Illustrated New Public Chain NEAR Ecosystem Overview

This article was published on ChainNews, author: Lou Yue.

DeFi is gradually moving from a period of rapid development to a mature and stable phase, becoming an indispensable part of the crypto market. However, faced with the recent exorbitant Gas fees of dozens or hundreds of dollars, delayed block speeds, and poor trading experiences, the long-standing Ethereum scalability issue has begun to overwhelm some users and developers, leading them to temporarily "escape."

Internally, Ethereum is engaged in a competition among Layer 2 solution projects, while externally, it faces a chaotic battle among public chains. Exchange public chains represented by Binance Smart Chain and Huobi Eco Chain have quickly attracted a large number of users, while new public chains represented by NEAR, Polkadot, and Solana have been given great expectations.

As one of the star projects of new public chains, NEAR is considered by many to be the project closest to the vision of Ethereum 2.0, but its progress is even faster than that of Ethereum 2.0. Additionally, NEAR's sharding technology theoretically possesses unlimited scalability, providing ample combinatorial space for its future technological development.

At the end of February, NEAR seized the opportunity to announce its EVM plan, aimed at solving the current and future computational challenges faced by the Ethereum ecosystem. According to NEAR's official statement, existing Ethereum smart contracts and front-end code implementations do not need to be changed.

If the EVM plan can launch its test version as scheduled by the end of March, its throughput could even reach 10 times that of Ethereum, while maintaining complete and uncompromised Ethereum compatibility, which may attract a large number of developers and users to flock to the NEAR ecosystem.

Five Major Areas of NEAR Ecosystem Begin to Take Shape

From the perspective of project positioning, NEAR is a decentralized application platform aimed at creating a fully sharded, scalable PoS blockchain. The team has released some of the only large-scale sharding system implementations.

D1 Ventures previously pointed out in its in-depth report on NEAR that NEAR is one of the most competitive players in the "DApp chain" direction, with significant latecomer advantages, possessing a better sharding solution than ETH2.0 and world-class engineering capabilities; however, its disadvantage has been a long-standing lack of community support.

Reference Reading: "In-Depth Analysis of Star Public Chain NEAR: Ethereum Killer? Or Just Another Player?"

Recently, NEAR's activity has significantly increased, and project progress is advancing. The Ethereum cross-chain Rainbow Bridge launched last year is currently running between the NEAR and Ethereum mainnets. With the expansion of the Rainbow Bridge, more and more DeFi projects are smoothly operating on the NEAR platform, continuously contributing to its ecological development.

As of the end of February 2021, the NEAR ecosystem has included five major areas: Infrastructure, DApp, Development Tools, DeFi, and NFT, especially focusing on infrastructure development, with 49 ecological projects within the protocol, and this number continues to grow. Its DeFi ecosystem's complete system structure is already taking shape and is poised for takeoff.

NFT

Mintbase

Mintbase is a marketplace for buying, selling, and minting NFTs, allowing businesses and creatives to launch their own stores. It is a well-known Ethereum project with over 1,000 stores and more than 80,000 transactions.

Due to the high operational costs of Ethereum, Mintbase has developed a new version on NEAR and deployed it on NEAR's testnet, currently undergoing an invitation-only public test, with a formal launch expected in the second quarter of 2021.

Paras

Paras is a digital art card application within the NEAR ecosystem, facilitating the creation, trading, and collection of DAC digital art cards, building a multi-functional social DAC marketplace for creators and collectors.

ARterra

ARterra is a fan interaction platform that enhances fan engagement through rewards such as NFT tokens, tokens, and AR game rewards. Flux and ARterra, two DApp projects developed on NEAR, have begun collaborating to bring prediction markets into simulated esports (including Madden and 2K).

Snark.Art

Snark.Art is creating a digital art platform for artists to generate and sell digital assets, manage communities, and achieve liquidity for artworks in secondary markets.

Berry Club

Berry Club is a DeFi gaming application on the NEAR platform, where users can create various interesting patterns using pixel points and generate NFTs while earning rewards through liquidity mining. As the usage of Berry Club continues to increase, the system will distribute rewards to developers who create smart contracts and token holders.

Nearfolio

Nearfolio is an NFT marketplace being built on the NEAR protocol, providing 100% on-chain non-fungible metadata. Nearfolio stores all NFT metadata on the NEAR blockchain while storing external data and files on IPFS and Arweave, and is set to launch soon.

DApp

Games

ZED

ZED allows players to buy, breed, sell, and race digital racehorses on the blockchain or build a racetrack. Each horse is created through smart contracts on the Ethereum network and is defined by its lineage, genes, and performance on the track.

