The Beginner’s Guide to the NEAR Blockchain

Welcome! This guide is intended to help anyone interested in understanding what NEAR actually is. That includes new users, curious community members, prospective partners and new core contributors to the NEAR Collective. I’ll provide a plain-English understanding of what we do, why we do it, and how you can learn what you need in order to get directly involved.

We’ll keep this guide updated over time as well so you can be sure it’s as current as possible.

My assumption is that you’re familiar with the high level of what a blockchain is so I’m not going to be using any of those block-and-line diagrams here. I'll make no assumption about your level of technicality -- you could be a highly technical engineer but you could be a less technical designer or marketer or community manager as well.

The Basics

So what is NEAR (aka “the NEAR Platform”)? NEAR is a decentralized development platform built on top of the NEAR Protocol, which is a public, sharded, developer-friendly, proof-of-stake blockchain. Put another way, NEAR is like a public community-run cloud platform. That means it is a highly scalable, low cost platform for developers to create decentralized apps on top of. While it's built on top of the NEAR Protocol blockchain, the NEAR Platform also contains a wide range of tooling from explorers to CLI tools to wallet apps to interoperability components which help developers build much more easily and the ecosystem to scale more widely.

Whereas most other “scalable” blockchains use approaches that centralize processing on high-end hardware to provide a temporary boost in throughput, NEAR Protocol’s approach allows the platform's capacity to scale nearly linearly up to billions of transactions in a fully decentralized way.

NEAR is being built by the NEAR Collective, a global collection of people and organizations who are collaboratively building this massive open source project. Everyone in this Collective is fanatically focused on enabling usability improvements for both developers and their end-users so the next wave of apps can cross the chasm to a more general audience that has thus far been unable to consistently work with blockchain-based apps built on today’s platforms.

This Collective contains a number of extraordinary teams and includes championship-level competitive programmers who have built some of the only at-scale sharded database systems in the world. In a space dominated by academic research projects and failures to launch, NEAR has a team well accustomed to shipping. It is also backed by financial and community contributions by the best names in the crypto industry.

Why are we doing this? Because this is an opportunity to build the ground floor for a far better Internet which puts the user in control of their money, their data and their identity. With the potential for creating composable open-state services, it’s a chance to kick start the biggest wave of innovation — and business progress — since the Internet. This vision is the biggest sort -- there are few opportunities in the world larger than the one we are tackling.

Let’s be clear: NEAR is not a side chain, an ERC20 token or a highly specialized task-specific blockchain… it is nothing less than a brand new and fundamentally reimagined layer 1 protocol designed to independently power the base of the emerging Open Web stack.Ok... Let’s back up and assume you’re still getting up to speed on what the heck a public, sharded, developer-friendly, proof-of-stake blockchain really is.

From 10,000 feet…

The NEAR Collective is basically building the infrastructure for a new Internet which makes it harder for giant companies to steal your data and for bad guy countries to shut it down. People have been trying to figure this stuff out with similar technologies since 2008 but it’s been slow going.

You’ve heard of Bitcoin, that digital currency everyone thinks is only used by criminals and third-world dictators. Well, despite a really bad reputation and a lot of hiccups along the way, ten years later they still haven’t been able to kill Bitcoin so you know it’s built on very resilient technology. We’re basically trying to use that same kind of technology to power a brand new Internet which is just as hard to kill or screw up.

A few other projects, especially one called Ethereum, tried doing this a few years ago and got a really good start but ultimately got totally bogged down in the growing pains of early technology and they were too slow and expensive to get mainstream adoption. Now, a lot of really smart people are working on a way to speed this up and keep costs low while making sure this new Internet is just as hard to mess up as Bitcoin.

You can read more about this journey in the Evolution of the Open Web.

From 1,000 feet…

We aren’t building the only blockchain which is taking on the scaling and cost problems but NEAR has a team that’s all aces and we’re coming at this in a slightly different way.

To set the stage, we’re building a “base-layer blockchain”, meaning that it’s on the same level of the infrastructure as projects like Ethereum, EOS or Polkadot. That means everything else will be built on top of NEAR.

