The only platform powerful enough to put the Open Web into the hands of everyday people
Content on this page was provided by the Near Foundation team
NEAR is one of the most highly anticipated technologies of 2020 because it addresses both the scaling and usability problems which have prevented existing chains from breaking out and caused fees to explode, so apps finally have the potential to operate at consumer scale with real consumers.
NEAR is a decentralized application platform which is built atop the NEAR Protocol, a revolutionary public proof-of-stake blockchain which uses sharding to scale and an innovative account model to make apps similarly usable to those on today’s web. Unlike most “next generation” blockchains, NEAR’s homogeneous sharding design allows developers to take advantage of push-to-deploy simplicity while benefiting from the Nightshade sharding design, which provides dynamic scalability and stabilizes fees -- all of which is comfortably hidden from developers and users.
Blockchain apps are complicated. NEAR makes building, using and scaling them simple.
Key Highlights
Technology NEAR uses a new sharding technology which gives applications the ability to scale while turbocharging the interoperability which is critical to build complex ecosystems like decentralized finance and the open web. The core account model also allows developers to build apps with unprecedented usability.
Team
NEAR is being built by extraordinary engineers who have deep experience shipping systems of NEAR's complexity and scale, including two 2-time ICPC world champions, 2 gold medalists, a Latin American champion and multiple other competitive programming finalists.
Cofounder Alex Skidanov directed engineering at the sharded database company MemSQL and cofounder Illia Polosukhin developed the TensorFlow machine learning library as part of Google before they partnered together to build NEAR.
Ecosystem Over 100 contributors from around the world have quietly built the technology which is now rolling out. NEAR has independent Guilds supporting the distributed community, partnerships with well-known companies and over a dozen projects expected to launch shortly after the final MainNet go-live.
Progress NEAR’s MainNet is already live and over 300 validators requested to join the incentivized TestNet. MainNet is currently operating with transfer restrictions in place until the network’s validators vote to unlock it.
NEAR is the native token of the network. It is used for staking and the payment of fees.
NEAR supply begins at 1,000,000,000 tokens and grows at a maximum rate of 5% per year.
NEAR transaction fees are burned so, at high rates of usage, the NEAR token becomes deflationary.
NEAR transaction fees are kept low over time because the network capacity dynamically expands through sharding.
(*Allocations and % above are based on anticipated amounts and subject to change)
A maximum of 5% additional NEAR tokens are expected to be mined each year after mainnet launch, whereas the transaction fees generated on the network reduce the amount of additionally mined NEAR Tokens.
Homogeneous Sharding NEAR uses a homogeneous sharding approach which means apps scale without developers having to worry about which shard they are on, similar to how apps that deploy to Amazon AWS, Azure or GCP today
Asynchronous calls NEAR contracts use asynchronous calls, so chaining multiple apps or contracts across shards is as easy as calling within a contract and complex financial tools can be composed at scale.
Dynamic Resharding NEAR’s dynamic resharding adds new capacity to the network as congestion occurs, keeping prices more stable and preventing traffic jams
Contract-based accounts NEAR’s contract-based accounts provide apps with advanced and flexible permissions so users don’t need to approve every single transaction.
Progressive UX The account model allows applications to offer progressive UX, where users don’t even know they are on a blockchain until after they have onboarded.
Contract-based delegation Contract-based delegation means validators can set flexible terms for tokenholders to delegate to them, which opens up a wide range of new financial products.
This sale provides the opportunity to purchase tokens during the final stages of NEAR’s MainNet release and participate in the operation or usage of the network. Tokens in the 2 year tranche are being offered at the same price as the previous sale to allow for broader community participation. Tokens can be staked or delegated while they are locked. Please visit the FAQs if you have questions.
| Asset | NEAR Tokens |
| Key Dates |
Registration Opens: August 4
Sale Period Begins: August 12 at 2 PM UTC The sale has now ended. |
| Sale Terms |
Option 1: $0.40 per token, 40-day holding period.
