Francesco Marzorati

Northeastern University

Introduction To The NEAR Protocol 

The crypto market is currently facing uncertain times, but uncertainty cannot always be considered as bad, indeed this uncertainty presents many opportunities for new players to enter the market. Thus, causing crypto to become more and more competitive.

Competition among different crypto projects stands only on one plane; solving the cryptocurrency and blockchain technology dilemma; often known as the blockchain trilemma. Such a trilemma consists of the tradeoff between decentralization, security, and scalability – which for many are the three pillars of blockchain technology. 

Layer 1s are projects that utilize their own blockchain networks to function. Examples of layer one blockchains include Ethereum (ETH), BNB Smart Chain (BNB), or even Solana (SOL). Usually, layer 1s make use of their own token in order to run transactions and divide rewards among miners. The importance of layer one networks is that they act as the foundation for applications to be built on top of them and therefore allow layer two solutions to develop on their mainnet. 

However, there’s usually a catch. Layer one chains encounter one difficulty which is scalability, or if the blockchain manages to be scalable such as Solana this would mean there is a tradeoff between one of the pillars. In the case of Solana, there’s a tradeoff with decentralization.  

Furthermore, projects such as Ethereum or Bitcoin for that matter, encounter problems with scalability because of their consensus mechanism. Bitcoin currently adopts a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism which requires a lot of computational power and does not allow for scalability. 

This consensus mechanism acts oppositely to the objective of scalability since as the network grows and more users adopt the network and eventually more blocks are created on this blockchain, greater computational power is required. This then means more time is required to process transactions. Furthermore, as more transactions are fulfilled at the same time on the network, this requires a higher transaction fee, which would once again discourage scalability.  

This phenomenon is highly visible with Ethereum, which developers and users of this layer one find very difficult to use, and many even describe it as unusable. 

To solve such problems, other projects such as the NEAR Protocol have become more and more known in space. NEAR indeed tries to solve the problem of scalability and the tradeoffs with decentralization. 

Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov started NEAR.ai in early 2017, and from the start, they recognized the very problem in the blockchain industry was scalability. Therefore, they wanted to create something that would meet their desires as developers themselves. Indeed, a decision that they have taken very early on was already to adopt for NEAR a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) method for validating transactions rather than PoW. 

Both founders have been in the tech space for a long time. For example, Illia Polosukhin graduated in computer science and applied mathematics and later became chief engineer at Google before founding NEAR. Alexander Skidanov started his career at Microsoft as an engineer after transferring to MemSQL as director of Engineering until he founded NEAR in 2017. 

NEAR has been recognized as one of the most promising projects in the crypto space and according to many, their technology is more advanced than others in many different aspects. For example, the NEAR team is one of the best. Currently, there are 811 projects and applications that are developing on the NEAR blockchain – and thus people are able to benefit from the many advantages that this blockchain offers. But most of all, the NEAR Protocol is known for its technology.

NEAR’s Key Technologies

Nightshade

Nightshade is the denomination given by NEAR to their sharding technology. Sharding technology is very predominant in the crypto space and in the future, other layer 1s will aspire to adopt it. Some of the sharding’s benefits include offering faster transaction times while still managing to maintain a high level of security per transaction. 

According to NEAR, Nightshade can allow them to process more than 100,000 transactions per second with an average block time of one second, whereas other competitors such as Ethereum (ETH) could only previously process 30 transactions per second and now after the Merge can process up to 100,000 transactions per second, but with an average block time of 12 seconds. 

Furthermore, the other blockchain that’s trying to solve this problem is Solana (SOL). Solana currently can process up to 50,000 transactions per second, but many criticize it due to its centralization and network outages. 

How Does Nightshade Work? 

As previously stated, Nightshade offers solutions that are highly envied by other blockchains. For example, once a block is created on NEAR’s blockchain, it’s divided into multiple parts called shards. At the same time, each validator is assigned to a different shard allowing the validators to have less workload – therefore not having to process all the transactions and store all the data. 

