NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol is a high-performance, sharded Layer-1 blockchain designed to support the agent economy and AI-driven decentralized applications (dApps).

Co-founded by AI pioneer Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, NEAR launched its mainnet in April 2020, aiming to simplify blockchain development. The protocol features Nightshade sharding, allowing it to process transactions in parallel across multiple shards, achieving scalability of over 1 million transactions per second with quick transaction finality. NEAR provides a developer platform for creating dApps using smart contracts in Rust and AssemblyScript. Its native token, NEAR, is used for transaction fees, staking rewards, and governance. The protocol also supports AI agents, offering secure infrastructure for confidential transactions and private inference. NEAR Protocol serves a diverse range of customers, including developers, AI agencies, and end users. It supports various use cases such as decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), payments, and gaming, positioning itself as a foundational layer for the next generation of the open web.