Coin columns · NEAR Protocol City
NEAR Protocol: A Sharded Proof-of-Stake Chain Built for Usability
Readable account names, chain abstraction and AI experiments
NEAR Protocol is a proof-of-stake blockchain that splits its network into shards to process transactions in parallel. It emphasizes easy accounts and ‘chain abstraction’, which lets people use assets on other chains from one place.
1. Founded by AI researchers
Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov started NEAR in 2018 after working on AI that writes code. Polosukhin co-authored ‘Attention Is All You Need’, the 2017 transformer paper behind today’s large language models. The mainnet opened in stages in 2020, with token transfers enabled that October.
The Swiss-based NEAR Foundation supports the ecosystem, and groups such as Near One build the core protocol. The NEAR token pays fees, secures the network through staking (locking coins behind validators) and is used in governance. On the Crypto Nation map, NEAR is the city-hall tower of NEAR Protocol City, as the chain’s own coin.
2. Nightshade sharding and friendly accounts
Under Nightshade sharding, each shard produces a chunk and the chunks are combined into one block, so the chain acts as one while sharing the work. Stateless validation, which spares validators from storing the full state, arrived in 2024. Blocks sped up to about 0.6 seconds in 2025, and since June 2026 dynamic resharding splits busy shards and merges quiet ones.
Accounts can have readable names such as ‘alice.near’, and users can issue limited-permission keys to individual apps. Seventy percent of fees are burned and thirty percent go to the developers of the contracts called. In October 2025, after validator approval, the cap on annual NEAR issuance fell from 5% to 2.5%.
3. Chain abstraction and the ecosystem
NEAR aims to make the underlying chain invisible. Chain Signatures let a NEAR account control addresses on other chains, such as Bitcoin, via a key split among many nodes (multi-party computation). With NEAR Intents, users state an outcome and solvers, third parties that find and execute trades, carry out cross-chain swaps. Confidential Intents, which hide trade details, arrived in early 2026.
The ecosystem also includes Aurora, an Ethereum-compatible environment, and the Rainbow Bridge to Ethereum. In 2025 the House of Stake began giving holders who lock NEAR voting power as veNEAR, and NEAR AI launched services that run AI models on encrypted user data.
4. Things to know
Elaborate designs such as dynamic resharding are complex to build and run and leave room for unexpected bugs. Chain Signatures rely on the nodes holding key shares, and private computing in Confidential Intents and NEAR AI relies on trusted execution environments (TEEs), isolated areas inside chips.
Even at 2.5%, new tokens keep coming, slowly diluting holders who do not stake. With the foundation and core teams so influential, it is worth watching how decentralized decisions become and how the House of Stake works in practice. Many other chains compete for similar goals.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.