It's a general-purpose platform that allows developers to create and deploy decentralized applications on top of it. A decent analogy is that it’s sort of like Amazon’s AWS platform, which is where most of the applications you know and love host their servers, except the NEAR platform isn’t actually run and controlled by one company, it’s run and controlled by thousands or even millions of people. You can call it a “community-operated cloud” but we usually prefer to simply call it a "decentralized application platform."

The Arc of Technology

It’s worth checking in quickly with how we got here because it will help you understand the context of the current ecosystem. A recent post goes into greater detail but here's the quick version:

Bitcoin is the original “programmable money” or “digital gold”. It has been doing a pretty good job of fulfilling those functions but its use so far as a more general-purpose computing platform (like we’re building) is mostly an accident. Essentially, developers saw they could hack together some basic programs on top of the limited functionality that Bitcoin provided and they began using Bitcoin as the base for some of these new applications because it’s now highly trusted and secure.

Unfortunately, transactions are very costly and, because this was definitely NOT what the Bitcoin platform was meant for, the functionality is very limited. The platform there is slow (roughly 4 transactions per second), costly, and a massive waste of global energy.

Ethereum, back in 2014, tried to directly address this use case by creating a platform that was, from day 1, intended to use the same blockchain technology to build a global virtual computer which any application could be built on top of.

So, if Bitcoin was really just a basic calculator, Ethereum was a fancy TI-83 graphing calculator on which you could write some interesting, if basic, games. While it put lots of good ideas into place, it is also rather slow (14 transactions per second) and still quite costly for developers to use. They’ve tried to upgrade this but are now having difficulty pivoting because of how much technical work, value storage and community growth has already occurred in their legacy model.

“Layer 2” scaling solutions, including “state channels” and “side chains”, have popped up to try and improve the performance and cost of these slower (but rather secure) platforms by taking some of the work off the main chain and doing it elsewhere. They exist for both Bitcoin and Ethereum but haven’t achieved the adoption we hoped.

The first serious challenger blockchains launched in 2017–2018 with a wide variety of approaches to helping the scaling problem. They generally tried centralizing more of the hardware (eg EOS) but most of the approaches are still ultimately bounded by a fixed limit because every single one of the “nodes” that make up the network are repeating the exact same work, whether there are 21 of them or 1,000. So these approaches have been able to achieve throughputs of thousands (or more) transactions per second but often sacrifice decentralization to do so.

Next generation scalable blockchains like NEAR represent the new wave. In this case, NEAR breaks free from the idea that every single node which participates in the network has to run all of the code because that essentially creates one big wasteful bottleneck and slows down all of the other approaches.

To fix this, NEAR uses a technique called “sharding” from the database world (technical explanation) which splits the network so that much of the computation is actually being done in parallel. This allows the network’s capacity to scale up as the number of nodes in the network increases so there isn’t a theoretical limit on the network’s capacity.

Unlike a lot of other sharding approaches, which still require nodes to be run on increasingly complex hardware (reducing the ability of more people to participate in the network), NEAR’s technique allows nodes to stay small enough to run on simple cloud-hosted instances.

But it’s not all about scaling. In fact, for scaling to even be a benefit, developers need to be able to create apps that people actually use and current blockchains make this difficult on both the developer and the end-user. Many of these issues have to be addressed by setting up the protocol properly from the beginning and few projects who focus on scalability have taken this properly into account.

For example, many scalability solutions require developers to build and provision their own blockchain (or "app chain"), which is a massive amount of work and maintenance, and it seems equally as unnecessary for most teams as building and on-premise server farm would be for most traditional web developers. By comparison, NEAR allows developers to just deploy their app without thinking too much about how the infrastructure around it operates or scales, which is more like the modern clouds like Amazon AWS or GCP or Azure which drive almost all of today's web applications.

