NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol is a Layer 1 blockchain founded by Illia Polosukhin (co-author of the 'Attention Is All You Need' paper that sparked the AI transformer revolution) and Alexander Skidanov. Launched in 2020, NEAR was built with a singular focus: making blockchain technology accessible to mainstream users and developers who are not crypto-native.

NEAR's most distinctive feature is its emphasis on usability. Instead of long hexadecimal addresses, NEAR uses human-readable account names (like 'alice.near'). Its key management system allows account recovery through email or phone, eliminating the single-point-of-failure problem of traditional seed phrases. For developers, NEAR supports smart contracts written in Rust and JavaScript, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry compared to learning Solidity.

NEAR uses a sharding mechanism called Nightshade, which splits the network into parallel segments (shards) that process transactions simultaneously. This allows the network to scale linearly — adding more shards increases throughput proportionally. NEAR's chain abstraction initiative aims to make the underlying blockchain invisible to end users, allowing them to interact with Web3 applications as seamlessly as they use traditional web apps.