About Near Protocol

NEAR Protocol is a decentralized platform for building and running applications. It aims to be a community-driven cloud computing service that emphasizes developer-friendliness and ease of use for users. The platform employs a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism combined with sharding technology to address blockchain scalability issues. Its native token, NEAR, is used to pay transaction fees and store data on the network. NEAR features a unique sharding approach called Nightshade, which divides the network into smaller segments called shards. This allows the network to process transactions and run computations in parallel, reducing the load on individual nodes. Consensus is maintained through staking NEAR tokens, with validators chosen via an auction system every roughly 12 hours during an ...