NEAR ecosystem expands integration with cryptocurrency market leaders
The best way to evaluate the ecosystem of a particular protocol is to evaluate the TVL (Total Value Locked) indicator, which shows the total value of funds locked by users. Let's analyze how much money has already been invested in NEAR Protocol. At the time of writing, the NEAR cryptocurrency ranked 8th in this indicator with a result of $158 million.
But in terms of the total number of unique wallets, the NEAR network takes an honorable first place with a result of 556 million. Moreover, it leads by a large margin from its closest competitor - BNB Chain, which has 386 million created wallets. This metric tells you how widespread the protocol is compared to other blockchains.
At the same time, the most popular application based on the NEAR Protocol is KAI-CHING, which helps save time and money when shopping in online stores.
Also very popular are the wallet with the somewhat strange name “HOT Game” and the application for users who prefer active recreation – “Sweat Economy”. The first and second were used by 5 and 2 million users, respectively, in just a month.
Who is NEAR's partner? In fact, there are a lot of them, and the key ones are Google, AliBaba, Arbitrum, Eigen Layer, Polygon, Sweat and MARBLEX. In addition, NEAR is actively implementing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies into its protocol. This gives a very obvious answer to the question: is it worth investing in NEAR?
How to buy NEAR on Binance
You can buy NEAR token on the popular Binance exchange in three simple steps:
- Log in to your account on the exchange and go to the “Trading” section in the top panel of the interface.
- In the search bar, indicate the name of the NEAR token and select the quote currency (the currency in which NEAR is traded).
- In the panel below the chart, go to the “Spot” tab, indicate the required amount and click “Buy NEAR”.
Conclusion
The cryptocurrency industry is developing rapidly, and today users are no longer satisfied with the “slow-moving” blockchain platforms that stood at the very beginning. New ambitious projects, like the NEAR Protocol and its native cryptocurrency NEAR, can not only significantly reduce commission costs for transactions, but also significantly increase the throughput of modern blockchain protocols.
NEAR's efficiency is sure to interest developers, while its excellent growth prospects should interest investors. According to experts, the NEAR cryptocurrency could grow to $15-$20 by the end of 2025, and up to $30 per coin by the end of 2028.
Such estimates provide a very specific answer to the question of whether it is worth investing in NEAR? However, we would like to especially emphasize that no forecasts can guarantee exchange rate growth. Always use risk and capital guidelines when making investment decisions.
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See also:
How to buy cryptocurrency for rubles or dollars
Is cryptocurrency necessary in the modern world?
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