A few quick notes…

There are a few kinds of projects that sort of fit into the landscape but won’t be covered much further here:

1. Currencies: Fundamentally, any token can operate as a currency because you can use it as a unit of account, a medium of exchange and/or a store of value. But a number of blockchains have been created to specifically act either as currencies (Bitcoin, Zcash, Monero…) or operate directly in the world of currencies (Ripple, Stellar, Libra). These are not general computation platforms, which we’re targeting here, so I’ll leave it at that.
2. Private Chains: Some blockchains, like Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project or R3 Corda, are pitched to big companies as a more secure sort of blockchain because they allow those companies to control all of the nodes of the network. While NEAR also has the ability to provide privacy in its network shards, I’ll ignore this category of chains as well because the biggest security advantages come from broad public decentralization not building an oligopoly of a few big companies controlling the chain.
3. “DAGs”: This one is the trickiest because these chains play in the blockchain world and are, essentially, doing the same sort of thing — creating an immutable (append-only) ledger. They are called “DAGs” because of the computer science term “Directed Acyclic Graph”, which is the actual data structure that makes them up. Generally speaking, these projects, like IOTA, tend to build a complicated mess of transactions among lots of small devices, which functions a lot like a blockchain. It’s scalable but has a lot of security and implementation challenges. I won’t dig deeply into it here but don’t forget about DAGs because many chains, including NEAR, use a sort of smaller DAG somewhere in the process of building their blocks.

More about NEAR

So, as we said before, the collection of teams that make up the NEAR Collective is building the NEAR Platform, which is built on top of the NEAR Protocol, which is a sharded, developer-friendly, proof-of-stake blockchain that developers can build decentralized apps on top of.

Let’s dig into what the NEAR Protocol actually does…

A Decentralized Network

As mentioned above, NEAR is similar in principle to the “cloud-based” infrastructure that developers currently build applications on top of except the cloud is no longer controlled by a single company running a giant data center — that data center is actually made up of all the people around the world who are operating nodes of that decentralized network. Instead of a “company-operated cloud” it is a “community-operated cloud”.

Here are a couple of perspectives on why this decentralization is useful:

1. Developers/Entrepreneurs: It’s good to have an application decentralized this way because, as a developer, you aren’t at the mercy of a single company like Amazon or even a government who might want to shut the app down… both of which have bedeviled companies since the very beginning. During the development process, you also get access to a few extra things “for free” like payments and cryptography, which can be a challenge to set up in a traditional application.
2. End Users: It’s better to have a decentralized application in some cases because the code is all open source (so you know exactly what it’s doing) and it can’t be changed once it has been launched (so there’s no chance they’re going to do sketchy things with your money or data). Even better, the app is actively disincentivized from hoarding your data.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into how this network is run.

The NEAR Token

So who actually runs all those individual “nodes” that make up this decentralized network? Anyone who feels properly incentivized to do so! The incentives for this permissionless network are powered by the NEAR token.

The NEAR token is how people who use applications on the network pay to submit transactions to the nodes who actually run the network. The token is thus a utility — if you hold it, you can use applications hosted on the network.

This is a little different from today’s web, where applications are owned by single developers or corporations who pay their cloud hosting bills on behalf of their users. Some aspects of the NEAR protocol allow developers to do this as well but, for simplicity, we will assume users generally pay directly for their use of the network.

Because NEAR is a permissionless protocol, anyone can run one of the nodes which operate the network by validating transactions which have been submitted to the network. But running infrastructure, even simple code that you can run from a laptop, costs some money and time, so few people would do it for free. Thus, in exchange for performing that service, you earn a portion of the transaction fees paid by users during each block where you are validating transactions.

How does the network make sure you’re actually running the code you’re supposed to and not just freeloading and earning income? You are required to “stake” your tokens (which basically means putting them in escrow) as a gesture of good faith. If you perform any malicious behavior (like trying to hack the system or mess with other people’s transactions), you will lose your stake. The system figures this out by coming to “consensus” among the nodes in each period and determining how the code should have been run so it’s easy to identify who did so improperly.

Luckily, you really don’t have to think about this stuff because, as long as you download and start up the standard node program from a reputable source, it all happens behind the scenes by the application code you downloaded and so you aren’t likely to lose your stake.

How do you make money as a "company"?

Good question. For starters, NEAR is not a company!

One of the biggest stumbling blocks people seem to have with blockchains is figuring out how they work as if they were traditional businesses. And that’s totally valid since the 2017 bubble saw all manner of convoluted monetization schemes which actually didn’t make any sense and usually didn’t require a token anyway.

The key to understanding this is realizing that the entire economics supporting the NEAR network are embedded at the protocol level and allow anyone to participate in the protocol by running a validating node themselves. Users of the network pay costs to use this network and the providers of the network capacity receive rewards from this activity. There is no shadowy company behind it all which is secretly trying to sell subscriptions or anything like that. The protocol has self-sustaining economics. The people who build the early technology are rewarded with participation in the initial allocation of tokens and funded by fiat contributions from early financial backers.

