What Is NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?

NEAR Protocol NEAR Protocol is the blockchain for AI. A high-performance, AI-native platform built to power the next generation of decentralized applications and intelligent agents. It provides the infrastructure AI needs to transact, operate, and interact across Web2 and Web3. NEAR combines three core elements: User-Owned AI, which ensures agents act in users’ best interests; Intents and Chain Abstraction, which eliminate blockchain complexity for seamless, goal-driven transactions across chains; and a sharded blockchain architecture that delivers the scalability, speed, and low-cost execution needed for real-world AI and Web3 use. This integrated stack makes NEAR the foundation for building secure, user-owned, AI-native applications at internet scale

Who Are the Founders of NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?

Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov founded NEAR Protocol in 2018 with the goal to build a scalable, usable blockchain. They had previously founded NEAR AI as a startup in 2017 with the goal to teach machines to code, then discovered Web3 as users and decided to apply their distributed systems expertise to architect a new protocol. Before NEAR, Polosukhin was a machine learning researcher at Google and co-authored "Attention Is All You Need," the paper that launched the transformer architecture powering today's popular LLMs. Skidanov was previously engineer #1 and director of engineering at Microsoft's SingleStore and an OpenAI contributor.

What Makes NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Unique?

NEAR Protocol is unique because it was purpose-built for AI from day one—not retrofitted after the fact. Founded by AI researchers, its architecture was designed to support intelligent systems at scale. With Nightshade sharding, NEAR can handle billions of transactions without congestion or rising fees. Developers can build using familiar languages like JavaScript and Rust, onboard users without wallets, and tap into other blockchains without bridges through Chain Signatures and NEAR Intents. Its progressive security model, low predictable fees, and native support for AI agents make NEAR the most practical blockchain for building the next generation of autonomous applications.

NEAR Protocol’s Security

NEAR uses a variation of the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism called Doomslug. Doomslug requires 2 rounds of communication to reach full BFT finality, but additionally provides near-instant practical finality after just 1 communication round. Thanks to this Doomslug finalizes twice as many blocks than other consensus algorithms

How Many NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Coins Are There in Circulation?

The total supply of NEAR is 1 billion tokens, according to the following token distribution:

• 17.2% - Community Grants
• 11.4% - Operation Grants
• 10% - Foundation Endowment
• 11.7% - Early Ecosystem
• 14% - Core Contributors
• 17.6% - Backers
• 6.1% - Small Backers
• 12% - Community Sale

NEAR Protocol launched its mainnet on April 22, 2020 with 1 billion NEAR tokens created at genesis. 5% of additional supply is issued each year to support the network as epoch rewards, of which 90% goes to validators (4.5% total) and 10% to the protocol treasury (0.5% total). 30% of transaction fees are paid out as rebates to contracts that interact with a transaction, while the remaining 70% are burned. The NEAR token is used for:

• Fees for processing transactions and storing data.
• Running validator nodes on the network via staking NEAR tokens.
• Used for governance votes to determine how network resources are allocated.

Where Can You Buy NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?

NEAR is available on Binance, Coinbase, OKX, Gate.io, Huobi, Kucoin, Kraken, Crypto.com, Revolut