NEAR Protocol: Reimagine Your World

The NEAR protocol is a Layer-one (L1) blockchain network that features its coin, NEAR. Launched on April 22, 2020, with 1 billion NEAR coins minted, the network is designed to improve on various limitations associated with other blockchain networks such as low speeds, high fees and poor interoperability. 

The NEAR Protocol functions on a Proof-of-Stake election mechanism called Thresholded Proof-of-Stake (TPoS). Here, a large pool of participants called witnesses is tasked with making decisions on the network.

The network forms a perfect setting for DApps and rollup protocols due to its user-friendly platform. the network uses a unique scaling solution through its consensus mechanism known as “Doomslug”

Number of Contributors

Armed with a war-chest of five coding languages including Rust, JavaScript, Python, TypeScript and WebAssembly, near features a vibrant contributor community with the near core having 66 contributors. 85.6% of contributors however use the Rust programming language to build and polish the master code.

Number Of Issues And Pull Requests.

NEAR provides potential contributors with various repos to contribute to. Users intending to collaborate are expected to fork a repository, work on their fork and then submit their pull request. The community devs will review the pull request before merging it into the main repo if they are satisfied.

As of 30/12/2021, there are 419 open issues on NEAR’s core code with 1766 having been closed since its debut. 101 pull requests remain on the community’s to-do list while 3508 have already been marked as closed.

Number of Commits

The NEAR developer team can track the blockchain’s activities or well-being through the commits submitted to its code. Every change to the codebase of Near Protocol is registered as a commit. More active projects have many commits while dead projects have nearly none.

Excluding merges, as of 30/12/2021, 25 authors have pushed 269 commits to master and 62 commits to all branches. On master, 511 files have changed and there have been 14,944 additions and 14, 783 deletions.

Number of Releases

The number of releases depicts the healthiness of a network. The NEAR protocol has had an abundance of improvements and tweaks to the performance, stability, and security of the network since launching.

In 2021 alone, Near’s engineering team oversaw 20 upgrades to the protocol. One of the most important upgrades was the “Implicit Accounts”.   This allows NEAR to have Ethereum style accounts that are public keys. They are created on-chain when someone transfers a nonzero amount of tokens to this account.

Number of Forks

The Near core developer team has launched many forks on the blockchain to push long-planned upgrades to the network. According to Github data, there have been 221 forks on the network since launch. Given that NEAR utilizes the TPoS mechanism, most of its upgrades have been built with the issues of security, speed and interoperability at heart. 

To date, NEAR’s most notable fork has been its  Nightshade Sharding Upgrade. Although the feature was launched in 2020, it was not until November 2021 that it hit the mainnet. Sharding is designed to improve the speed of transactions, heighten security through the prevention of long-range attacks and enable the network to onboard millions of users into the world of Web3 without skipping a beat. 

Near Website: NEAR protocol

Near GitHub: https://github.com/near

PN: “This data is not final and may be updated from time to time”