A NEAR Thesis.

is the fastest sharded PoS chain with unique sharding tech, high multi-chain interoperability, and relentless focus on UX/DevX.

Advantages:

1.Dynamic Re-sharding (Nightshade): Currently 3k TPS with 4 shards, projected 100k in 1yr, no ceiling

1. One of the fastest finality (2s) and lowest tx fees (<$0.01) out of alt-L1s 3. Gasless EVM chain- Aurora 4. IBC-compatible Parachains- Octopus Network

\5. Trustless bridge- Rainbow 6. Super UX/DevX focused 7. EVM, Rust, and WASM compatible 8. Thriving ecosystem, tons of middleware alr 9. $1.2B ecosystem fund

Backed by strong VCs:
@a16z, @PanteraCapital, @CoinbaseVentures, @DragonflyCap, @CoinFund

A

doption metrics such as MAU, tx count, and TVL are snowballing. https://twitter.com/analyticalali/status/1475346966615711744…

NEAR has one of the best UX/DevX out of any L1 I have used, but has yet to gain mass adoption b/c ppl don’t see a compelling reason to try NEAR out in the first place. The biggest criticism I hear is that NEAR seems too vanilla. This is mostly a branding issue.

NEAR differentiates: it’s ETH 2.0 sharding on steroids + Solana’s speed + Avalanche’s EVM compatibility + Polkadot’s parachain shared security (but cheaper) + Cosmos’ IBC-compatible app-specific chains.

Compared to monolithic L1s, sharding better parallelizes computation, and distributes storage. Here’s Vitalik’s take on sharding: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/04/07/sharding.html…

But how is NEAR’s Dynamic, Re-sharding unique? NEAR’s sharding approach is light and dynamic, whereas ETH hopes to scale mainly thru ZKR L2s. Altho I am bullish on L2 ZKR tech, there’s still huge unsolved interoperability and sequencer-trust issues.

Nightshade (NEAR) favors asynchronicity and ‘lighter’ nodes, whilst Casper FFG (ETH) targets synchronicity and heavy consensus. NEAR requires cheap consensus once per day, whilst Ethereum validators need to be constantly online participating in heavy computations.

Shards are dynamically added and removed based on tx loads. In comparison, ETH 2.0 is limited to 64 shards. Dynamic re-sharding allows the network to only pay for infrastructure and scale it needs, rather than overpaying for unneeded throughput... 12/x

or underpaying and running into bottlenecks. NEAR will automatically load balance smart contracts, ensuring no shard is trafficked.
@AlexSkidanov
claims that NEAR’s sharding tech is not only better than ETH 2.0, but will also hit mainnet sooner. https://near.org/blog/why-doesnt-near-just-replicate-ethereum-serenity-design/

@auroraisnear
/Rainbow Bridge brings EVM Compatibility and Interoperability to NEAR. Rainbow Bridge connects Aurora/NEAR with Ethereum through a bilateral light-node model. Aurora can be thought of as an EVM L2 on NEAR since it is implemented as a smart contract.

contains the best parts of Polkadot/Cosmos, bringing IBC-compatible parachains to NEAR. Thru a validator marketplace, Octopus provides out-of-the-box shared security, interoperability, and on-chain governance to projects looking to make their own appchain.

Octopus Network makes it much less expensive for a dApp to access shared security compared to @Polkadot's beefy parachain auctions. Appchains are built w/ IBC-compatible Substrate, allowing it to interoperate with other Octo appchains and @cosmos chains like @terra_money .

“While Octopus Network has tested out multiple Layer 1 blockchains including Cosmos, Polkadot, and others, they have selected NEAR to be the ‘mother-chain’ of the network. Faster than Cosmos Chains, and more affordable and scalable than Polkadot ‘Parachains’” -

UX is heavily overlooked in the crypto space currently because most users are adventurous early adopters willing to go thru tedious onboarding processes to discover the frontier of Web3. The L1 wars occurring in the early adopter testbed won't mean anything compared to...

when one of the L1s ‘crosses the chasm’ to mainstream adoption, unlocking an unfathomable amount of capital and decentralization.

imo the most important thing is not how decentralized an L1 is now, but how decentralized an L1 is ‘set up’ to be. And the leading indicator for ‘potential decentralization’ is UX, dev-friendliness, and the accessibility of running a node. NEAR smashes UX out of the park.

