I recently did a deep dive into Near Protocol, and there are actually some quite interesting points worth sharing. What is Near? It’s a layer 1 blockchain built with the goal of directly competing with Ethereum, but with a different approach.

Near Protocol was founded by a strong team — Erik Trautman (former founder of Viking Education), Alexandra Skidanov (former scientist at Microsoft), and Ilya Polosukin (with over 10 years of experience at Google). Currently, the team has expanded to over 70 developers. Seeing this setup, you can already imagine why Near focuses so much on developer experience.

What’s special about Near? First, it uses sharding technology to process transactions at a higher speed than Ethereum, especially in terms of scalability. Additionally, Near has Rainbow Bridge, which allows asset transfers between different chains, helping to reduce gas costs.

The NEAR token currently has a total supply of 1 billion tokens, used for paying gas fees and staking. The current price is around $2.53, down 7.67% in the past 24 hours. The market cap is approximately $3.28 billion. The crypto market is quite volatile right now, so close monitoring is definitely necessary.

Recent developments are quite promising — in February last year, Near launched Pagoda, a startup platform for Web3 developers. Interestingly, Google Cloud just announced a partnership to provide infrastructure support for Pagoda. This could help Near increase transaction processing capacity and attract more developers into its ecosystem.

From a fundamental perspective, Near Protocol truly has strengths — open source code, secure data storage, good transaction scalability. But remember, the current crypto market is quite risky and volatile. If you want to learn more about Near, do thorough research before making any decisions. I’m just sharing information, not giving investment advice.