NEAR

mission

To accelerate the world’s transition to open technologies by growing and enabling a community of developers and creators.

current challenges

• Coordination

As the ecosystem grows, we anticipate the scope of coordination to increase across a wider portfolio of tools and groups.

• Allocation

Our early mission is to do so by ensuring that the protocol itself creates the proper incentives to drive adoption but many aspects of the ecosystem development, including the development of the core protocol itself, can only be done with additional assistance.

• Advocacy

When building something completely new, the biggest obstacle is that, by default, no one cares. To fulfill our purpose, we will need to raise the awareness of this new suite of tools and the problems they solve among end users, developers, regulators, governments, businesses and beyond.

• Governance

We want to ensure that it is serving the key stakeholders of our ecosystem in a way which is representative of their interests.

culture & values

The NEAR Community is made up of Innovators, Creators, Contributors, and, of course, a few wild cards. We’re all here to build a stronger ecosystem.

• Ecosystem-first. Always put the health and success of the ecosystem above any individual’s interest 
• Openness. Operate transparently and consistently share knowledge to build open communities 
• Pragmatism over perfection. Find the right solution not the ideal solution and beat dogmatism by openly considering all ideas
• Make it feel simple. Strive to make the complex feel simple so the technology, platform and ecosystem are accessible to all
• Grow constantly. Learn, improve and fail productively so the ecosystem and the community are always becoming more effective

history

NEAR was a machine learning project before it became a blockchain development platform. Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov started NEAR.ai in early 2017 to explore program synthesis: the field of automating programs from a human specification. They felt driven to learn more about cryptography and conduct more study.

Researching program synthesis led the team to explore programmable smart contract platforms and crypto payments in late 2017 and early 2018. As they explored the solution space and tried out a variety of blockchain protocols, they realized the current state of the tech didn’t meet their needs and began to design a blockchain that could. Illia and Alex gathered a team of engineers and formally started building NEAR Protocol in August 2018.

The founding vision for the NEAR platform was to offer developers an easy path to building decentralized applications that can scale to mass usage. Near Protocol raised $50 million in the first four months, even before they built anything.

NEAR combines a horizontal scaling approach with a new consensus mechanism that splits the network into parallel shards and dynamically distributes the computation to increase the network's processing capacity. The network launched in April 2020, became community-operated in September 2020, and passed a vote to enable token transfers in October 2020.

core team

• Alexander Skidanov - Co-Founder
• Illia Polosukhin - Co-Founder

benefits

• Find your Tribe. Make friends and connections pursuing a mission you’re passionate about
• Make an Impact. Help give power (money, data, and governance) back to the people
• Give Back. When you contribute to building a better future, good things happen
• Make a Living. Work when you want, how you want, and get paid based on your contribution