NEAR Protocol

What it is

NEAR Protocol is a layer 1 blockchain founded in 2018 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, with a mainnet that launched in April 2020 and passed fully into community operation that September. The founders’ background is the memorable part. The pair started NEAR.AI in 2017 as a startup teaching machines to write code, and Polosukhin is a co-author of “Attention Is All You Need”, the 2017 research paper that introduced the transformer architecture behind modern AI models. The blockchain was, in a sense, a detour that grew; the AI thread has since returned to the centre of the project.

How it works

NEAR is a proof-of-stake network, secured by validators who lock up NEAR tokens rather than by mining. Its distinguishing design is Nightshade sharding, which splits the network’s workload across parallel lanes called shards so capacity can grow by adding lanes rather than making every node do everything. Transactions reach finality in one to two seconds and fees are typically under a tenth of a cent. Two usability choices stand out: accounts can be human-readable names rather than long strings of characters, and a feature called chain signatures lets a NEAR account control addresses on other chains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana. The token has no fixed maximum; new issuance pays validators, offset in part by burned fees.

The story so far

NEAR launched into the crowded field of would-be Ethereum rivals and built a reputation for developer friendliness, supporting Rust and JavaScript rather than a bespoke language. Its sharding design shipped in phases across several years, including the Nightshade 2.0 upgrade that introduced stateless validation to lighten the load on nodes. The bigger strategic turn has been towards artificial intelligence: Polosukhin has become one of the more credible voices arguing for open, user-owned AI, and the project now frames itself as infrastructure where AI agents can hold accounts, sign transactions and act across chains on a user’s behalf.

Where it stands

As of late July 2026, NEAR sits around 38th by market value at roughly $2.4 billion, trading near $1.82, according to CoinGecko; it and Uniswap’s UNI are close enough that the two swap places day to day. The AI positioning is the thing to judge it by, since that is where the project has planted its flag. Worth watching from here: whether agent-driven activity shows up in real network usage, how the sharded architecture scales as demand grows, and whether the founders’ AI credibility converts into products people use. Our crypto explainers hub compares NEAR with the other layer 1 chains in the crypto section.