What is the NEAR Collective?

NEAR Collective is the globally distributed group of teams, made up of many individual organizations and contributors, who self-organize in order to bring this technology to life. It is not a business or anything nearly so formal. Think of it instead like the groups of people who run large open-source software projects. One of the Collective's projects is writing the initial code and the reference implementation for the open source NEAR network, sort of like building the rocket boosters on the space shuttle. Their job is to do the necessary R&D work to help the blockchain get into orbit. The code for that chain is open source so literally anyone can contribute to or run it.

It's important to stress that networks like NEAR are designed to be totally decentralized. This means they ultimately operate completely on their own and can’t actually be censored, shut down or otherwise messed with by third parties… not even the teams who initially built them! So, while members of this collective are here to get the ball rolling on building the reference implementation, they quickly become nonessential to the operation of the network once it has started running. In fact, once it's launch-ready, anyone could modify and run the NEAR Protocol code to start up their own blockchain because it’s all open source and any changes would have to be democratically accepted by the independent validators who run it.

That said, the core teams can (and hopefully will) stick around to keep updating the system and performing bug fixes. After the network has been launched, any ongoing development work will hopefully be supported by the governance of the network through grant funding or other means.

One Collective member worth noting is the NEAR Foundation, a nonprofit entity whose entire goal is to build a vibrant and active long-term ecosystem around the blockchain and which has commissioned the development of the reference implementation of that chain. The Foundation helps coordinate some of the early development work and governance activities.

The NEAR blockchain is only one of the NEAR Collective’s projects, so there are plenty of other areas where we can help the ecosystem going forward.

What is the Path Ahead?

In the early phases of this market, projects focused on strutting a bunch of vanity metrics in order to get as many retail investors on board for a big ICO (initial coin offering). That meant trying to have the biggest Telegram community, the most big-name advisors, the best-looking proof-of-concept projects from big businesses and so on.

The ICO boom finished in 2018 so, luckily, we’re able to focus more on what actually matters. In this case, it’s all about community and adoption.

We have extraordinary technical teams who are working to make sure the technology is implemented properly but everything they build will be open source. That means anyone in the world could, theoretically, just copy the code and run their own NEAR blockchain. Now, it’s not quite as easy as that and our teams' expertise puts this version ahead should anyone try that, but ultimately technology is merely a time-based advantage. The real traction comes from building a great community.

The ecosystem is most useful when there are lots of applications and lots of users who want to use those applications. Because we see a world where the major development paradigm is to build in a decentralized fashion, there is *lots* of ground to cover between here and there. So the key metric we’re shooting for is adoption and usage of the platform.

A lot of projects are focusing on targeting developers to build apps on top of their platforms. That’s obviously important since this is a highly technical field but it’s not the only thing that matters. Specifically, if you look at the history of major development platforms, the ones that are truly successful need to support real, at-scale businesses not just a bunch of side projects.

So building an ecosystem that has the kind of functional breadth and technical depth to create at-scale businesses for the long term is everything to us. That requires significant efforts on the dimensions of community building, education and overall user experience. And plenty of cool technical tools as well, of course!

Luckily, if we succeed, we have the opportunity to drive the greatest wealth creation since the original Internet by helping developers and entrepreneurs everywhere access new markets and build new kinds of businesses on top of the NEAR Protocol. The upside of what we’re doing is super exciting!

Why is NEAR going to succeed?

You can take this from two perspectives — what makes the NEAR Protocol likely to actually get to market and what makes it better to developers/end-users once we get it there? Let’s explore both.

Execution Matters

What says the NEAR team is going to out-execute the competition and get into the market with the right technology on the right timeline?

For starters... NEAR has already launched its MainNet genesis! And it handed off operation to the community as planned :). But also...

If you hop over to the NEAR project website and you’ll see the best team in the industry and, importantly, a team who has shipped sharded systems before in production settings. Having that kind of experienced team behind it already sets the NEAR Protocol apart from almost every other network out there.

