Discover the latest advancements in blockchain technology with our in-depth exploration of NEAR Protocol’s significant developments in 2023. As one of the forefront layer-one blockchains, it continues redefining decentralized technology’s landscape.
CryptoMode delves into five key milestones achieved by NEAR this year, from strategic partnerships and community empowerment to groundbreaking technical enhancements.
Robust Ecosystem Growth
NEAR Protocol has demonstrated significant growth since its Mainnet launch in late 2020. By 2023, it has become one of the leading layer-one blockchains, boasting 22 million accounts and 600K monthly active wallets.
This remarkable expansion is evidenced by a 15-fold increase in users and projects in just one year. Moreover, NEAR Foundation’s prudent treasury management ensures it has enough capital for at least five years of operations, even in bear market conditions.
Strategic Partnerships
NEAR’s approach to growth in 2023 involves forming partnerships with major applications and brands, leveraging their substantial communities. This strategy targets high-traction verticals like sports, entertainment, and loyalty programs.
Notable partnerships include collaborations with Grupo Nutresa, Google Cloud, and Sweat Economy, focusing on real-use cases like ticketing and earning, enhancing user engagement on the platform.
Empowering the Community through DAOs
NEAR Protocol is shifting its focus to empower its community in 2023. It will encourage expansion through grants, primarily distributed by three major community DAOs: Developer DAO, Marketing DAO, and Creatives DAO.
This decentralizes key ecosystem elements, as NEAR Foundation will no longer directly allocate capital to projects. These DAOs, supported by the NEAR Developer Community (NDC), play a pivotal role in ecosystem governance, including launching a new Governance Working Group and a v1 governance infrastructure.
NEAR Foundation’s Early-Stage Accelerator
NEAR Foundation is launching an early-stage accelerator in 2023 to support emerging projects and founders. This initiative provides comprehensive assistance, including education, technology, hiring, legal, UX, and go-to-market guidance.
This support aims to nurture these projects into landmark Web3 initiatives, fostering growth and innovation within the NEAR ecosystem.
Technical Enhancements and Blockchain Operating System
NEAR Protocol is working on numerous technical advancements. These include the development of NEAR Crowd, a gig economy platform, and NEAR Social, an on-chain social network with a unique widget framework. Additionally, NEAR is improving onboarding processes and integrating features like EVM wallets, native meta transactions, and new chat/social capabilities. These improvements aim to transform NEAR into a global blockchain operating system, enhancing the experience for developers and users.
Other significant technical progress includes proposals for account namespaces and wasm submodules, improvements in flat storage and state sync, and the integration of finite wasm with nearcore. These enhancements improve the NEAR blockchain’s security, efficiency, and scalability. Furthermore, the focus in the latter part of 2023 will shift to Phase 2 of sharding, a crucial step in evolving NEAR’s infrastructure.