NEAR Protocol is quickly becoming one of the most talked-about blockchains out there. Its extraordinary growth in monthly active users (MAU) has all the tech and marketing industries buzzing. With a reported 46 million users, the question naturally arises: can NEAR Protocol eventually overtake established players like Solana? So let’s look into NEAR’s technological foundations and discover its growing ecosystem. We’ll take a look at how it stacks up against the field. GreedyChain.com has all the answers in side-by-side comparisons of Layer 1 that tell the whole story. Don’t miss our savvy breakdown of Layer 2 scaling to help you stay ahead of the Web3 pack.
Understanding NEAR Protocol's Architecture
At its core, NEAR Protocol aims to be a developer-friendly, high-performance and highly secure Layer 1 (L1) blockchain. The architecture is designed for scalability, extensibility and usability. It addresses the core issues that have stymied the mass adoption of blockchain technology. The protocol’s narrative is built upon a few unifying innovations, from Nightshade sharding, to stateless validation, to an easy-to-use dev experience.
Nightshade Sharding
Nightshade sharding is what makes NEAR’s scalability solution so unique. What is sharding? Sharding, broadly speaking, is the process of splitting a blockchain into smaller, easier to maintain chunks, or shards. As a result, this lets the network execute transactions in parallel rather than one by one, massively improving the throughput. Unlike other implementations, NEAR’s Nightshade sharding takes a unique approach. Nightshade simplifies smart contract transaction validation for nodes. Instead of every node needing to validate every transaction, each node only needs to focus on validating the transactions within its assigned shard. This greatly lowers the computational load on each node and allows the network to process many more transactions.
Lately, with Nightshade sharding, NEAR Protocol is able to handle at least 2500-3000 TPS as a bare minimum! In addition, the underlying architecture is built to dynamically scale. Splitting and merging shards according to resource usage is planned for the future. This dynamic sharding capability gives NEAR the flexibility to adapt in a matter of seconds to fluctuating network conditions and needs. As the user base and transaction volume grow, it ensures reliable and predictable performance.
Stateless Validation
By implementing stateless validation, NEAR Protocol has gone above and beyond to make the network more efficient and secure. Stateless validation is an anti-fraud mechanism Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, first floated in February. Specifically, it enables validators to check the correctness of state transitions without requiring them to keep the full state of the blockchain. This improvement places considerable decreases storage burden on validators. This allows more participants to join the network with ease, increasing the network’s decentralization in the process.
Modular Architecture
Such a design is fundamentally modular, enabling easy upgradability and protocol improvements NEAR Protocol. This modularity allows the platform to stay responsive to the changing needs of developers and the state of technology. The ability to easily incorporate new features and improvements is crucial for staying competitive in the rapidly evolving blockchain landscape.
NEAR's Ecosystem and User Experience
NEAR Protocol runs much deeper than its technical architecture. It intentionally cultivates a robust and flourishing ecosystem and provides a hassle-free experience for developers and for end users. You have created community-focused tools and resources that encourage and support dApp development. Discover robust features that make it easy for anyone to interact with the blockchain.
Developer Support and dApp Ecosystem
NEAR Protocol incentivizes dApp development by implementing a large grants program, which is currently funded with $350 million. Expanded project resources beyond participatory feedback, the protocol provides a project accelerator and a community bounty program. These initiatives are designed to attract top-notch developers and encourage innovation in the NEAR ecosystem.
The NEAR blockchain is home to these one-of-a-kind dApps. Metaverse AI, an immersive 3D metaverse company, and Mintbase, a world-leading NFT engine, are both achieving a deep level of innovation. NEAR Protocol’s dApp ecosystem made an incredible breakout, hitting a peak DeFi total value locked (TVL) of $590 million in May 2022. This monumental milestone places NEAR within the top 10 non-EVM chains by TVL and demonstrates its increasing importance within the space.
User-Friendly Features
Usability is at the core of NEAR Protocol. It provides a user-friendly and intuitive development environment that helps developers effortlessly develop and deploy dApps. The Rainbow Bridge enables seamless transfer of assets and tokens between NEAR and other blockchain networks, initially focusing on Ethereum. Aurora is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on steroids, custom-built to supercharge developers. It provides them an out-of-the-box solution for deploying their Ethereum-compatible apps on a high-performance platform. These attributes play a part in attracting a more diverse user base and growing adoption.
NEAR vs. Solana: A Comparative Analysis
To accurately compare NEAR Protocol and Solana, we need to consider the advantages and disadvantages that each platform offers. What really puts NEAR over the top is its scalability through Nightshade sharding and a vibrant ecosystem. On one hand, Solana’s weaknesses are overshadowed by impressive technical prowess and real-world adoption.
Solana's Strengths
Solana has received a lot of attention by making a big show about creating the best, fastest, most technically impressive blockchain out there. This has drawn the world’s largest open source community and more projects than all other data visualizations combined. Solana’s breakthrough scalability comes from its proprietary Proof-of-History consensus mechanism. Using both a single-layer blockchain and parallel processing, it’s able to perform thousands of transactions per second. Fast-forward to 2022, and Solana boasted a rich and mature ecosystem, with more than 5,100 projects. A confident community knows that the future of retail crypto belongs to them. A critical mass of developers and projects have already moved to Solana, or are new projects being built on Solana — creating a powerful network effect.
Challenges for NEAR
If NEAR Protocol wants to actually compete with Solana, there are quite a few hurdles it must clear. To be a true contender, NEAR will have to demonstrate that it can at least compete with Solana’s technical prowess. In order to win the contest long-term, NEAR Protocol will have to create an ecosystem that’s just as strong as Solana’s current head start. NEAR will need to incentivize developers and projects to switch to its platform, overcoming the inertia of Solana's existing user base. NEAR still has to build this network effect though and continue to attract users and projects. Together, this will create movement and energy and create a very powerful community.
The Path Forward for NEAR Protocol
NEAR Protocol has already shown tremendous promise in its cutting edge technology and human-centered design. If it really wants to leapfrog incumbents such as Solana, it has to continue advancing its ecosystem. Engaging developers and building a robust community are important first steps in that process.
Here's a breakdown of key areas for NEAR to focus on:
- Enhance Developer Resources: Continue investing in developer tools, documentation, and support programs to make it even easier for developers to build on NEAR.
- Expand the Ecosystem: Attract a wider range of dApps to the NEAR ecosystem, focusing on use cases that leverage NEAR's unique capabilities.
- Strengthen Community Engagement: Foster a vibrant and engaged community through active communication, events, and governance participation.
- Strategic Partnerships: Forge partnerships with other blockchain projects and traditional businesses to expand NEAR's reach and adoption.
By doubling down on these priorities, NEAR Protocol can further solidify its role as the premier Layer-1 blockchain. This strategy might allow it to break the hegemony of currently entrenched competitors such as Solana. Keep an eye on NEAR Protocol, it’s bound to be captivating. Can it use the momentum it has right now to make progress toward some very ambitious goals it has set for itself?
GreedyChain.com is going to keep a close eye on NEAR Protocol’s progress. Second, it will be a very useful tool for investors and developers trying to assess its long-term viability.