Moreover, each shard produces chunks, which are basically pieces of information containing the transaction’s details. For example, the wallet addresses sending and receiving the money and how much money is being sent. 

Furthermore, once these chunks have been produced by shards and sent to the validators – each validator gathers different chunks to build a block. Thus, the computational power is used for this specific purpose: putting together pieces of information in order to form a block. 

Therefore, this allows for different validators to process different transactions at the same time, thus achieving faster transaction time finality and no need for high computational power. This technology is reflected in the transaction fees the users end up paying to make transactions on the network. 

Such revolutionary technology has allowed for scalability. It also solves the problems other layer 1s are encountering, such as high gas fees – for instance, Ethereum v1.

Ethereum Is Expensive

The problem of gas fees is huge in the crypto space. In particular, this problem has been seen in the last few years with Ethereum (ETH). Ethereum transaction fees (also known as gas fees) have been over the roof due to the number of transactions the network has to cover at times. For example, the higher volume of transactions the network must validate, the higher the transaction fees.

Miners give their computational power to the network to validate transactions and receive a reward in return. Since the system is decentralized, miners can ignore certain transactions if the gas price is too low. Therefore, lowering the ratio of miners per transaction means higher gas fees – and vice versa, the higher the ratio of miners per transaction means lower gas fees.

(Ethereum transactions per day)

(Transaction fees since 2019)

From the two graphs above, we can extrapolate what has been said previously as we can see there’s a peak in transactions per day in 2021 followed by a decrease. This also influenced the transaction fees. Indeed, if the same number of miners/nodes are involved and there are more transactions on the network, then we will likely witness higher transaction fees.

It’s important to keep in mind this does not happen with the NEAR Protocol because the gas fees are minimal, slim to none.

Furthermore, sharding technology has also been looked at by big projects in the crypto space such as Ethereum. According to the Ethereum team, they’ll be looking to implement sharding and have mainnet adoption by 2023.

Sharding technology is considered so advanced because it does not have any tradeoffs between decentralization, security, and scalability. Once again we have seen there are other crypto projects that implement high scalability without maintaining a proper level of decentralization. Nonetheless, sharding technology manages to be efficient due to the increased number of nodes, allowing each node to work in symbiosis with other nodes and split the work among themselves, thus requiring little computational power. Therefore, Nightshade is a revolutionary technology.

Aurora: The Smart Contract Layer That Leverages The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)

Aurora is a layer two network that currently runs on the NEAR Protocol. However, it’s also compatible with the Ethereum network and uses ETH as its native token to run transaction fees.

Aurora is basically a subnet of the NEAR Protocol that’s also EVM compatible (Ethereum Virtual Machine). EVM allows developers to export their programs as well as their smart contracts from one network (e.g., Ethereum) to another network (e.g., NEAR) without having to rewrite them. Simply put, Aurora creates a bridge between the Ethereum and NEAR networks, while allowing develoopers to benefit from the advantages that NEAR offers.

Through Aurora it’s possible once again to identify how the founders are trying to make the NEAR Protocol developer-friendly – by leveraging the technology, NEAR offers to fulfill the needs and reduce obstacles for creators in the crypto space.

Aurora allows developers to export their decentralized applications (DApps) and other normal applications from the Ethereum network. This allows developers to benefit from faster, cheaper, and more secure transactions on the NEAR Protocol. This is all possible because Aurora is launched as a smart contract on NEAR. This means Aurora does not have to care for consensus, tracking of transactions, or data storage since NEAR is the one in charge of all such tasks.

Furthermore, the Aurora developing team wanted to create a seamless space where developers could allow tokens to flow freely – therefore, creating a decentralized bridge between Ethereum and NEAR.

As previously expressed, there’s a huge interest in this and since Ethereum 2.0 was launched – the interest in this technology has only grown. However, since Ethereum 2.0 was not released on the mainnet, users started to feel the pressure of such high gas fees. As a result, they started to look for more efficient alternatives to build their DApps and smart contracts, and here is where Aurora comes into play.

