On Wednesday, the NEAR blockchain token gained a whopping 40%.
Let's take a look together at what caused the movement and what makes the NEAR Protocol one of the most exciting projects in crypto.
AI hype as a catalyst
The reason for the rise in the share price of $NEAR (+2,2 %) was, among other things, the announcement that NEAR founder Illia Polosukhin will be speaking on the topic of "Transforming AI" at NVIDIA's upcoming GTC24 conference.
Illia himself is a true AI OG.
He worked as a machine learning researcher at Google for ten years, where he was instrumental in developing the Transformer, the AI model behind ChatGPT.
Background on NEAR
Initially founded in 2017 as an AI start-up, NEAR dedicated itself to building its own blockchain network just one year later.
The original goal was to develop a blockchain that would be a cheaper and more performant alternative to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
To achieve this, NEAR relied on sharding, in which the blockchain is divided into smaller, separate blockchains in order to execute transactions in parallel and thus increase throughput (the
number
executed
transactions per second) can be increased.
NEAR today
NEAR is now also developing further blockchain infrastructure.
In addition to its own data availability layer, which is said to be up to 30 times cheaper than Celestia, the company has focused primarily on the topic of chain abstraction.
The most important feature here, and also NEAR's core USP, is called Account Aggregation.
It should enable Web3 users to connect to dApps (decentralized applications) on different networks - including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana - without having to transfer their assets back and forth.
This form of abstraction is made possible by a combination of...
- Chain Signaturesthat allow NEAR accounts to control addresses on other networks and...
- a network of smart contracts and third partiesthat execute the user's trading intentions on other blockchains.
Traction
With an average of 1.2 million daily active users, NEAR is the most used blockchain network in crypto after Tron.
NEAR owes these figures in particular to its integration with the payment system of the Singaporean retail shopping app KaiKai.
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Did you enjoy this short deep dive?
Then take a look at the other topics in today's edition of Blockstories:
- Ethereum: Everything you need to know about the Dencun upgrade
- BlackRock submits next application
- German stock exchange launches crypto trading venue
- 73 million USD for privacy startup
- Details of to the Kamino and Wormhole Airdrop
This way: https://blockstories.beehiiv.com/p/ethereums-dencun-upgrade
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Sources:
NEAR Sharding explained: https://near.org/blog/blockchain-scaling-approaches-near-sharding-vs-layer-2s
NEAR's Data Availability Layer: https://pages.near.org/blog/why-near-data-availability
Chain Abstraction: https://pages.near.org/blog/why-chain-abstraction-is-the-next-frontier-for-web3
Account Aggregation: https://pages.near.org/blog/unlocking-web3-usability-with-account-aggregation
NEAR user numbers: https://app.artemis.xyz/chains
Our report on NEAR's partnership with KaiKai: https://blockstories.beehiiv.com/p/die-wichtigsten-erkenntnisse-vom-rwa-summit
