NEAR is a fast, secure, and eco-friendly blockchain that supports decentralized applications with low transaction fees.
NEAR is a user-friendly, certified carbon-neutral blockchain designed to be fast, secure, and scalable. It supports the development of decentralized and community-owned applications with low transaction fees. Its native token is NEAR.
NEAR uses the eco-friendly Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Validators stake NEAR tokens for the chance to be chosen to add new blocks to the blockchain. If they act maliciously or fail to perform their duties, they will be penalized by the system.
NEAR uses sharding, a Layer 1 scaling solution, to keep the network running smoothly no matter how many transactions need to be processed at once. Instead of waiting for the entire blockchain to process a block, the network is split into multiple independent segments, or “shards,” that process transactions simultaneously. Each shard produces its own chunk of the whole block. These chunks are later assembled into a complete block and added to the blockchain. Sharding allows the network to complete a transaction in less than two seconds.
Unlike many blockchains that use long strings of numbers and letters as addresses, NEAR allows users to register account names that are easier to remember, such as company.near or sub-account names such as ceo.company.near.
For security purposes, NEAR accounts can have multiple private keys, each with different permissions. For instance, a user could have one private key for making regular transactions and another key for a specific decentralized app. A key could also be restricted to interact with a specific smart contract or to limit the amount of funds it can spend. This increases the security of the account since if one key is compromised, the damage is limited to the specific permissions granted to that key.
If an account or smart contract stores data, a corresponding amount of NEAR tokens must be locked up as a form of "rent" for the storage used.
With fast, efficient, and sustainable technology, NEAR ensures that scalability is no longer a barrier for developers and users alike. This makes it a powerful option for building environmentally friendly blockchain projects in the future.