The creators of ZED, Virtually Human Studio (VHS), stated that due to significant barriers to active player participation (high Gas prices and long transaction times), it would not be able to realize ZED's vision as a continuous horse racing entertainment venue. The team began looking for alternative solutions and decided to integrate its new product NEST ZEST Play Platform into the NEAR platform.

Somnium Space

Somnium Space is an open, social, blockchain-powered virtual reality world where users can purchase land, build or import objects, and easily monetize their experiences. Somnium Space was initially built using Loom Network and later migrated to Polygon to support its complex gaming economy, including virtual avatars, NFT collectibles, etc. In October 2020, Somnium Space announced a partnership with NEAR.

Payments

MoonPay

MoonPay is a financial technology company that combines banking and online cryptocurrency exchanges, serving as a marketplace between cryptocurrency trading platforms and users, facilitating instant non-regulated purchases of major cryptocurrencies. Founded in 2018, MoonPay is collaborating with crypto companies to provide development tools, including customizable components and public APIs, to build seamless purchasing experiences. MoonPay currently serves customers in Europe and the UK and plans to expand globally. MoonPay currently supports NEAR tokens.

Privacy

Zero Pool

Zero Pool is a platform on Ethereum for completely anonymous and untraceable transactions, using ZK Ethereum anonymous pools, low transaction fees, atomic swaps, and universal anonymous integration. Zero Pool has reached a collaboration with NEAR Protocol regarding privacy transactions, and NEAR will also support it on Gitcon.

Identity

ONtology

ONtology is a high-performance public blockchain that includes a complete distributed ledger and smart contract system support. The ontology architecture supports public chain network systems, providing not only basic public chain services but also supporting customized public chains for different applications through the ontology blockchain framework, and facilitating chain network collaboration through different protocol groups.

In August 2020, Ontology announced a partnership with the open network infrastructure NEAR, focusing on the development and deployment of decentralized identity solutions. In this collaboration, Ontology will provide technical support for NEAR's decentralized identity (DID), including DID specification documents and reference implementations of smart contracts, assisting NEAR in completing DID registration on W3C.

Torus

Torus, headquartered in Singapore, provides a decentralized private key management solution without trust through distributed key generation technology in multi-party computation, allowing users to log into decentralized ecosystems using Google or Facebook OAuth. Torus Labs was founded by Ethereum developers Leonard Tan and Zen Yong, both of whom previously worked at Visa.

Applications

TessaB

Glyde is a second-hand mobile phone trading market built on the NEAR blockchain, supported by TessaB, aiming to provide higher levels of transparency and security for buyers and sellers. Its goal is to eliminate inefficiencies and establish trust between buyers and sellers.

Boxscores

Boxscores is a scalable platform for sports content, focusing on future sports competitions.

Crowdfunding Platform

Common Fund

Common Fund is similar to crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, with the only difference being that it will adopt a smart contract-driven model to avoid direct contact with the funds raised. The vision of Common.Fund is to enable projects to bring exciting ideas and plans to the world through cryptocurrency, thereby supporting them. The official statement indicates that Common.Fund has settled on the open network platform NEAR and is currently looking for three projects hoping to launch in the NEAR community before the end of February.

Prediction Market

Flux

Flux is a scalable prediction market protocol that allows market trading on any digital asset or event, such as stock options, virtual currency derivatives, and even sports event outcome predictions. Flux is also a decentralized oracle project, built with AMM, LOB, indexers, etc. Developers can use its open-source Javascript SDK to easily connect to Flux's market and oracle protocol with just three lines of code.

Flux will release two versions of the end-user DApp, one aimed at professional traders, positioned as a decentralized FTX. The other version will have a minimalist interface, allowing participation directly with credit cards, targeting a broader end-user audience, which can be imagined as Robinhood supporting more markets. Currently, Flux has launched on the NEAR mainnet and is conducting an invitation-only private test, with a public version expected to be released soon.

Development Tools

Magic Labs

Magic Labs, formerly known as Fortmatic, is a Web3 application wallet solution provider based on Ethereum, aimed at providing authentication technology services for Web 3.0 and Web 2.0 developers and users. It claims that its wallet solution has been applied in several Ethereum applications, including Uniswap, TokenSets, and PoolTogether.

DeFi

Balancer

Balancer is a non-custodial portfolio management platform that provides liquidity and responds to market prices. It turns the concept of index funds into reality. Traders rebalance portfolios by following arbitrage opportunities. In October 2020, NEAR announced a partnership with Balancer to jointly develop Balancer on the NEAR protocol.

