Near Protocol is a fully operational open source layer-1 blockchain created as the community-ruled cloud computing platform. It overcomes some of the limitations of Web3 adoption that other blockchains face, such as low transaction speed, low throughput, and bad interoperability. Thus it offers a perfect environment for dApps and developers. 

Near Protocol uses its Nightshade technology to massively improve transaction throughput. It is a kind of sharding where the individual validation sets process the transactions in parallel in several sharded chains, thus increasing the capacity of the network. In the Nightshade, each block builds a fraction (a “chunk”) of the next block allowing the network to process over 100 000 transactions per second with almost instant transaction finality due to the one-second block cadence and the fees as close to zero as possible.

In Near account, names are made human-readable and easier to memorize unlike cryptographic wallet addresses on the networks like Ethereum. Additionally, it offers unique solutions for the scaling issues and its own consensus mechanism called “Doomslug”.

The protocol has also built a bridge to Ethereum so the users can transfer ERC-20 tokens from Near to the Ethereum platform. 

The concept of completely sharded blockchain was introduced in 2019 by the Near Collective community, which works on the initial code and the updates of the ecosystem. The mainnet was launched on April 22, 2020. The end goal of the project is to create a “secure enough” blockchain that will be able to manage valuable assets like money and identities with fast enough performance. 

The founder of the protocol is Erik Trautman, an entrepreneur with a Wall Street background, Illia Polosukhin, who has experience working for Google, and a computer scientist Alexander Skidanov. The rest of the team is also known for their experience in building real-world sharding systems at scale.