NEAR Protocol NEAR

NEAR Protocol was built so that an ordinary user need not understand the chain underneath: accounts read as human names such as alice.near, and access keys can be limited to one contract and a spending cap instead of handing an application full control of the account.

Technically it is a proof-of-stake chain with sharding — state and processing are split across parts of the network, so throughput grows by adding shards rather than by demanding faster hardware from every node. Contracts are written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, and part of the fee a contract earns is rebated to that contract, giving developers a share of their own application's usage.

A separate line of work targets other chains: chain signatures let a NEAR account control addresses on foreign networks, sparing the user a wallet per chain. NEAR itself pays fees and serves as validator stake; there is no second settlement coin, so one asset carries both roles.

Readable account names and permission-scoped keys appeared in NEAR before they were common elsewhere — the chain was built around onboarding from the start.