Option 2: $0.34 per token, 40-day holding period. Tokens release linearly during the 12-month period starting when token transfers are enabled on the network. Option 3: $0.29 per token, 40-day holding period. Tokens release linearly during the 24-month period starting when token transfers are enabled on the network. If the 40-day holding period has not completed by the time when token transfers are enabled, for either options 2 or 3, it is treated as a cliff lockup until the 40 days from purchase are complete. |
| Supply Limits |
Option 1: Supply capped at 25M NEAR Tokens Option 2: No Supply Cap Option 3: No Supply Cap Options may be combined. Overall sale supply cannot exceed 100M tokens. |
| Minimum & Maximum Purchase |
Minimum Purchase: 500 NEAR Tokens
Maximum Purchase: 100k NEAR Tokens (Applies to Option 1 only); 5M NEAR tokens total across all options |
| Eligible Participants | Non-US Participants. Excludes certain jurisdictions. |
NEAR benefits from the support of prominent backers who all have long term lockups. Early fundraising was done via convertible notes, which are all expected to fully convert to tokens. All lockups are linearly released during the specified period. For more information, see this post.
NEAR is a decentralized application platform built on top of a brand new public, proof-of-stake blockchain. The NEAR architecture is most often compared to the Ethereum 2.0 design but NEAR’s novel approach optimizes for faster block times and stronger usability so developers can create successful businesses.
Homogeneous sharding, which splits the network into multiple pieces so the computation is done in parallel, is the only technology which can scale a network at the same rate that its adoption grows without forcing apps to build entire blockchains of their own.
Unlike “app chain” or “parachain” models, which allow for high configurability but require developers to handle significant complexity, on NEAR this complexity is hidden from developers because shards are homogenous. Developers expect this simplicity from existing web 2 services like Amazon AWS, which hide the complexity of managing commodity compute clusters.
NEAR’s novel contract-based account model uses human-readable account names and allows individual keys to be saved and permissioned. For the first time, applications can natively pay for gas on behalf of users, authorize advanced permissions and security transfer accounts.
NEAR has a bilateral trustless bridge with Ethereum, which allows tokens and contract calls to pass between the networks. This bridge allows NEAR to solve the scalability and cost problems of Ethereum while users and developers benefit from a much broader ecosystem than a simpler layer 2 scaling solution can offer.
NEAR’s initial distribution of 1,000,000,000 tokens and their lockups reflect long term commitments to building and growing the network from each group involved. The largest allocations are set aside for participants in the ecosystem and community. The Small Backers category will be affected if the amount of tokens sold in this sale exceeds expectations. For more information, see this post.
NEAR uses a gas model similar to Ethereum to pay for transactions and charges contracts “rent” for storage space they use on chain. This rent can be paid by holding a small number of tokens on the account.
The NEAR token is used by validators to participate in running the network via the staking process. Tokenholders can delegate their tokens to validators in order to participate in the staking process. Locked tokens can be delegated.
Transaction fees are partly burned and partly split with the contracts that generated those fees. Fees for transactions are potentially 1,000,000 times cheaper than Ethereum.
Validators are rewarded with a predetermined inflationary reward. Incentives are aligned to push for increased network usage because it improves validator return rates, increases security and, at very high rates of usage, the network actually becomes deflationary due to the burning of transaction fees.
Unlike non-sharded systems, transaction fees on NEAR are kept very low because congestion on the network can be alleviated by dynamically expanding the system’s capacity via resharding.
All tokens begin unlocking from the point where transfer restrictions on the network are lifted. Most lockups are long term and release linearly after transfers are enabled. The core team has 48-month lockups with a 12-month cliff. The initial circulating supply is approximately 158 million tokens. For more information, see this post.
The circulating supply by category is provided below. All initial tokens are technically circulating by month 60. For more information, see this post.
The NEAR community is self-organized into dozens of Guilds which are distributed around the world and which support developers and founders on their journeys.
Xoogler Guild: Startup founders, early team members, angel investors, VCs, and mentors who formerly or currently work at Google.
Open Shard Alliance: Formed by several BetaNet validators to run an experimental network which implements the NEAR sharding design.
NEAR Russian Guild: Over 250 active members engage in validator activities as well as provide engineering contributions and support to the NEAR ecosystem.
NEAR Chinese Guild: NEAR Chinese Guilds manage over 2000+ community members in China and are growing. They participate in engineering contributions and ecosystem support in various ways.
NEAR Japanese Guild: Over 500 members who are supported with localized educational content.