How Does Aurora Work?

Aurora is mainly composed of two factors; the Aurora Engine runtime which allows developers to implement their DApps and smart contracts of Solidity and Vyper, and Aurora Bridge which is the same as the Rainbow Bridge where there is the possibility of permissionless transfer of tokens between the Ethereum and NEAR networks.

Furthermore, it’s possible to say that Aurora is a big project in the space with a total of 150 million dollars in total value locked (TVL), which almost doubled a few months ago; putting Aurora in the top ten of layers two projects by size.

It’s important to note that due to the drastic situation of the higher and higher gas fees presented by Ethereum, another layer 2s such as Aurora has managed to grow exponentially. This fact can be seen by the number of unique addresses shown below.

The fact that there’s a huge gain in security because of the higher transaction finality gained by using NEAR’s mainnet has pushed many developers to start using Aurora rather than other layer 2s to build applications. Furthermore, Aurora does not want to compete with Ethereum, but it integrates it, allowing developers to benefit from NEAR’s technology. This is due to the EVM compatibility which for developers is among one of the most important features.

The Octopus Network & The Problem With Interoperability (Octopus Relay)

Another problem with the crypto space is interoperability. Many projects build applications on their native blockchain, however, they do not have the ability to communicate with external blockchains. This is because each blockchain is independent – which causes huge problems for scalability as well. 

Achieving interoperability within the crypto space is crucial; therefore allowing different blockchains to communicate and work with each other is essential for the success of the project itself.

An analogy that might describe the importance of interoperability and its weight on the functionality of a crypto project could be given by comparing this situation with the history of the computer. For example, when the computer was invented, it worked independently completing simple functions within its software; however, the real game changer was when computers were allowed to communicate leading to the creation of the internet.  

Moreover, there are applications built on top of the blockchains, and since the blockchains themselves cannot communicate, the “apps” suffer once again from the problem of interoperability.

To solve the problem of interoperability, many developers have been trying to build the “blockchain of blockchains,” which simply put, tries to put in communication all the blockchains by making them run under one big blockchain. This solution is very tedious – therefore instead of having others come up with solutions to address the problem; NEAR, for instance, established the Octopus relay (thus introducing the concept of appchains). 

An appchain is a specific and very detailed blockchain that’s exclusively used for certain applications built on top of an ecosystem and in many cases allows for interoperability.

The Octopus Network is a decentralized application that adopts smart contract technology to offer a multichain interoperable crypto-network for different application-specific blockchains – or commonly known as appchains. 

Such terminology is difficult to understand, therefore, let’s break it down to properly understand what the Octopus Network really is.

First, the Octopus Network is composed of many smart contracts put together that work independently. But since smart contract technology is self-executing, there’s decentralization. Second, the Octopus Network offers a multichain interoperable crypto-network which means it offers interoperability between the many appchains that developers create in its ecosystem; thus as we explained before, appchains are just detailed blockchains for applications that have the opportunity to communicate with each other – thus allowing interoperability and scalability for the entire network. 

Appchains also bring other benefits such as allowing the creator of the application to choose the most important aspects of its own blockchain such as its governance, its economic structure, and its consensus mechanism. Furthermore, by having their appchain, developers are empowered over ownership and performance since they have the possibility to choose the aspect listed above and they’re not restrained by the preset structure imposed by the blockchain they’re building on. With the usage of appchains, developers have the possibility to create their own ecosystem, which means that all of the appchains on the Octopus Relay can decide independently how much to pay validators and who stakes with them.

In addition, validators can choose an appchain and stake their OTC, which is the Octopus Network’s native token, in doing so they allow for security to take place. This is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) concept, indeed such blockchains gain security when more of their native token asset is staked on its blockchain such as in the Octopus Network’s case.

Another possibility offered by the Octopus Network is to be a delegator, which simply means that instead of being a validator and therefore choosing to validate transactions and give up some of your computational power, you can give up your tokens to a validator. The validator then will validate transactions and give some of its rewards to you due to the commitments you have done by delegating the assets.

