NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol positions itself as the blockchain for AI. It is a high-performance, AI-native platform designed to support the next wave of decentralized applications and intelligent agents. The network offers the infrastructure required for AI to transact, operate, and interact across both Web2 and Web3 environments. NEAR integrates three primary components: User-Owned AI, which guarantees that agents prioritize users’ best interests; Intents and Chain Abstraction, which remove blockchain complexity to enable smooth, goal-oriented transactions across different chains; and a sharded blockchain architecture that provides the scalability, speed, and low-cost execution necessary for practical AI and Web3 applications. This combined stack establishes NEAR as the basis for developing secure, user-owned, AI-native applications at internet scale.

NEAR Protocol was established in 2018 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, who aimed to create a blockchain that is both scalable and user-friendly. Prior to this, the pair launched NEAR AI in 2017 as a startup focused on teaching machines how to code. After experiencing Web3 as users, they chose to leverage their background in distributed systems to design a new protocol. Before working on NEAR, Polosukhin served as a machine learning researcher at Google and co-wrote "Attention Is All You Need," the foundational paper for the transformer architecture used in modern LLMs. Skidanov previously held the roles of engineer #1 and director of engineering at Microsoft’s SingleStore and contributed to OpenAI.

NEAR Protocol stands out because it was engineered for AI from the start, rather than being adapted later. Created by AI researchers, its structure supports large-scale intelligent systems. Using Nightshade sharding, the network processes billions of transactions while avoiding congestion and fee spikes. Developers can code in common languages such as JavaScript and Rust, bring in users who do not need wallets, and connect to other chains without bridges via Chain Signatures and NEAR Intents. With its progressive security, stable low fees, and built-in support for AI agents, NEAR positions itself as the most practical chain for creating future autonomous apps.

NEAR Protocol’s mainnet went live on April 22, 2020, with a genesis creation of 1 billion NEAR tokens. The total supply is capped at 1 billion, distributed as follows:

• 17.2% - Community Grants
• 11.4% - Operation Grants
• 10% - Foundation Endowment
• 11.7% - Early Ecosystem
• 14% - Core Contributors
• 17.6% - Backers
• 6.1% - Small Backers
• 12% - Community Sale

Each year, the network issues an additional 5% in epoch rewards to support operations. Of this new supply, 90% (totaling 4.5%) is allocated to validators, while the remaining 10% (totaling 0.5%) goes to the protocol treasury. Regarding transaction fees, 30% are returned as rebates to contracts involved in the transaction, and the other 70% are burned. The NEAR token serves several functions:

• Paying for data storage and transaction processing fees.
• Staking to operate validator nodes on the network.
• Participating in governance votes to decide on the allocation of network resources.

You can purchase NEAR on exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, OKX, Gate.io, Huobi, Kucoin, Kraken, Crypto.com, and Revolut.

Regarding security, the protocol employs a proof-of-stake variant known as Doomslug. This mechanism achieves full BFT finality through 2 rounds of communication, while also offering near-instant practical finality after only 1 round. As a result, Doomslug finalizes twice as many blocks compared to other consensus algorithms.