NEAR Vietnamese Guild: Over 1000 regional members who help each other with localized content, events and more.
Contributor Guild: A collective of developers who are supporting the engineering efforts around NEAR core, feature development, and bug fixes.
Design Guild: An independent community focused on design from crypto-related art to application UX.
NEAR has a long history of operating collaboratively with other teams in the space, including Whiteboard Series technical talks with founders of every major protocol in the space.
Over a dozen projects are expected to launch on MainNet within months of it coming online. NEAR has partnerships with leading custody providers, wallets and applications who will integrate with the network and make it accessible to people around the world.
The NEAR core team is made of world champion competitive programmers, prolific open source contributors and successful entrepreneurs who are all operating at the top of their fields.
There are over 200 contributors, many of whom have experiences at companies like Google, MemSQL, Facebook, ConsenSys, Microsoft and Niantic. Members of the Core Contributors have won 4 ICPC World Championships, multiple gold medals and a Latin American championship. They have appeared in multiple Google Code Jam finals, Facebook Hacker Cup finals, Russian Code Cup finals, Yandex.Algorithm finals and Top Coder Open finals.
Alex Skidanov (Cofounder): Y-Combinator alum, ICPC gold medalist and first engineer at the sharded database company MemSQL, where he was an Architect and Director of Engineering. Alex wrote the Nightshade sharding and Doomslug consensus papers.
Illia Polosukhin (Cofounder): ICPC finalist with 10 years of industry experience, including 3 years at Google where he was a primary contributor to the TensorFlow machine learning library while working in their prestigious research division.
NEAR Token Sale FAQ
Priority is granted on a first-come, first-served basis based on time of completed purchase. A purchase is only considered complete once funds have cleared. You will need to have sufficient funds in your CoinList wallet to make the purchase - you can fund your wallet during the purchase, or beforehand.
We will display payment information once the Sale Period starts. You can pay with USD, USDC, BTC, or ETH.
If you fund your account and purchase tokens with USDC, there are no fees. You can deposit USDC into your CoinList wallet anytime at https://coinlist.co/wallets.
If you fund your account and purchase with ETH or BTC, it will be converted to USDC at the time of purchase. An estimated conversion rate will be shown at the time of purchase and you will also incur a 0.50% transaction fee from CoinList for converting such funds. All purchases will be denominated in USD. You can deposit ETH and BTC into your CoinList wallet anytime at https://coinlist.co/wallets.
If you intend to fund your purchase with USD, please note that wire transfers can take 1-3 days to clear depending on your bank. We highly recommend paying with USDC where possible.
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Following the sale, CoinList will reach out to purchasers to collect wallet addresses. Purchasers will be able to use their choice of wallet so long as they are able to generate an address and receive NEAR tokens in that wallet.
Purchasers are limited to 5M tokens (across all options). Purchasers wanting to purchase tokens in the ‘Option 1’ tier are limited to 100K Option 1 tokens (but can purchase additional tokens from Options 2 and 3 up to 5M total).
A number of jurisdictions are blocked from participating in the sale: BELARUS, CHINA, THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO, CUBA, THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN, LIBERIA, MYANMAR, SUDAN, SYRIAN ARAB REPUBLIC, UNITED STATES, and ZIMBABWE
Additionally, CoinList is unable to support crypto trading or wallets for a number of jurisdictions. You can see a list of unsupported jurisdictions here: https://coinlist.co/legal
No. Anyone who wants to participate in the sale must go through KYC/AML (Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering) checks.
For more information about NEAR, the following reference materials will likely be useful:
https://docs.near.org/docs/faq/general_faq
Tokens can be staked or delegated normally even while they are locked.
You can use any official document where your address is stated. It could be a bank statement, a utility bill or lease agreement. The document must be not older than 3 months.
All tokens are subject to a 40-day holding period. You may stake or delegate tokens during the holding period.
Option 1: Freely transferable after 40-days.
Option 2: Tokens release linearly during the 12-month period starting when token transfers are enabled on the network.
Option 3: Tokens release linearly during the 24-month period starting when token transfers are enabled on the network.
If the 40-day holding period has not completed by the time when token transfers are enabled, for either options 2 or 3, it is treated as a cliff lockup until the 40 days from purchase are complete.