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 October 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.

Reader's Guide

Designed to maintain decentralized applications and high-throughput transactions through a sharded architecture, NEAR gained traction as an alternative to Ethereum and other layer-one blockchain networks.

Did You Know?

• 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.
• In 2023, Messari's analysts found that roughly 35% of NEAR’s staked tokens were hosted on Amazon Web Services, yielding a hosting 'operational Nakamoto coefficient' of 1.
• 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, later revealed as a marketing tactic.