As crypto continues to evolve,
we need to continue to evolve the way we look at crypto.
Bitcoin, for instance, yes, it is a coin, but it's so much more than that.
It's open source computer software.
And looking at crypto as software is definitely an angle that people need to consider.
In this video, I'm going to tell you about a project that's got the software angle completely covered.
NEAR Protocol
It's already in the top 35 crypto projects.
It's got a long way to maybe break inside the top 10.
As we've seen over the last few years, top 10 changes quite a bit.
But NEAR Protocol has got a lot of heavy hitters on its team,
and it's got a very unique approach.
When it comes to being one of the top projects in crypto,
I don't know, you might could say they're nearly there.
Let's get it!
Welcome to BitBoy Crypto!
My name is Ben.
Today, we're going to be taking a look at NEAR Protocol.
It launched its mainnet back in October of 2020.
And ever since, it's definitely been a project to watch.
Vitalik Buterin himself even said NEAR Protocol is one of the biggest competitors to Ethereum.
More on that in a little bit.
According to their Twitter,
they're a climate-neutral, high-speed, low transaction fee layer 1 blockchain.
According to their website,
NEAR Protocol consumes as much energy in a year as Bitcoin does in three minutes.
This is a DPoS project, or a delegated proof of stake blockchain.
It's building infrastructure for a new internet with higher security and privacy.
It's built from the ground up to be able to perform, be scalable and secure.
It's built for developers by developers!
I didn't have any part in it.
But one of their goals is to make it easier for the masses to build on Web3.
Instead of coding in Solidity,
which is a very tough blockchain language to be able to learn
and only about 25,000 people know how to program in,
NEAR can be programmed in JavaScript or Rust, much more common computer languages.
This attracts more devs to the project
as well as more SDKs, or software development kits.
Another reason for devs is they receive 30% of the gas fees.
The other 70% is burned, creating a deflationary mechanism.
Now, according to awesomenear.com,
definitely not a biased website,
there are 916 projects building in the NEAR ecosystem.
And not only is the ecosystem booming, their team is top-notch.
The team includes Illia Polosukhin,
the co-founder, a former engineering manager at Google,
Alex Skidanov,
the co-founder, a former software dev at Microsoft,
Marieke Flament,
CEO, formerly worked for Louis Vuitton, Hotels.com
and helped USDC scale from zero to 2 million users in less than two years,
and several people on the team are International Collegiate Programming Contest winners
that claim to have built the only real-world sharding system at scale.
Another great factor at NEAR is they're very well funded.
And we know bear markets absolutely decimate many coins,
but NEAR has enough funding to stand the test of time.
Before they even got off the ground,
they raised $50 million with no product thanks to VC firm Y Combinator.
Now, according to thedefiant.io,
VCs backed NEAR to the tune of $566 million so far,
including Andreessen Horowitz, DCG, Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, Accomplice,
Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Blockchange, Dragonfly Capital, Blockchain.com and others.
They even have an NFT partnership with DeadMau5.
I used to think it was "Dead-Mau-five."
So, what separates NEAR from the crowd?
One thing they're doing that even Ethereum isn't doing right now is sharding.
So simply put,
this is when the total load of the network is broken into sections or shards,
and each shard handles a fraction of the load.
This is the key to their heightened scalability, speed and security.
The NEAR network runs on Nightshade.
This is their proof-of-stake and sharding mechanism.
Instead of sidechains, they use shards.
Now, Ethereum plans to scale into shards at some point,
but NEAR is already doing it.
Because of sharding, they can already process up to 100,000 transactions per second.
And with Nightshade, the cost of those transactions is less than a penny each.
So far, NEAR Protocol has over 20 million accounts,
400,000 daily transactions,
and a 2.4-second time of finality.
NEAR's transaction count is three times lower than ETH right now,
but they're done five times as fast.
If you want to swap back and forth between ETH and NEAR,
well, they've got something called the Rainbow Bridge for that.
From the Rainbow Bridge to Doomslug.
Doomslug is actually the way that the NEAR Protocol produces blocks.
How apocalyptic.
It allows practical finality after one round of communication
compared to 35 blocks on ETH.
Instead of having a random combination of letters and numbers for their addresses,
NEAR has human-readable addresses without ENS.
You can't talk about NEAR without talking about Aurora.
This is their layer 2 like MATIC for Ethereum.
It's basically a copy of the EVM, or Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Devs can easily copy and paste ETH dApps onto NEAR.
That's big.
Aurora is also a smart contract for the mainnet,
meaning it also taps sharding for scaling.
And the Aurora community is massive.
Projects building on Aurora,
well, they include The Graph, Curve, Etherscan, Gnosis Safe, Synapse, Covalent and many more.
There are 200 projects on Aurora.
Like I said earlier, when it comes to the game of crypto being software,
NEAR Protocol is ahead of the game.
When it comes to the tokenomics,
the token NEAR obviously is the governance token of the platform.
The coin has a 5% inflation reward to incentivize network security,
but it also adds a deflationary mechanism as well.
70% of transaction fees are burned.
So whether it's inflationary or deflationary at the time,
kind of like Ethereum, it depends on the network activity.
Total supply is 1 billion.
And right now about 821 million of those are circulating.
The supply curve ends and all the tokens are circulating by the end of 2027.
Right now, its market cap is under $2 billion.
At the time of this recording, the price is a little bit less than $2.
But the all-time high was $21.
Just to get back to the all-time high from here,
well, that's a 10X.
Now, whether it can get there or not, well, that depends on a couple of things.
Do you believe that this software and the highlight and focus on devs
is going to be enough to push this project to the masses?
It also depends on
how much do you consider environmentally neutral
to be a factor in the success of a crypto project?
Down below,
I want you guys to put down your thoughts and comments on those questions.
Do you believe NEAR Protocol can get back to all-time highs
or even exceed it?
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
This video is not an endorsement of NEAR Protocol.
In fact, it's not in my portfolio at all at the moment, but that could change.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.