NEAR Protocol (NEAR)

NEAR Protocol (NEAR) is the native cryptocurrency of NEAR, a proof-of-stake blockchain that splits its work across parallel pieces called shards so it can grow with demand. NEAR pays transaction and storage fees, is staked to secure the network, and is used in governance. Its smallest unit is the yoctoNEAR, a septillionth of a NEAR.

The network was founded by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov and is supported by the NEAR Foundation in Switzerland, with core development led by the team now called NEAR One. NEAR is designed around ease of use, with readable account names such as alice.near, and it competes with the Ethereum Blockchain and other platforms for decentralized applications. In recent years it has promoted "chain abstraction", letting one NEAR account act on other blockchains.

Imagine a supermarket that opens more checkout lanes as the queue grows. Instead of every shopper waiting for one till, the store splits customers across several lanes, and the lanes keep in touch so that nobody is charged twice. NEAR works like that: the network is divided into lanes, called shards, that process transactions side by side, and it can add lanes when traffic rises.

NEAR is the money used at the tills. It pays small fees for each action and covers the cost of storing data, and people who lock up some of their NEAR help keep the store honest and earn rewards. The project also tries to make the shopping trip simple, with account names people can remember instead of long strings of numbers and letters.

Polosukhin and Skidanov started NEAR in 2018; Polosukhin was a co-author of "Attention Is All You Need", the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer model behind modern AI. The mainnet launched in April 2020 under a restricted phase run by the foundation, and token transfers were switched on in October 2020 once validators voted to move to full community control. Sharding arrived in stages, and on 22 August 2024 the Nightshade 2.0 upgrade introduced stateless validation. In 2025 the core team proposed halving the maximum inflation rate from 5 percent to 2.5 percent; the validator vote fell short of its two-thirds threshold, but the change shipped in a software release that took effect on 30 October 2025, after enough validators upgraded.

NEAR's sharding design, called Nightshade, produces one chain whose blocks are made of chunks, one per shard. Each shard processes its own transactions, and messages between shards are passed from block to block. Under stateless validation, most validators check chunks using proofs of the data they touch rather than storing every shard's full history, which lowers hardware costs. Developers write smart contracts that compile to WebAssembly, usually in Rust or JavaScript, and Aurora, a separate project, runs an Ethereum Virtual Machine on NEAR. Contracts that use more storage must lock up NEAR to pay for it.

NEAR started with 1 billion tokens and has no hard cap. New tokens are issued each epoch to validators and those who stake with them, and part of each fee is burned: 70 percent of a transaction's gas fee is destroyed and 30 percent goes to the contract that was called. Annual issuance is roughly:

• $I$ is the new NEAR issued over a year.
• $S$ is the total supply at the start of the year.
• $r$ is the maximum annual inflation rate, 2.5 percent since October 2025.

With a supply of $1{,}250{,}000{,}000$ NEAR, issuance is about $1{,}250{,}000{,}000 \times 0.025 = 31{,}250{,}000$ NEAR a year, half of what the old 5 percent rate would have produced. Burned fees offset part of this, so net inflation is slightly lower than the headline rate.

• Fees and storage. NEAR pays gas and is locked to cover on-chain storage.
• Staking. Holders delegate NEAR to validators and share rewards; see delegated staking.
• Applications. NEAR hosts wallets, games, DAOs and DeFi services, and its cross-chain tools let one account sign transactions on other networks.
• Bridging. The Rainbow Bridge and other crypto bridges move assets between NEAR and Ethereum.

The 2025 inflation cut raised a governance question: some validators objected that core developers could bring in a change that had failed a vote by bundling it into a software upgrade. Others note that NEAR's usage has lagged rivals such as Solana (SOL), that large shares of supply went to insiders and the foundation, and that sharding adds complexity that can hide bugs. For background on the trade-offs, see scaling blockchains. Supporters reply that fees have stayed low, that the network has kept adding shards as planned, and that its account system is easier for newcomers than most. A further reduction in inflation has also been discussed, but no further cut had taken effect by late 2026.

• NEAR Protocol
• NEAR documentation
• NEAR Foundation