Near Protocol

Lore & Background

NEAR Protocol was founded in early 2017 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov. Initially, the project was established as Near.ai, an artificial intelligence startup focused on program synthesis. Polosukhin was a former engineering manager at Google Research, where he co-authored the seminal 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need,' which introduced the transformer architecture. Skidanov was previously the director of engineering at MemSQL and a software engineer at Microsoft. The project began development on its sharded architecture in late 2018. In July 2019, NEAR raised $12.1 million in a funding round led by Metastable Capital and Accomplice. The NEAR mainnet officially launched in April 2020, initially operating in a 'restricted' proof of authority mode to ensure stability. In May 2020, the project closed a $21.6 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

In Their Own Story

In the digital expanse of the Nightshade network, data does not flow in a single, clogged river but fractures into a million shimmering streams. A validator node, humming with the rhythm of Doomslug consensus, watches as a transaction from a user named 'alex.near' requests entry. There is no waiting for blocks to mine; there is only the swift certainty of finality, confirmed in seconds before the next breath. The shard accepts it, the ledger updates, and the network breathes on—unbroken, unburdened, ready for the next million streams.

Reader's Guide

In 2022, Skyward Finance, an IDO/launchpad built on NEAR blockchain, was exploited for roughly $3 million after an attacker abused a flaw in the project’s treasury redemption contract. The bug, identified by security firm BlockSec, failed to check for duplicate token account IDs, enabling the attacker to redeem wrapped NEAR in a loop within a single transaction. Skyward acknowledged that its treasury had been drained and advised users to cease interacting with the contracts, noting that the incident rendered the SKYWARD token effectively worthless. In 2023, Messari's analysts questioned validator decentralization on NEAR and other blockchain platforms. Messari found that roughly 35% of NEAR’s staked tokens were hosted on Amazon Web Services, yielding a hosting 'operational Nakamoto coefficient' of 1. The report also observed geographic concentration of validators and stake in the United States and Germany, limited presence in underrepresented regions, and reliance on a single validator client at the time; NEAR’s aggregated operational Nakamoto coefficient was estimated at ~1.3. In 2024, NEAR blockchain drew criticism after its official X account abruptly changed its display name to 'it’s all a lie' and posted anti-crypto messages. NEAR later indicated the episode was a marketing tactic tied to an upcoming event, which industry commentators and developers criticized as tone-deaf. During the period of the campaign, Bloomberg reported that NEAR’s token declined by roughly 15% over the preceding week. Bloomberg also noted that the controversy followed a real security incident in May 2023, when a compromised moderator account on NEAR’s Discord was used to promote a fraudulent airdrop.

Did You Know?

• NEAR Protocol was originally founded as an AI startup called Near.ai in early 2017.
• Illia Polosukhin co-authored the seminal 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need,' which introduced the transformer architecture.
• In 2022, Skyward Finance on NEAR was exploited for roughly $3 million due to a flaw in its treasury redemption contract.
• In 2023, Messari found that roughly 35% of NEAR’s staked tokens were hosted on Amazon Web Services.