Intro to NEAR for Senior Developers
Today’s cryptonetworks suffer from limitations that keep them from seriously challenging centralized incumbents. The most severe limitations are around performance and scalability. The next few years will be about fixing these limitations and building networks that form the infrastructure layer of the crypto stack. After that, most of the energy will turn to building applications on top of that infrastructure.
-- Chris Dixon, February 2018
The Map
NEAR is a layer 1 smart contract platform (like Ethereum but cheaper and faster) that scales by parallelizing sharded storage and compute. NEAR Protocol uses Proof of Stake consensus with over 50 validators securing millions of transactions and hundreds of thousands of accounts as of summer 2021.
The platform exposes two surfaces for extension: