NEAR Protocol is a Layer 1 blockchain that prioritizes usability and developer experience above all else. Founded in 2018 by Illia Polosukhin (who co-authored the original “Attention Is All You Need” transformer paper) and Alexander Skidanov, both former engineers at major tech companies, NEAR was designed to be the blockchain that doesn’t feel like one.
The network’s most distinctive user-facing feature is human-readable account names. Instead of long hexadecimal addresses, users get accounts like “alice.near” — a small change that dramatically improves the experience of sending and receiving tokens. NEAR also supports key-based permissions, allowing users to grant limited access to apps without exposing their full account.
Technically, NEAR uses a sharding architecture called Nightshade, which splits the network into parallel segments to increase throughput. Unlike some sharding approaches that sacrifice composability, Nightshade aims to maintain the ability for contracts on different shards to interact with each other. The network’s roadmap includes plans for dynamic resharding that automatically adjusts based on demand.
NEAR has invested heavily in attracting developers from outside crypto. The protocol supports smart contracts written in Rust and JavaScript (via AssemblyScript), familiar languages for web developers. NEAR’s JavaScript SDK and documentation are notably polished compared to other Layer 1 platforms.
The project gained additional attention when Polosukhin’s AI background created a natural connection between NEAR and the AI space. The NEAR Foundation has funded AI-related projects and positioned the chain as infrastructure for AI-powered decentralized applications.
Based in San Francisco with a globally distributed team, NEAR has also focused on the Blockchain Operating System (BOS), a framework for building decentralized frontends. The NEAR ecosystem includes Aurora (an Ethereum-compatible Layer 2 running on NEAR) and several DeFi protocols building on the platform’s user-friendly foundation.
