In-depth analysis of Messari: why NEAR will occupy a place 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 more than 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 its listing. The following is an overall analysis report on the development of NEAR.

1. Overview of the agreement and team

NEAR was founded in 2018 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov. As students, they both topped the ICPC World Finals International Collegiate Programming Competition, where Alex won a gold medal. Alex worked as a software engineer at Microsoft, while Illia worked in engineering at Google, spending time on its TensorFlow machine learning platform. They met on unrelated jobs, and machine learning problems brought them together.

At the time, creators were exploring a way to solve procedural composition, and they needed developers from around the world to help solve the problem with small chunks of code. To send payments to these people, the team tried to use traditional financial networks, but they were too slow or too expensive, and when they tried to use cryptocurrency platforms, they ran into problems. Existing blockchains are either too slow, too expensive, or cannot handle enough transactions. From this they started trying to build a better blockchain, and the NEAR protocol was launched.

As they delved into the technology of Ethereum, the largest smart contract platform, the NEAR team discovered that the way of thinking of coding on Ethereum is very unintuitive for most traditional developers. They built NEAR's components from scratch using industry-standard tools used by Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants, including leveraging WebAssembly to enable the use of standard programming languages. This highlights a key ethos of the NEAR team: a developer-first mentality in everything they do. NEAR can support any language that can be compiled to WebAssembly, which currently includes Java, Go, Rust, and others. This should make it easier for Web2 developers to create applications instead of having to learn a very specific language (like Solidity, Ethereum's preferred language) to start coding. WebAssembly also allows developers to more easily port their legacy applications to Web3. If NEAR programmers want more flexibility in building their applications, Rust will be their preferred coding language.

As this flexibility was added to blockchain technology, NEAR's vision evolved to be the foundational platform on which a decentralized or "open web" could be built. To achieve this scale, the existing underlying blockchain must be able to handle huge transaction volumes quickly and inexpensively, and NEAR is working hard to achieve all of these goals.