NEAR Protocol is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain that allows for serverless deployment of applications and smart contracts with a focus on usability for developers and users.
Account addresses are human readable and end in .near, with a length between 2 and 64 characters. It is also possible to generate subaccounts, similar to domain patterns.
The protocol is developer friendly because smart contracts can be written in many languages, as long as it compiles to WebAssembly.
The NEAR EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) allows to copy and paste existing smart contracts (written in Solidity) onto a dedicated shard.
Scaling
NEAR is taking advantage of sharding from the beginning. In order to process data in parallel on subsections of the blockchain, sharding makes it possible that each shard has its own set of witnesses, instead of having all witnesses approving every single block of the complete chain. This helps keeping each validator node smaller. Lower hardware requirements enable more validators to participate, which increases decentralization.
Economics
Initial supply is 1 billion with a static inflation of 5%. It is possible to earn rewards by staking to validators. Rewards are being paid every 12 hours (1 epoch). Unstaking (Unbonding) takes 3 epochs. The expected rate of rewards is currently around 12%. Rewards get automatically added to your staked balance.
Exchanges
NEAR is currently easily accessible on Huobi and Binance.
Links
A list of projects on NEAR: https://awesomenear.com
NEAR documentation: https://docs.near.org
NEAR wallet: https://wallet.near.org
NEAR explorer: https://explorer.near.org
NEAR rewards calculator: https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/near-protocol
NEAR economics: https://bisontrails.co/near-token-economics
NEAR White Paper: https://near.org/papers/the-official-near-white-paper