History of NEAR Protocol
NEAR Protocol, a Layer 1 blockchain,
originated from an AI-focused startup and was developed to solve the
critical challenges of scalability, usability, and developer experience
prevalent in earlier blockchains. Founding and Early Vision 2017: NEAR AI - The story begins when Illia
Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov co-founded NEAR AI, a startup
focused on teaching machines to code.2 They were both veterans of
large-scale distributed systems and AI, with Polosukhin co-authoring the
landmark "Attention Is All You Need" paper (which introduced the
Transformer architecture) and Skidanov being a former engineer at Microsoft and
SingleStore.3 2018: Protocol Concept - While exploring
blockchain platforms for their AI-related work, they found existing solutions
couldn't scale effectively to meet their needs.4 This realization
led them to shift focus and begin developing their own blockchain, the NEAR
Protocol, with the goal of building a sharded, scalable, and highly usable
platform.5 2019: Foundation Established - The non-profit NEAR
Foundation was established in Switzerland to support the growth and
decentralization of the NEAR Protocol ecosystem. Launch and Key
Milestones
|
Year |
Milestone |
Description |
|
April 2020 |
Mainnet Launch |
The NEAR Protocol mainnet went live in phases, starting
with a more centralized operation before transitioning to full
community-governed Proof-of-Stake. |
|
September 2020 |
Community Operation |
The network became fully community-operated, and a vote
later in October enabled token transfers. |
|
2021 |
Interoperability & EVM |
The Rainbow Bridge went live, enabling
interoperability with the Ethereum blockchain, and Aurora, an Ethereum
Virtual Machine (EVM) environment, was introduced to allow Ethereum-compatible
dApps to run on NEAR. |
|
2021–2022 |
Sharding Progress |
The first phases of the protocol's core scaling
technology, Nightshade sharding, were implemented and progressed,
significantly increasing network capacity. |
|
2023 |
Blockchain Operating System (BOS) |
NEAR introduced the Blockchain Operating System (BOS)
initiative, aiming to create a common layer for frontends, components, and
smart contracts across different blockchains, a concept they now frame as
"Chain Abstraction." |
NEAR Protocol uses a unique sharding
mechanism called Nightshade to achieve high scalability and low fees,
aiming to simplify the experience for both users (with human-readable account
names like alice.near) and developers (supporting familiar languages like Rust).6