This technology is complicated! Technically speaking, sharding is a scaling approach that’s being seriously attempted by roughly a dozen chains, including the market-leading Ethereum… but they’ve taken years to put together their proposal and expect to take more years to implement it. So it’s non-trivial to get this started.

To round things out, the NEAR team has the support of the best financial and non-financial backers in the space and a cadre of informal advisors who span everything from economics and mechanism design to cryptography and blockchain design.

Killer Features for Everyone

This market — and the technology — is still in the “roll up your sleeves, it’s going to be messy” phase. Every major stakeholder group has challenges:

1. For developers, that means the tools are really hard to use and hundreds of teams are building hundreds of different things that point in all different directions, including some projects inventing their own programming languages. In short, it’s chaos and it’s painful to develop on existing systems.
2. For end users, the path to getting started with crypto projects and the new web is incredibly long. In the normal web world, you lose a huge portion of users for each step you make them go through before achieving their goal. Right now, to get a brand new user from zero to playing a crypto-based game or sending a friend money, it takes literally *dozens* of steps… and it’s incredibly slow and somewhat expensive to perform these steps. Not ideal.
3. For Validators, the people who run the nodes which actually operate the network, their options for receiving tokens from their communities are very limited by existing protocol designs so they are forced to compete with each other based entirely on price, which commoditizes their offerings and makes them less attractive to prospective delegators who might lend them tokens.

All of these problems require a fanatical focus on user experience and user needs as the driving force for creating technology instead of starting by driving technology forward and then seeing what happens. We’ve been developing the NEAR Protocol and many supporting tools with a focus on these experiences while stepping forward to engage the broader community on solving these issues. It’s not going to be fast or easy, but it *is* the priority for us.

We describe the NEAR platform as “developer-friendly” or “usable” because it implements approaches at the protocol level which address each of those problems:

1. For developers, NEAR's contract-based account model allows them to build advanced permissions into their apps and sign transactions on behalf of users. They also have access to a set of tools that make app composition straightforward and the opportunity for a protocol-level fee rebate which compensates them for creating well-used apps and critical system infrastructure.
2. For end users, the flexible account model allows them to benefit from "progressive UX", which means they don't have to touch wallets or tokens until they are ready because the application is hiding them behind the scenes. For their end-users, the way our accounts are set up allows for smoother onboarding experiences which don’t require as many steps or as many annoying wallet pop-ups.
3. For validators, having access to "delegation" at the contract level means that they can create infinitely diversified offerings of their services, thus making NEAR a very attractive place to run validating nodes.

What are the use cases for the NEAR blockchain?

One of the hottest questions is what the use cases are for blockchains precisely because it hasn’t been definitively answered. Sure, it’s being used in everything from supply chain tracking to cross border payments, but most of these cases are still early enough that they haven’t achieved mainstream adoption. We’re still in a phase of trying new things to see what new primitives they unlock and how they extend.

In our case, we’re talking to hundreds of existing businesses and opportunistic entrepreneurs about how a truly scalable, usable blockchain can unlock new business opportunities. I won’t spoil the surprises by getting into that here but suffice it to say, there are a few burning areas where people are begging us to solve their problems and existing blockchains have been too slow or expensive or painful for users. A couple of areas to start include gaming and decentralized finance but that’s just the beginning. In many cases, it starts by taking the things people already do on less performant chains -- like Open Finance on Ethereum -- and scaling them out to more potential users and uses by providing a more versatile and performant chain.

In the long run, just like with the original Internet revolution, the earliest use cases are likely just going to bridge the gap until people invent entirely new business models. So, while we’re excited about addressing things in the short term, we’re especially excited about building a toolkit that future entrepreneurs can combine with their creativity to change the world in ways we can’t even imagine now.

This is where new ideas around composability of microservices and open/transferrable state (a paradigm we call the Open Web) are really exciting. How different will it be to create businesses which sit atop a portfolio of open services rather than gated APIs and centralized platforms? These are new development paradigms that we’ve only scratched the surface of so far.

What should I learn next?

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably curious to learn more. There are a lot of resources out there but I’ll recommend a reasonable path through them. Blockchain is a highly technical field that covers just about every discipline under the sun so it can feel like drinking from a firehose without proper guidance.

