The NEAR protocol was launched in 2020 by a group of Russians and Ukrainians.
Its team prizes technical excellence, having among its members former employees of Microsoft, Facebook and Google, as well as medalists and champions of world programming tournaments.
This is reflected in how NEAR works to train developers and the community itself, with various economic incentive programs, hackathons and seminars, although today it is not an ecosystem with such a relevant user and developer base today.
WHAT IS NEAR?
Near Protocol is a first-tier network that seeks as a competitive differentiator to implement from the beginning the best solutions that have been created for the Ethereum ecosystem, without the need to have to deal with a legacy that needs to be adapted.
Near is a core network that is the base layer where other fragments sit on top of it, responsible for executing transactions that have worked in parallel since its inception.
The result of this process is a network divided into modules, separated into different shadings, which behaves quickly and scalably.
Near features a new PoS mechanism called Thresholded Proof-of-Stake (TPoS), which introduces a more dynamic staking mechanism (which is the process where the user locks up their cryptocurrencies helping in network security and in return receives revenues), which attempts to perform a more efficient rotation between validation operators.
It has as its cryptocurrency NEAR, used for the payment of fees for network transactions and intelligent contracts, for staking and participation in the consensus, and as a hindrance for storing data on the network.
This cryptocurrency competes directly with all top-tier networks such as #Ethereum, #Polkadot, #Solana, among others.
NEAR TOKENOMICS
In terms of cryptocurrency economics, NEAR has points of attention.
As a network that is still in its infancy, its focus on growth requires the generation of many incentives, which is reflected in an inflation rate of 34% per year, one of the highest observed among its competitors in the same segment.
It is also interesting to understand that many NEAR crypts that were issued (contributing to this process of inflation) have not yet been spent by the team and are being stored in the "treasury" of the protocol to generate incentives and future funding of the team.
In contrast, NEAR has a maximum amount of crypts to be issued and has a defined firing policy, which can reduce the effects of inflation over time, and eventually set up a more sustainable general economic policy framework in the future that is not present today.
That is, the NEAR crypt is still quite inflationary, which can cause its price to fall over time, and its burning depends on the massive adoption of the network, which is not yet a reality and may not even be in the future.
GOVERNANCE OF NEAR
In terms of governance, NEAR has some mechanisms such as the "Near Digital Collective", a governance structure for decentralizing decision-making regarding infrastructure and treasury aspects.
The protocol is also working in partnership with the Commonwealth to create a 100% on-chain platform, focused not only on the governance of NEAR itself, but also to support the creation of DAOs within its ecosystem. Nevertheless, these initiatives are extremely recent.
Historically, NEAR has acted in a very centralized way in its decisions, with a much more corporate aspect than other blockchains we know.
Participation in the new governance platform is still very timid, and only time will tell if it will be really used for the community to be able to express their opinion on decisions that are really important and meaningful for the future of the project.
NEAR is designed to be a well-decentralized blockchain, but this goal should only materialize in the long run, since the decentralization factor scales with the creation of new blockchain fragments (sharding), and the network is still in its infancy.
Today NEAR has only 100 validators in total number. Networks whose consensus mechanisms are more centralized, like Cosmos, are already in the region of 175 validators and are studying increasing the quantity. Therefore, in terms of validation, NEAR can still be considered a centralized network.
In addition, the hardware and staking requirements to act as NEAR validator are very high, which greatly restricts the democratic aspect of consensus, which is softened by a native token delegation policy that allows less capitalized users to enjoy staking gains.
CONCLUSION: WHAT DO I THINK OF NEAR?
#NearProtocol has a very good team, an interesting technology in terms of infrastructure and is very well funded.
But it still has no adoption, it has no traction within its ecosystem, it doesn't have a relevant number of users utilizing or developers building in its ecosystem today.
In addition, with recent advances in the second tier market, the competitive landscape of the first alternative tiers is tougher than ever, and considering that NEAR is at the beginning of its history still needs to prove relevant to compete with more mature solutions.
That is why I consider that Near's maturation in the first-tier competitive scenario is quite uncertain.
So I see Near today as a network with very good technology, but as an investment bias, I see some red flags on this project, which makes it not interesting today to have in my wallet.
Anyway, I'll still keep it on my radar and track the possible adoption developments of users and developers in a next high cycle, which can make the project develop and take on a more relevant role for crypt.
