NEAR Protocol NEAR

NEAR Protocol is a proof-of-stake blockchain launched in 2020, founded by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov — the former a machine-learning researcher who worked on the paper that introduced the transformer architecture. It was built around a single goal: make blockchain applications feel like ordinary web applications.

Two design choices follow from that. Accounts use readable names rather than raw hexadecimal addresses, and applications can pay transaction fees on a user's behalf, so someone can use an app without first acquiring a token. Underneath, the chain splits work across shards so capacity grows with usage instead of competing for one shared queue.

What it is not is a solved usability problem. Readable account names make addresses easier to check; they do nothing about the fact that losing the keys still loses the funds. Sharding arrived in stages over several years rather than at launch, as it has everywhere it has been attempted. And the ecosystem, while active, is materially smaller than Ethereum's or Solana's — the project has repositioned its public messaging more than once, most recently around AI, which is a signal worth reading either as adaptability or as a search for a use case.