UX:

• Cleanest wallet UX I’ve had + tons of optionality w/ Metamask etc
• Stake directly from wallet
• Defined token list. Never manually import tokens or forget what u have in ur wallet again
• Native human-readable account ID ".near", no need to pay $50 for an ENS
• Onboard users without a wallet thru temp access keys
• Devs can prepay gas for first-time users, meaning zero costs for onboarding
• Easy subscriptions for users to manage each app’s permissions. No more annoying, excessive wallet pop-ups for each step of a tx.

- Contract-based account model allows devs to build secure apps that consumers can actually use similarly to today’s web apps, something which requires multiple second-layer add-ons on other blockchains.

- Predictable tx pricing with senders only paying for gas they use. We’ve all heard of the horror stories of ETH users accidentally paying millions in gas. https://decrypt.co/31830/someone-just-made-a-2-6-million-mistake-on-ethereum…

Unlike NEAR, Ethereum's gas fee accounts for the amount of data stored via that transaction. Essentially, anyone can pay once to store permanent data on-chain. This is a poor economic design: 1. Miners are not appropriately incentivized to store large amounts of data,

DevX:

• EVM, Rust, and WASM compatible

• “Rust is one of the most loved languages (https://tinyurl.com/ruststackoverflow). On Github, 24K users have contributed code written in Rust, where there are only 3.5K developers who have contributed Solidity code.”-Sino Global Capital

• One-click deploys, integrated unit testing, GitPod IDE, SDKs, easy front-end integration, + debugging.

• Tons of dev tooling/middleware alr built! From explorers, CLI tools, The Graph, wallet apps to interoperability components and oracles

• DAO infrastructure: Easy to launch with Sputnik and AstroDAO

• Smart fee design, and protocol-level in-built royalties functionality.

• 30% of network fee from usage of a smart contract is automatically allocated to the contract’s developers.

• Allows devs to natively monetize their open-source components

• Ability to buy and sell accounts! Super useful for NFT collections, businesses and organizations down the line. Opens up new horizons for devs to play with proxies and contract authority.

Tokenomics: Allocation. 37.7% to backers/team, rest to community

Release schedule of $NEAR

FDV is a meme at this point, but let’s just do comps for the hell of it

Team is GALAXY BRAIN. World-championship coders. Early engineers at Google, MemSQL, FB and Consensys. Plus

even LOOKS like

. Take my money!

Ecosystem:
Surprisingly, alr quite strong! https://twitter.com/analyticalali/status/1475347000858054660

Top Projects:
CPAMMs:
@Ref
Finance,
@TriSolaris
,
@Balancer
,
@DODO
etc.
Stableswap AMMs:
@RoseOnAurora
,
@AuroraSwap
etc.
NFT Marketplace:
@Paras
,
@Mintbase
etc.
Oracles:
@Chainlink
,
@Flux
,
@BandProtocol
etc.

P2E/Gaming:

,

,

etc. Stablecoins: UST, USDC, USDT, TUSD, DAI etc. Data:

,

,

etc. DAO Infrastructure:

,

,

etc. IDO Platforms:

,

etc.

Catalysts:

• Popular integrations incoming. Recent UST integration caused large rally. With Aurora being EVM-compatible, we could easily see the biggest DeFi apps porting over much like with Avalanche’s success.
• Sharding upgrade in Jan 2022 introduces chunk-only producers

increasing TPS and reducing hardware requirements for nodes

• Narrative rotation into multi-chain interoperability with Octopus Network + Cosmos IBC
• Leaning into the modular blockchain thesis by partnering with
  @CelestiaOrg
  , the leading data availability chain

Risks: Lots of execution risk with big roadmap. L1 Rotatoorr narrative dying: https://twitter.com/zmanian/status/1476960265107243009…

How decentralized is NEAR? Currently, not very. With 69 validators, NEAR’s Nakamoto Coefficient (min no of validators for 33% attack), is just 7, compared to Ethereum’s 34 and Solana’s 19.

To get listed on US exchanges and achieve legitimacy within the crypto-native community, NEAR must decentralize. NEAR should allocate a portion of its ecosystem fund for a “Validator Mining” rewards program.

HOWEVER, I don’t think this is a deathly problem for the future. Running Validators has been insanely profitable. Validators have a privileged advantage for MEV. The supply of validators will massively expand, esp with L1s heating up

Chunk-only producer rollout in Jan 2022 drastically reduces hardware requirements for nodes.

had a similar number of validators too 1y ago, now at 1000. Even with a headstart, it will be much easier for NEAR to catch up and hit 10,000 validators.

All in all, @NEARProtocol is a bet for interoperability, scalability thru sharding, and mainstream adoption through usability.