NEAR is a public blockchain platform that uses a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and provides smart-contract functionality. Its native cryptocurrency is NEAR. It was founded in 2018 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, with mainnet launching in 2020.
Designed to maintain decentralized applications and high-throughput transactions through a sharded architecture, NEAR gained traction as an alternative to Ethereum and other layer-one blockchain networks.
NEAR Protocol was founded in early 2017 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov. Initially, the project was established as Near.ai, an artificial intelligence startup focused on program synthesis. Polosukhin was a former engineering manager at Google Research, where he co-authored the seminal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the transformer architecture. Skidanov was previously the director of engineering at MemSQL and a software engineer at Microsoft.
While developing their AI platform, the founders hired a global network of freelance developers. They reportedly encountered significant friction in making international payments using traditional banking and existing blockchain networks like Ethereum, which they found lacked the necessary throughput and cost-efficiency. In August 2018, the team pivoted from AI to building a new layer 1 blockchain protocol designed to support decentralized applications (dApps) at scale.
The project began development on its sharded architecture in late 2018. In July 2019, NEAR raised $12.1 million in a funding round led by Metastable Capital and Accomplice (venture capital).
The NEAR mainnet officially launched in April 2020, initially operating in a "restricted" proof of authority mode to ensure stability. In May 2020, the project closed a $21.6 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). By October 2020, the network transitioned to a fully decentralized proof of stake consensus mechanism after a community vote enabled token transfers and decentralized governance.
In April 2021, NEAR launched the Rainbow Bridge, an interoperability protocol allowing users to transfer ERC-20 tokens and assets between Ethereum and NEAR. This was followed by the launch of Aurora, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible layer built on NEAR, which allowed developers to deploy Ethereum-based smart contracts with lower transaction fees.
In January 2022, the protocol announced a $150 million seed investment round led by Three Arrows Capital. This was followed in April 2022 by a $350 million funding round led by Tiger Global Management, which at the time was one of the largest capital raises for a layer 1 blockchain.
During this period, NEAR began the rollout of its multi-phase sharding design, known as "Nightshade." The first phase, "Simple Nightshade," was launched in late 2021, and Phase 1, which introduced "chunk-only producers" to increase decentralization of the validator set, was implemented in September 2022.
In 2023, the NEAR Foundation pivoted its strategic focus toward "Chain Abstraction," a concept aimed at hiding the complexities of blockchain infrastructure from the end-user. During the same year, the foundation launched the Blockchain Operating System (BOS), a decentralized frontend framework for interacting with various web3 stacks.
In early 2024, NEAR drew industry attention for a marketing campaign where its official X account was temporarily rebranded with the phrase "it's all a lie." While later revealed to be a promotional tactic for an upcoming conference, the move received criticism from some market analysts for resembling a security breach.
In August 2024, the network successfully implemented Nightshade 2.0, an upgrade that introduced "stateless validation." This technical milestone was designed to significantly lower the hardware requirements for network validators and further improve the protocol's horizontal scalability. By 2025, Polosukhin and the NEAR Foundation announced a return to the project's AI roots, launching initiatives to integrate on-chain AI models and "User-Owned AI" ecosystems to counter the centralized nature of major LLM providers.
In 2022, Skyward Finance, an IDO/launchpad built on NEAR blockchain, was exploited for roughly $3 million after an attacker abused a flaw in the projectâÂÂs treasury redemption contract. The bug, identified by security firm BlockSec, failed to check for duplicate token account IDs, enabling the attacker to redeem wrapped NEAR in a loop within a single transaction. Skyward acknowledged that its treasury had been drained and advised users to cease interacting with the contracts, noting that the incident rendered the SKYWARD token effectively worthless.
In 2023, Messari's analysts have questioned validator decentralization on Avalanche, Solana, NEAR, and others blockchain platforms. Messari study found that roughly 35% of NEARâÂÂs staked tokens were hosted on Amazon Web Services, yielding a hosting âÂÂoperational Nakamoto coefficientâ of 1 (i.e., more than one-third of stake concentrated on a single provider). The report also observed geographic concentration of validators and stake in the United States and Germany, limited presence in underrepresented regions, and reliance on a single validator client at the time; taken together, NEARâÂÂs aggregated operational Nakamoto coefficient was estimated at ~1.3, indicating elevated susceptibility to correlated infrastructure or jurisdictional failures relative to a more distributed network.
In 2024, NEAR blockchain drew criticism after its official X (formerly Twitter) account abruptly changed its display name to âÂÂitâÂÂs all a lieâ and posted anti-crypto messages that prompted widespread speculation the account had been hacked. NEAR later indicated the episode was a marketing tactic tied to an upcoming event, which industry commentators and developers criticized as tone-deaf given the prevalence of genuine security breaches in the sector; some argued the stunt risked harming the projectâÂÂs credibility. During the period of the campaign, Bloomberg reported that NEARâÂÂs token declined by roughly 15% over the preceding week. According to the Bloomberg, also noted that the controversy followed a real security incident in May 2023, when a compromised moderator account on NEARâÂÂs Discord was used to promote a fraudulent airdrop.