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- It is a smart contract platform that is a compatible layer-1. It has the ability to bridge back to Ethereum
- Rather than being an “Ethereum killer”, it’s goal is to collaborate make Ethereum greater than what it is today
- A metaphor could be that the Ethereum is the “New York City” of smart contracts and the NEAR protocol is the “Chicago” of smart contracts
- Referencing in terms of scalability
- NEAR blockchain can process 10x more transactions individually than Ethereum 1.0
- Will be able to process about 100 thousand transactions per second
- Currently, only able to process 1000 transactions per second
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- Their approach is the same as Ethereum 2.0: horizontally sharded blockchains that support more transactions per second.
- Transactions are processed asynchronously. Developers write contracts that should be safe to access concurrently.
- More on Sharding at Near Protocol here
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- Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm called doom slug
- Two rounds of consensus
- As soon as a new block is receive by a node, it’s considered finalized
- This block is then broadcasted to other validators, allowing almost instant finality by having validators taking turns to produce blocks
- Has a sharding algorithm called Nightshade that allows to efficiently execute transactions through nodes and achieve greater throughput
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- Has a native token used for
- Staking
- Governance
- Paying network gas fees
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- ~30k smart contracts deployed
- Smart contracts are written in Rust, just like Solana
- Developers can port their Ethereum application using Aurora, an EVM solution that runs on top of the NEAR protocol
- Rainbow bridge allows you to transfer ERS20 tokens to the NEAR protocol
- Has a grant program
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Aurora
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