Dragonfly Capital becomes third largest validator on NEAR mainnet

Dragonfly Capital have announced that their Managing Director Haseeb Qureshi will join the NEAR Validator Advisory Board (NVAB). Dragonfly Capital will be instrumental in helping NEAR through its next phase of adoption. 

Dragonfly Capital is a global investment company that focusses on Crypto research and analysis. Its Crypto investments include 1inch Exchange, Bybit, Celo, Compound, DyDx, Maker and Oasis Labs, to name just a few. Dragonfly Capital has made a "significant" investment in NEAR, and has become the third largest validator on their mainnet. 

NEAR is a layer-one protocol designed to interoperate with Ethereum. With all the congestion caused by the sheer amount of DeFi activity taking place on the Ethereum blockchain, NEAR is able to help to soak up and enhance this activity, much like layer-two protocols are designed to do, but with all the security guarantees of an advanced layer-one protocol. 

The NEAR Validator Advisory Board comprises of a group of professional validators and infrastructure providers who help to give advice on technology and the network. Their advice is needed given that NEAR is a fully-decentralised protocol, controlled by its community. 

NEAR is developing an innovative approach to staking NEAR tokens in the form of “Delegation via smart contracts”. This is considerably better than staking at the protocol level, where it is performed by most PoS blockchains. It gives validators more options such as being able to make their own validation contract or to construct optimised staking rewards. 

NEAR is concentrating on making things easy for developers, therefore no new programming languages are necessary to build on the network. Also, with EVM compatibility in the pipeline and a “fully decentralized, trustless cross-chain asset bridge called the Rainbow Bridge” ensures that accessibility for any developer is well-addressed. 

Haseeb Qureshi states that he is excited to be working with NEAR. He believes that NEAR will bring remedies to many of the issues faced by other protocols, such as massive network congestion, leading to bottlenecks and the ensuing high gas fees – all barriers to mainstream adoption. 

He also adds that: 

“NEAR is not trying to kill Ethereum. At this point, Ethereum is going to forever be a fixture in the smart contract landscape. Rather, NEAR collaborates with and augments Ethereum, as another major city in the landscape of blockchain networks.” 

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.