Moreover, the Octopus Network solves the interoperability problem by allowing different appchains to communicate between themselves.

The Octopus Network relies on the Rainbow Bridge initially created for Aurora. The Rainbow Bridge allows a permissionless exchange of information between the Octopus Network, NEAR, and Ethereum, thus allowing the information cryptographically available on each network to be used interchangeably.

The Octopus Relay includes as well the Ethereum network with the usage of Rainbow Bridge and uses IBC blockchains to communicate with Polkadot’s parachains. IBC, simply put, is what’s known in the space as a universal interoperability protocol that allows two or multiple blockchains to work with each other.

However, it’s important to note that the Octopus Network was never meant to be a competitor to Polkadot or Cosmos, which are currently its two biggest competitors, but rather as a way to be able to communicate between different applications.

What Are The Octopus Network’s Advantages & Competitive Differentiators?

Let’s start with Polkadot, which is Octopus’s main competitor that currently sits at a $7.6 billion dollar market cap. Polkadot is trying to find the same solution as the Octopus Network, however, its offering is limited because they have managed to only deploy 100 appchains – meaning that only 100 applications can be developed using such technology with the Polkadot network.

In order to determine which project would be allowed to build on top of Polkadot, it was established that an auction would allow the participants (projects) to bid against each other to secure one of the appchains offered by the ecosystem.

Appchains until now have been considered to be capital intensive, which is obviously a huge obstacle for scalability in this space. Initial high costs as a bid to secure an appchain on a reliable ecosystem are not the only ones which are negatively affecting this space since security comes as a big financial burden for such projects as well. Developers are finding it very difficult to accumulate debt to clinch such appchains and spend even more capital to bootstrap the security needed to launch.

High initial costs are not only met by Polkadot’s network but also by Cosmos, which is the second biggest competitor after Polkadot, also one of the first to offer appchains. Cosmos has its own appchains called “Zones.” Zones, however, also require high starting capital for projects to launch since projects encounter the same problem as Polkadot’s network; indeed Cosmos is unable to offer a more affordable option for new projects to bootstrap their security to the application that the project is working on. 

The lack of affortadableness creates an entry point for the Octopus Network which has managed to offer an option for developers to start their projects without worrying about costs. According to the official Octopus Relay website, they have managed to decrease the cost of launching by 100x when it comes to bootstrapping security to different applications. This is because, unlike Polkadot or Cosmos, the Octopus Network allows Appchains to leverage on its validator set. Therefore, there’s no need to bootstrap their validator set, meaning they do not need to pay attention to the tokenomics and the 51% rule to prevent attacks.

Overall, the Octopus Relay is a more affordable and developer-friendly option for projects who need appchains to start. They have managed through technological advancement to beat their competitors, offering developers a more secure and less capital-intensive alternative. Thanks to NEAR, the Octopus Relay manages to benefit from the ecosystem already in place, becoming the preferred by developers to build their projects on.

NEAR Protocol Roadmap

Decentralization

Another huge problem encountered by many blockchains is complete decentralization. Since many blockchains have high barriers to entry for validators/nodes, it becomes difficult for the number of validators to increase exponentially, which is what decentralization aims for. The high barrier to entry is usually referred to as high capital (in many cases millions are required) to start a validator node. As a result, this causes the blockchain to not be scalable – thus, allowing an individual or an institution to own the majority of the nodes, which is against decentralization.

Fortunately, this is not the case for the NEAR Protocol because, in December 2021, the developer team changed the validator section algorithm to decrease the high barriers to entry for new nodes. NEAR offered another extra 100 spots for validators and the starting capital decreased from $3.6 million to $67,000 dollars.

