NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol is a Layer 1 blockchain founded by Illia Polosukhin — one of the co-authors of the 2017 'Attention Is All You Need' paper that introduced the transformer architecture underlying most modern large language models — and Alexander Skidanov, a former Microsoft engineer. Launched on mainnet in 2020, NEAR was built with a singular focus: making blockchain technology accessible to mainstream users and developers who are not crypto-native. Where earlier chains treated user experience as a downstream problem, NEAR baked usability decisions into the protocol layer.

NEAR's most distinctive feature is its emphasis on usability. Instead of long hexadecimal addresses, NEAR uses human-readable account names (like 'alice.near' or 'bank.near'), with subaccounts (sub.alice.near) that provide hierarchical namespacing. Its account model supports multiple access keys per account, each with different permission scopes: a 'function-call' key can only invoke specific methods on specific contracts up to a spending limit, enabling wallet-less session keys for games and social apps. NEAR's Meta Transactions and FastAuth infrastructure allow users to sign up with just an email address — a relayer submits the transaction and pays the gas, and the private key is derived from the user's auth session rather than a seed phrase. This eliminates the single-point-of-failure problem of traditional seed phrases for onboarding users, though users who want full self-custody can always export and manage their keys directly.

For developers, NEAR supports smart contracts written in Rust and JavaScript (via a WebAssembly-compiled subset), dramatically lowering the barrier to entry compared to learning Solidity. NEAR uses a sharding mechanism called Nightshade, which splits the network into parallel segments (shards) that process transactions simultaneously. This allows the network to scale linearly — adding more shards increases throughput proportionally — while a single logical global state is maintained through cross-shard receipts.

Since 2023, NEAR has pivoted more explicitly toward what it calls 'chain abstraction' and the 'blockchain operating system': a vision in which end users interact with a single NEAR-based interface that can transact across many chains (Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, various L2s) via chain signatures, meta transactions, and cross-chain intents. This makes NEAR less a competitor to other L1s and more a coordination layer atop them. Polosukhin's ongoing AI work also positions NEAR at the intersection of blockchain and AI infrastructure — NEAR.AI is exploring on-chain and off-chain AI agents that use NEAR accounts as their identity and payment layer.