As crypto continues to evolve, we need to continue to evolve how we look at it.

wonderful himself, Kevin O’Leary stated that he “doesn’t look at Bitcoin as a coin, it’s software…Ethereum isn’t a coin, it’s software.” video link (0:34)

This is a very sound-minded way to think about this; and he’s spot on by saying this.

In this video I’m going to tell you about a project that has the software angle of crypto completely covered, and although it’s already inside the top 35 projects, it has a long way to go to break into the top 10…but considering how many heavy hitters they have on their team AND the unconventional approach they’re taking to crypto as a software, it’s possible, and they’re NEARly there 😉

Near Protocol launched its mainnet in October 2020, and ever since they’ve been one to watch.

Vitalik Buterin HIMSELF stated that Near is one of Ethereum’s biggest challengers…more on that later.

According to their Twitter, they’re a climate neutral, high speed, low transaction fee layer 1 blockchain.

According to their website, Near consumes in a year the same energy Bitcoin consumes in 3 minutes.

This delegated proof of stake project is building an infrastructure for the “New internet” to have higher security and privacy. Built from the ground up to be performant, secure and scalable.

It’s built for developers by developers, and one of their goals is to make it easy for the masses to build on Web3

Instead of coding in Solidity, which is a tough programming language only 25 thousand or so people know how to code in, NEAR can be programmed in JavaScript or Rust, which are much more common. This attracts Devs to the project as well as the simple SDKs

Another incentive for Devs is that they receive 30% of the gas fees from smart contracts, the other 70% is burned, which helps as a deflationary mechanism.

According to com, there are 916 projects building in the Near ecosystem.

Not only is the eco-system booming, their team is TOP NOTCH.

Top Notch Team including:

Illia Polosukhin – Co founder. former Engineering manager at google

Alex Skidanov- Co founder Former softward Dev at Microsoft

Marieke Flament- CEO, formally worked for Louis Vuitton, Hotels.com and helped USDC scale from 0 to two million users in less than two years.

Several people on the team are international collegiate programming contest winners/ “they claim to have built the only real world sharding system at scale”

Another great factor about NEAR is that they’re WELL FUNDED. Bear markets absolutely decimate alt-coins. NEAR is here to stay.

Before they even got off the ground, they raised 50 million in for months with no product thanks to VC firm Y-Combinator

According to the io, “VCs backed NEAR to the tune of $566 Million so far, including Andreessen Horowitz, DCG, Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, Accomplice, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Blockchange, Dragonfly Capital, Blockchain.com and others.”

They even have an NFT partnership with deadmau5

What separates NEAR from the crowd, something they’re already doing that even Ethereum isn’t doing, is sharding.

Simply put, this is when they total load of the network is broken into sections, or shards, and each shard handles a fraction of the load. This is the key to their heightened scalability, speed and security.

The Near Network runs on NightShade- which is their proof of stake/ sharding mechanism.

Instead of sidechains, they use shards.

ETH wants to get to sharding, near already has it

Because they have sharding, they can process up to 100,000 transactions per second.

With nightshade, the transaction cost is less than a penny, they have over 20 million accounts, 400k daily transaction and a 2.4 second time of finality.

Near’s transaction count is three times lower than ETH, but it completes transactions five times faster.

The Rainbow Bridge easily allows transfers from ETH to NEAR.

DoomSlug is the name for how Near produces blocks

Allows practical finality after one round of communication…compared to 35 blocks like ETH

Instead of having a random combination of letters and numbers, Near has human readable addresses without ENS service like with ETH.

You can’t talk about Near without Aurora, which is their layer 2. Like Matic for Ethereum.

Basically a copy of EVM

Devs can easily copy and paste eth apps onto near

It’s also a smart contract on the mainnet, taps into sharding for scaling.

Aurora community is massive. Projects building on Aurora include The Graph, Curve, Etherscan, Gnosis Safe, Synapse, Covalent and many more. There are over 200 projects on Aurora.

Remember, like O’Leary said, crypto is software, and this software is primed for mass adoption because they’re ahead of the curve.

Tokenomics

The token Near, obviously is a Governance token.

The coin has a 5% inflation rewards rate to incentivize network security, but there is also deflationary mechanics as 70% of gas fees are burned. If it’s inflationary or deflationary depends on network activity.

Total supply is 1 billion…820.9 million already in circulation. Supply Curve ends 2027

9 Billion Market cap. Currently trading for 2.08

It’s all time high is around 21 dollars, if it was to go back to that from here, basically a 10x sounds nice. I believe it’s capable of getting there because, this crypto, this software, is accessible and easy for the masses of Devs to work with, it’s well funded, they’re ahead of the curve with sharding and their eco-system/ layer 2’s are growing by the hour.

Final verdict: Bullish.