In-depth analysis of Messari: why NEAR will occupy a plac in the public chain

The competition of public chains has always been a hot spot in the crypto industry. In 2021, it will be in a state of prosperity. Whether it is ecology or token increase, major public chains have achieved good results. The most prominent representatives of public chains are Solana, Avalanche and Terra.

There is also an emerging public chain in the public chain track that cannot be ignored. Although it has not received much attention, its technology is very novel, and it is unique among many public chains that "change the soup without changing the medicine". The POS public chain NEAR using sharding technology. NEAR is committed to becoming the most friendly smart contract platform for users and developers, so NEAR is good at looking at problems from the perspective of users and developers, and also occupies a place in the competitive public chain because of its sharding technology.

Of course, NEAR itself has many shortcomings. This article analyzes the NEAR ecology in detail, introduces NEAR's novel technologies, and also analyzes some of the risks it may face.

The following content is from Messari and compiled by Corn, the author of Ostrich Blockchain.



The competition in the public chain track has become more crowded and fierce after the rise of DeFi. There are already hundreds of public chain competitors, and the total market value of the overall cryptocurrency has also risen. Despite the huge size of the market, there are still only two major large players, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum, which control over 50% of the market.

Most emerging public chains are concentrated in the field of smart contracts, and Ethereum has dominated the smart contract market since its emergence. However, in the past 18 months, a large number of Ethereum competitors have successfully broken the circle. From the perspective of total locked value (TVL), in early 2021, Ethereum accounted for 97% of the entire smart contract market, but as of 2022 In March 2018, that figure had fallen below 60%.

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The current bottlenecks of Ethereum are obvious, such as network congestion, high gas fees, and low scalability. While the smart contract market is getting bigger and continues to grow rapidly, it’s no surprise that competition is intensifying. Competitors to Ethereum are trying to break the current bottleneck of Ethereum, they want to be faster, cheaper or provide a more attractive reward structure. But how many winners are there in the end?

As highlighted in Messari's Cryptocurrency Papers 2022, the trend in tech platforms is a duopoly. Ethereum and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) have a big lead, and it’s hard to beat them entirely. Additionally, there is already a large group of developers and builders building on the EVM. The advantages of EVM are so great that major competitors are using or transitioning to EVM rather than trying to compete head-to-head without this capability. Even competitors like Solana and Cardano have recently added or are adding EVM compatibility (Terra being an exception). In many cases, EVM has cemented its position through its network effects.

If we think the smart contract space will be dominated by two players, which public chain will stand out? Solana, Avalanche, and Terra delivered strong results in 2021, growing their respective market shares (as measured by TVL) by 4%, 5%, and 8%, respectively. Cardano has long been the second-largest smart contract platform by total market cap, only recently surpassed by Terra and BNB. After years of delays, Candano's smart contract functionality finally went live on the network in September 2021, but Cardano only gained 0.05% of the smart contract market share.

In mid-2020, a new agreement joined the fray to try to grab a spot. With an experienced team, strong capital and novel underlying technology, NEAR has rapidly grown to a market value of more than $10 billion within one year of listing. The following is an overall analysis report on the development of NEAR.