- The NEAR protocol is called the potential new next generation Ethereum killer because it is said to have solved Ethereum’s scaling problem with a new sharding approach.
- NEAR raised more than U$21 million in venture capital in a new financing round.
The scalability of the Ethereum network is still a weakness of the ecosystem, for which there are many different solutions. However, for some experts in the industry, the development is progressing too slowly.
NEAR protocol solves Ethereum’s scalability problem with a new approach
The NEAR protocol is considered to be the supposed new “Ethereum Killer” and comes up with a new scaling approach. NEAR relies on a proof-of-state network that uses sharding to achieve high transaction throughput and high security for the ecosystem. NEAR is a decentralized application platform that places great emphasis on simple and easy application creation.
Furthermore, NEAR uses a novel consensus mechanism called Doomslug, by which there is no theoretical limit to the capacity of the network. Doomslug works in such a way that a block is considered “final” if a block produced by Doomslug contains endorsements by more than half of the block producers for the previous block. The previous block is irreversible unless at least one of the block producers is removed.
According to the press release published a few hours ago, NEAR launched Mainnet yesterday, allowing developers to take full advantage of the platform’s functionality immediately. The Genesis block was mined on April 22, 2020 at 6pm UTC. Illia Polosuchin, CEO of NEAR Inc, the company behind NEAR, said:
Genesis occurred at 2020-04-22 18:00:00 UTC and, while there’s still lots of work to do, this means that developers can actually deploy production apps while the network gets more decentralized and is ultimately handed off completely to the community over the next several months.
It is also remarkable that NEAR was able to raise more than $21.6 million in a financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Among the investors were Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Blockchange, Libertus Capital and Distributed Global. The capital will be used for the launch and adaptation of the platform and is expected to benefit millions of developers.
NEAR has already been able to find a strong partner in Stardust, who appreciates the advantages of the platform. Canaan Linder, founder and CEO of Stardust, explains:
NEAR’s technology allows Stardust to scale to millions of users without having to worry about infrastructure limitations or costs. Without NEAR, Stardust’s business model could not work.
Although NEAR has published big words and numbers, the functionality of the network is limited so far, as there are only four nodes and a limited number of validators. According to the official schedule, the blockchain of the platform should be fully operational by July. NEAR provides detailed instructions under this link where an account can be created.
Ethereum can achieve higher scalability than Visa and Mastercard
According to a recently published study, Ethereum can currently process up to 9,000 transactions per second and, with planned technical developments, can exceed the scalability of Visa, Mastercard and PayPal. The combination of sharding and plasma should one day enable a scalability of one million transactions per second, Vitalik Buterin announced in an AMA session with OmiseGo.
