Overview
NEAR Edges
$800m+ in ecosystem funds from basically all the VCs
Thriving NFT community
Sharding
Aurora - faster EVM chain than AVAX-C-chain
Trustless Rainbow bridge
NEAR USN
The repo binary-star was recently leaked.
The design and incentive structure is very similar to Terra UST.
There will be 3 stability mechanisms:
NEAR and stablecoin Reserve Fund backed
On-chain arbitrage contract
StableSwap stabilization
We have recently seen how Terra UST has driven the demand for LUNA and the Terra ecosystem. $USN is the NEAR answer to the major adoption of the NEAR blockchain. At least for the short term.
Ecosystem Funds
NEAR currently has more than $800m+ in ecosystem funds. $350m, which will be given in DEFI incentives and grants.
In comparison, AVAX had a $180m ecosystem fund announced in August, resulting in AVAX TVL rising from $750m to $10B in 2 months.
With higher ecosystem funds + $USN launching tomorrow with some incentives, It's safe to assume that Near adoption will skyrocket within a short period.
CEX + NFT Marketplace:
NEAR currently is onboarding a lot of infrastructure for CEX listing + bringing Near NFT to the mainstream markets like Coinbase. Once that gets launched, those will definitely move NEAR along with major adoption
NEAR Sharding
Unlike App-specific chains like Cosmos, where different blockchains are separated into different shards hindering composability.
NEAR models as a single chain, but validators only handle different chunks of data, making minimal composability tradeoff.
Composability is a massive advantage for Near, being able to have high TPS like Solana without sacrificing validator cost and composability.
Like everything, there are tradeoffs. Sharding comes with some security tradeoffs, so a secure sharding mechanism is a very challenging problem to solve.
But with a team full of geniuses from Google, Microsoft, etc, with extensive knowledge of blockchain and distributed systems. misaka has some confidence they will be able to solve it.
Aurora
Aurora is a NEAR EVM compatible chain with $970m in current TVL. Having EVM compatibility is very important since it lets developers easily migrate their Dapps over from ETH mainnet
Aurora advantages:
fast block time and finality with a cheap fee
with 1s block time, it is currently 2x faster than AV
with <$0.02 in fees, it is much cheaper than most other EVM solutions
More than 100+ protocols are now on NEAR, with projects like Curve, Sushiswap, etc., also expanding to Near soon.
NFT
NEAR is the fastest-growing NFT chain currently. NFT often represents the actual retail userbases and are ultimately what separate chains like Solana, AVAX, Matic, etc., from other generic blockchains
Gaming
Gaming is arguably the future of blockchain, with Solana, AVAX, Terra, Matic, etc., heavily investing in the space. NEAR also has a lot of exciting gaming projects.
UX commitment
NEAR is committed to offering the best UX experience for both users and developers on Near: predictive gas price, human-friendly wallet, etc.
Most blockchains often overlook the importance of UI and UX, but ultimately UI and UX are what users will interact with, and NEAR has been focusing on them since day one.
App-specific chains
Avax has been very popular with game developers recently because of the ability for games to deploy their own subnets. Similar to Subnets and Cosmos. NEAR also has interoperable EVM compatible app chains called @oct_network
In conclusion, NEAR seemingly has all the good parts of all major blockchains, and it will be why it will likely gain significant adoption in the coming months.
My prediction is that Near will be Blockchain of the year in 2022.
If you are building on NEAR please reach out, misaka supports many projects on NEAR. DM's opened Would love to connect + and collab or introduce you to some investors investing specifically in the NEAR ecosystem.