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Intro

NEAR Protocol was founded in 2017 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov with a vision to create a highly scalable PoS network that can provide the necessary infrastructure to support exponential growth in the user base using blockchain infrastructure. Before exploring programmable smart contract networks, NEAR originally started as an opportunity for the team to investigate more about program synthesis. In 2018, the platform eventually evolved into exploring scalability improvements for existing peer-to-peer (p2p) transaction blockchains like Ethereum. It serves as a decentralized, sharded layer-1 smart contract platform to rival others like Polkadot, Cosmos, and others. It aims to provide advancements in usability, efficiency, and scalability through its unique sharding infrastructure. The primary use case for NEAR Protocol is to provide a highly scalable, congestion-free settlement layer that uses smart contracts to facilitate transactions and shard on-chain data storage.

Near's BOS

In March 2023, the NEAR protocol unveiled the Blockchain Operating System (BOS), a groundbreaking open-source platform that furnishes developers with the tools to build seamlessly across varied blockchain ecosystems using well-known programming languages. Simultaneously, it offers crypto users a Web 2.0-like user experience. The BOS is crafted to be inclusive, targeting not just the seasoned web3 veterans but also those new to the decentralized space, eliminating the barrier of needing cryptocurrency for new users, which greatly eases the process of joining the platform.

The BOS stands out for its streamlined interface that simplifies navigation and access, enhances the user experience for developers and everyday users alike, and facilitates the exploration of various communities and applications with a strong emphasis on data privacy. It's designed to be both a development space and a social network, creating an ecosystem where applications can be both created and discovered, thus revolutionizing the development and interaction of Web 3 applications.

Delving into the technicalities, the BOS's architecture is anchored on three critical components: the building blocks (dApps like Lido and Uniswap), the underlying blockchains (with compatibility across EVM chains and NEAR's own platform), and the gateways that deliver decentralized front-ends. These components, with on-chain storage for transparency and security, allow for a new level of auditability and local operation of applications. The BOS's ability to interact with multiple blockchains taps into vast liquidity and applications within the crypto economy, while the NEAR platform serves as an efficient host for app source codes.

Gateways serve as the bridge, delivering decentralized front-ends to users through a virtual machine capable of running various protocol frontends, all housed on the NEAR blockchain. This setup ranges from wallets to unique applications, all the while enabling developers to easily integrate a vast range of functionality with the simple addition of a JavaScript library.

NEAR's BOS is revolutionizing the crypto space by decentralizing front-ends that are stored on the blockchain, ensuring composability and resistance to censorship. This approach is pivotal, especially given past vulnerabilities like the Uniswap token delisting and Tornado Cash sanctions, showcasing the potential of BOS to enable developers to truly leverage the open-source nature of blockchain technology.

Near+Polyogn

Polygon Labs and the NEAR Foundation have embarked on a collaborative venture to create a zero-knowledge (ZK) prover specifically tailored for Wasm blockchains, aiming to create a bridge between Wasm-based chains and the Ethereum network. This initiative will see NEAR becoming a key contributor to the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK), which is designed to facilitate the creation of ZK-powered Layer 2 solutions on Ethereum. With the zkWasm prover, developers will gain unprecedented flexibility in building on Polygon CDK, which can now support a variety of provers, enhancing their ability to either launch or migrate EVM chains or develop Wasm chains for better Ethereum integration and liquidity access. The new zkWasm prover promises enhanced scalability and decentralization, potentially connecting NEAR Protocol more closely with Ethereum and offering developers more options within the Polygon CDK ecosystem. Furthermore, this could eventually lead to the formation of a cohesive ecosystem of L2 chains deployed via Polygon CDK, encompassing a spectrum of layer-1 and layer-2 solutions.

Near's Data Availability Play

The NEAR Foundation has introduced the NEAR Data Availability (NEAR DA) layer as part of its NEAR Open Web Stack, aiming to significantly impact the Ethereum ecosystem. Designed to provide a cost-effective and reliable data availability solution for ETH rollups and developers, NEAR DA distinguishes itself with its affordability—charging just $0.0033 for 100kB of calldata, in stark contrast to Ethereum L1's $26.22 fee, making it 8,000 times less expensive as of September 2023. This innovation not only promises to cut costs but also to maintain the security integrity of Ethereum, offering support to high-quality projects developing app-chains or Layer 2 solutions. Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and the new CEO of the NEAR Foundation, emphasizes that NEAR DA's integration showcases the adaptability of NEAR’s technology and its commitment to facilitating the broader adoption of the Open Web. Boasting a three-year track record of 100% uptime, NEAR’s Layer 1 is positioned as a robust and economical option for secure data availability in the evolving Ethereum modular blockchain landscape.