NEAR, the sharded dApp platform that raised over $60 million in private and public token sales this year, has morphed into a permissionless, community-governed network. A mere five months after its mainnet launch, the highly scalable blockchain has made good on a promise previously touted on its roadmap.
Community-Governed and Open for Business
Now open for developers to deploy production apps, users to create accounts, and new validators to join in an entirely permissionless manner, NEAR’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain has achieved a key milestone as it seeks to compete with the likes of Polkadot and Ethereum 2.0.
Founded in 2017 and based in San Francisco, the defi project – whose team is responsible for building one of the only sharded databases in production at scale today – aims to enable community-driven innovation to put the power of Open Finance and Open Web into the hands of everyday users.
NEAR is actively encouraging developers and those keen to build on the network by joining the Open Web Collective, an initiative that helps decentralized web developers acquire funding. It has also hosted a hackathon recently, focused on building a bridge to Ethereum - one needed to make Web3 a reality.
The NEAR community has completed the voting process on the network’s future, with a decentralized set of validators having already flocked to the mainnet to replace the NEAR Foundation nodes and decentralize the protocol’s consensus.
Projects Are Already Putting NEAR to the Test
Custody and asset-servicing solution Finoa is just one project that has been getting to grips with NEAR, having announced support for custody and staking for all existing as well as prospective holders of the NEAR token. Open market protocol Flux is another startup making use of NEAR, specifically the blockchain’s Ethereum bridge, which lets Flux connect to decentralized infrastructure such as 0x and Maker.
The ETH-NEAR Rainbow Bridge, as it’s known, was created to help applications on different blockchains to seamlessly communicate with one another; to enjoy the network’s low fees and fast confirmation times while benefiting from Ethereum’s impressive network effects. The trustless interoperability solution is entirely decentralized, meaning no special permission is required to deploy, maintain or use the bridge.
Decentralization processes as introduced by NEAR are becoming more popular, as can be seen with Polkadot and Filecoin as well. Hopefully, the communities will indeed be able to maintain the decentralization of the network, unlike what occurred on EOS.
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