If you’re pretty new to blockchain, start here to get a strong overview of the ecosystem and its development:

1. Deconstructing the blockchain ecosystem (2018, slides)
2. The state of blockchain product, design and development (2018)

After that, it’s a good idea to start diving a little deeper into the functional disciplines. The next layer deeper is to explore the NEAR Protocol White Paper, which is a human-readable deconstruction of every aspect of the project. You can find it along with the other technical papers at:

Technical Stuff

No matter what role you have, you’ll need to get up to speed technically because the lingo is going to come up repeatedly. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to understand all the computer science underneath it but you should know the basics.

Generally:

1. What are decentralized applications and how do they work (slides)
2. Using blockchain in “regular” web and mobile apps (slides)
3. An overview of “all you need to know” in blockchain development by Haseeb Qureshi

NEAR specific:

1. Overview:Check out the NEAR Whitepaper for the first layer of depth into the technical aspects of this project.
2. From there, this blog (at https://www.near.org/blog) is the best record of technical specs as they grow and change over time. Subscribe for updates at https://pages.near.org/newsletter.
3. A good primer is on the Bison Trails blog.
4. Economics:Learn about how NEAR Economics work in the Introduction to NEAR Economics post
5. Dive deeper into the NEAR Economics Paper
6. If you are curious about acquiring tokens in the future, any information about that will be available on the tokens page.
7. Technical:The NEAR Whiteboard Series on YouTube has founders Alex and Illia do technical deep-dives with the founders of over 30 other projects including Ethereum, Cosmos, Nervos, Celo, IOTA, and so on.
8. Differences between the NEAR approach and Ethereum 2.0 sharding (written with Vitalik’s feedback)
9. Our sharding talk at Blockchain@Berkeley
10. Our work with Vlad Zamfir on a sharding POC during the Ethereum SF hackathon

Design

We’re focusing on building a great developer and end-user experience. And here are a few resources that will be helpful from a design perspective.

1. Improving blockchain developer experience (slides)
2. The design of blockchain-based applications (DApps) (slides)
3. Why the future will be driven by “UX Equilibrium”
4. Check out the San Francisco Blockchain Product, Design and Development meetup group to get a sense of the kind of broader community we’re hoping to build across functional disciplines
5. Bonus: Look for YouTube talks from the folks at Consensys, Coinbase and IDEO Colab.

General Resources

Podcasts

Podcasts are one of the best ways to educate yourself because the back catalogs can be very informative. I recommend taking up a time-consuming endurance sport where you can listen to them for hours on end and then consuming the following:

1. Laura Shin’s Unchained (http://unchainedpodcast.co/) and Unconfirmed (https://unconfirmed.libsyn.com/) for plain-English interviews
2. Epicenter (https://epicenter.tv/) for a bit more technical dives into various systems.
3. Zero Knowledge (https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/) is another on the more technical side.

Newsletters

There aren’t too many great newsletters and you should avoid anything that is primarily price or trading focused. That said, check out:

1. Token Economy (http://weekly.tokeneconomy.co/) is a good weekly roundup.
2. It’s highly Bitcoin-biased but I do enjoy reading Anthony Pompliano’s Off the Chain daily (https://offthechain.substack.com/) because it doesn’t have a lot of BS.
3. The CB Insights newsletter (https://www.cbinsights.com/newsletter) is more broad-ranging but generally has one general-interest blockchain story per issue.

Writing

1. The team from a16z Crypto has excellent writing on everything from legal issues around tokens to the future of web 3 with open state. See their main blog at https://a16zcrypto.com/content but also check out the original a16z blog before 2018 when they migrated to the new site for the legacy content, which is great too.
2. Vitalik from the Ethereum Foundation has been a prolific writer over the years and just about everything he puts out is interesting. Check out his blog at https://vitalik.ca/ and Ethereum-related research at https://ethresear.ch/.

People and Community at NEAR

1. To stay in the loop on an ongoing basis, follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nearprotocol
2. To join the more in-depth community discussion and talk to the team, jump into our chat Channels: http://near.chat
3. To learn more and stay in the loop as we publish more content about the protocol and the industry in general, subscribe to our updates and newsletter (https://pages.near.org/newsletter) and subscribe to our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/nearprotocol)

Thanks for your interest in the project! If you have more questions, suggestions for high-quality resources or just want to engage in the conversation more, Discord is your best bet. We’ll see you there :)