The NEAR team has already released a roadmap on how they want to increase decentralization over the next few years. For example, NEAR is trying to move people who are interested in being validators to be producers of chunks (parts of a block from a shard). This has caused the barrier to entry to drop even lower. For perspective, to be a chunks producer, there’s a hardware need to have a 4-Core CPU with 8 GB of RAM. NEAR has expressed they want to continue to evolve their decentralization, and they want to try to lower their entry barrier even more in the near future.

Community & Acceleration Fund 

NEAR’s community is extraordinary. In particular, they offer different channels for developers to discuss and share ideas on how the NEAR Protocol should approach the problems in their ecosystem. Moreover, the NEAR team has explicitly said they’d like to turn the NEAR community into a DAO. However, they have not given further comments than that.

Furthermore, the two founders of NEAR keep pushing forward initiatives as they promised in the past they would. For example, by November 2021, they have launched an $800 million dollar fund for project growth in the ecosystem. NEAR has used this to gain traction and momentum for the past 12 months.

From this $800 million – $100 million will be allocated to Startup Grant pools, which is a further incentive to lower the entry barrier for new projects looking a blockchain to build on. 20 startups will be identified by NEAR and will each receive $5 million in funding. Another $250 million will be distributed among existing projects. The remaining $100 million then will be distributed between regional funds to grow NEAR’s global communities. 

It’s important to keep in mind that this was 2021. Prior to this year, NEAR already spent $45 million dollars to support and grow the ecosystem. As a result, they’ve managed to help more than 120 projects that were developing in the ecosystem. 

NEAR seems to be very active with its community. For example, this can be seen by the events they’ve launched and how they’ve brought many new features to the ecosystem.

Moreover, 2022 was a big year for NEAR since they launched NEARCON in Lisbon, Portugal. This event included more than 2,000 participants, and NEAR released multiple announcements to the dearest people of their community.

Some of the highlights are – Few and Far partnerships to build a next-generation NFT marketplace, a major partnership with Tether (USDT), the most trusted stablecoin in the crypto space, and another partnership with Coinbase, Pagoda announced that they will launch their flagship developer on the NEAR Protocol, and most importantly, NEAR has announced a strategic partnership with Caerus Ventures which will result in the creation of a $100 million dollar capital fund for applications built on the NEAR ecosystem.

What’s NEAR’s Investment Value?

NEAR appears to be one of the most well-positioned projects in the space. Starting from bottom to the top, NEAR has showed great performance and appears to be one of the smaller market cap projects which in the next bull run could achieve great results.

For example, NEAR continues to be a great project and has all the ingredients to become a proper competitor to other bigger crypto projects such as Ethereum or Polkadot.

Every investor that decides to put money into a project must check certain things about the project such as team, technological advancement, community and community engagement, transparency, and partnerships. Let’s analyze each of these components one by one.

Team

NEAR’s team is impeccable, and the excellency of their work has been recognized by many developers. Everything that NEAR did and continues to do is towards the vision statement developed by the founders. Both founders wanted to create something which developers felt more comfortable working within the crypto space, and because they could not find a proper blockchain that gives them what they need to work they decided to create one.

As reported by Forbes: “With the headquarters in San Francisco, California, NEAR has assembled a multinational team of 50+ engineers, developers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries including International Collegiate Programming Contest medalists and finalists Evgeny Kuzyakov, Alexander Kouprin, Ashley Tyson, Evgeny Kapun, Mikhail Kever, and Marcelo Fornet.” 

Both founders have had careers in computer science and engineering, therefore allowing them to understand more about their own network and to be able to work side by side with developers.

Technological Advancement

Under this aspect, the NEAR Protocol passes with full grades as explained earlier in the paper – NEAR’s technological advancement is envied by many projects in the crypto space. As mentioned earlier as well, their adoption of sharding technology (Nightshade) is what Ethereum aims to have by 2023. In addition, Octopus Relay and Aurora benefit from consensus methods allowing developers to not encounter problems with security or high transaction time as well as very low gas fees.

