NEAR Protocol (NEAR) perpetual market

NEAR Protocol is a proof-of-stake layer-1 blockchain that launched in 2020, built by Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin with a focus on usability and scalability. Its native token, NEAR, pays fees, is staked to secure the network and is used in governance. NEAR's signature technology is sharding, branded Nightshade, which splits the network into parallel pieces so capacity grows as it adds validators, aiming for low fees and high throughput. It emphasizes a friendly developer and user experience, with human-readable account names and features that let applications cover fees so newcomers can use apps without first holding crypto. More recently NEAR has repositioned around artificial intelligence and chain abstraction, promoting a vision where users interact across many blockchains seamlessly. Co-founder Illia Polosukhin was among the authors of the original transformer paper that underpins modern AI.