Community & Engagement

Community is essential for projects such as NEAR, especially because they want to follow their vision as an institution that cares about developers. Community engagement is very high on many social media platforms including Discord, Twitter, Telegram, WeChat (the biggest social media in Asia), YouTube, GitHub, and Reddit. Community involvement is very high since there are many developers who contribute daily to blog posts on solutions for the NEAR Protocol. Furthermore, NEAR is taking steps to allow the community and the project itself to become a DAO to allow for more decentralization.

Project Transparency

Transparency is essential for crypto projects because often they take advantage of investors and trick them to obtain money. Unfortunately, this is one of the areas which is most surprising about NEAR – they’re not fully transparent. Usually, founders of such projects make public their wallet addresses to show investors that they don’t own a large part of the coin’s supply – and therefore if they would sell off some of the supply, they would probably not cause any relevant price movements.

However, in this case, public wallet addresses of the founders and the developing team are not public. Furthermore, with regards to the distribution of the supply, the most a single wallet address has is 8% of the total supply, which in such a big project is a very high number, which is concerning.

Partnerships

NEAR comes on a positive note under this aspect since their strategic partnerships are just excellent. NEAR has managed to partner up with the biggest players in crypto, pushing towards not only a brighter future but the whole crypto market along with it.

Partnerships like the one established with Google just stand to show the seriousness of the project itself and how different partners will help for strategic growth. NEAR and Google Cloud will be partnering to jump-start the development of Web3 applications.

Exploring The NEAR Investment Thesis

According to many, NEAR seems to be a project which could perform quite well in the future, especially because they have strong fundamentals since its inception and initiated strong long-lasting partnerships with the best projects and companies in the crypto space.

As stated before, their fundamentals look very strong. For example, one of the things to keep in mind is that NEAR is among the projects with the highest number of active users and developers on-chain. Moreover, during this current difficult situation, their numbers are growing day by day.

Liquidity-wise and how they select to divide liquidity among the protocol is very safe and can be checked in Etherscan.

Further confidence in the NEAR Protocol is given by the fact that NEAR works on multiple levels since it does not act as a simple layer one, but rather offers a whole ecosystem for developers and consumers to enjoy. This produces confidence since there’s a high diversification among the products which NEAR offers within its ecosystem.

As we have stated previously in the paper, there are bridges that allow participants to transfer funds between different layers, appchains technology, and developers' tools, making it one of the projects most loved by developers.

Furthermore, NEAR’s team is solid; people from different backgrounds and different cultures allow for success. Highly skilled employees work every day towards the vision established by the founders (Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov) – which is to provide a safe Web3 space where creators can work with the most efficient and developer-friendly tools.

Since its creation, the founders have established a roadmap for NEAR which is still in progress. According to the founders, they wanted to first establish a reliable platform for developers which would not implicate them financially – and that’s exactly what they did. Therefore, this just stands to prove that they are doing what they have promised their consumers as well as their investors they would do – and the path they have chosen is directing them on the right track.

Technologically wise, the NEAR Protocol is above its competition, as it had developed and adopted the most promising technology in the crypto space. Due to the controversy created by Proof-of-Work, they have adopted Proof-of-Stake with a twist (sharding). This allowed them to scale quickly and continue to have the technological advantage over their competitors with things like Rainbow Bridge, Aurora, Nightshade, sharding technology, and the Octopus Network.

Once again, NEAR manages to offer all of these products in their ecosystem which has gained a lot of support from developers as well as users of their blockchain. For example, we have seen the active users and developers grow exponentially in the past few years which simply means the destiny of NEAR is much greater than what was expected.

Looking at NEAR from an investor perspective, this could be a great opportunity to diversify and catch on to some of the altcoins which will likely perform well during the next bull run. Although smaller market caps such as NEAR have suffered a lot during this bear market, new investors might greatly benefit from much lower prices. NEAR certainly is a high-risk and high-reward bet, however, it passes the test for being one of the projects that have great fundamentals, a great team, a great ecosystem, solid user engagement, big partnerships, and proven technology – therefore it can be concluded this could be a good investment opportunity.

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