AAVE

AAVE is a Finnish word meaning "ghost," and is an open-source decentralized lending protocol that provides deposit and lending services to users. The deposit and loan interest rates for both lending parties are calculated algorithmically based on the platform's borrowing and deposit volumes, and the platform uses Chainlink's oracle to ensure the fairness of collateral prices.

1inch

1inch.exchange is a decentralized token trading aggregation platform. When users swap one token for another on the platform, 1inch checks a large number of DEX decentralized trading platforms and sends your order to the one offering the best price. In November 2020, the automated market maker protocol Mooniswap developed by 1inch.exchange joined the NEAR ecosystem.

Chainlink

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that solves interoperability issues for blockchain smart contracts and securely connects them to off-chain data sources, Web APIs, and traditional banking payment systems.

NEAR introduced the Chainlink decentralized oracle network, with the first application scenario integrating Chainlink being to provide price data for DeFi applications through Chainlink's price reference data framework. Additionally, Chainlink will connect open network applications to Chainlink's Web2 applications to query data (such as market price data for assets like real estate, insurance, and music).

TrustToken

TrustToken is an asset tokenization platform aimed at creating asset-backed tokens, with the company’s stablecoin named TrueUSD, which can be redeemed for US dollars. In November 2020, NEAR established a partnership with TUSD, making it the first stablecoin to launch on the NEAR mainnet.

Maker

Maker is a decentralized autonomous organization and smart contract system on Ethereum, with applications in collateral loans, margin trading, international remittances, and supply chain finance. In the ecological map officially released by NEAR, Maker is included, but no specific progress has been seen yet.

Infrastructure

Wallets

NEAR Wallet

NEAR Wallet is a web wallet for the NEAR protocol that uses localStorage on the user's computer to store account keys in plain text.

Math Wallet

Math Wallet is a multi-platform cross-chain wallet that includes APP wallets, web wallets, browser extension wallets, hardware wallets, etc., supporting BTC, ETH, EOS, Cosmos, Binance Chain, ONT, Polkadot, NEAR, and other public chains, and supports decentralized cross-chain trading. Math Wallet has added support for NEAR Staking.

Coinbase Custody

Coinbase Custody is a custody service for institutional crypto assets, an independent business under Coinbase, where all digital assets are isolated and held in trust for the benefit of clients.

Coinbase Custody announced in April 2020 that it would provide custody services for NEAR, and will also provide infrastructure for NEAR users to offer PoS staking services.

Portis

Portis is a technology company aiming to make using decentralized applications as easy as using "regular" applications by creating simple user interactions, encouraging Portis users to innovate and making blockchain as user-friendly as possible.

Ledger

Ledger is a multifunctional hardware wallet, a hardware device for securely storing private keys. When viewing wallets and sending transactions, the hardware wallet needs to work with software wallets. Its project has been open-sourced on Github. Based on its hardware device, users can use both Ledger's developed software wallet and other teams' developed software wallets. NEAR Wallet currently supports Ledger.

Trust Wallet

Trust Wallet is a multi-currency wallet that can connect to decentralized exchanges for trading. It has been acquired by Binance and was developed by Viktor Radchenko. Trust Wallet includes a built-in Web3 (a development tool for Ethereum) browser that allows users to explore decentralized applications. Trust Wallet accounts now support importing NEAR wallets.

Narwallets

Narwallets is a wallet based on NEAR and also serves as a gateway for NEAR blockchain applications, supporting functions such as storing, sending, staking, and unstaking NEAR tokens. Narwallets has been selected for the ecological funding pilot project launched by the NEAR Foundation.

Guarda

Guarda is a non-custodial multi-currency cryptocurrency wallet that supports about 50 blockchains and over 10,000 tokens. This wallet can be used on the web, desktop, Chrome extension, and mobile, and with built-in services, users can trade and purchase cryptocurrencies as well as stake within the wallet. It has now added support for NEAR tokens here.

Validator Nodes

HashQuark

HashQuark focuses on PoS, DPoS, and other consensus mechanism public chains, providing secure, stable, and convenient enterprise-level staking services, supporting over 40 mainstream underlying chains, and is one of the members of the NEAR Validator Advisory Board (NVAB).

Stake.fish

stake.fish is a PoS (Proof of Stake) infrastructure service provider, offering staking services for major PoS projects. Stake.fish is also one of the members of the NEAR Validator Advisory Board (NVAB), providing token staking services.

Spark Pool

Spark Pool is a mining pool service platform with nodes around the world, allowing miners to receive transfer and miner disconnection alerts, dedicated to providing professional mining pool services and maintaining the stable operation of public chain networks. It is also one of the members of the NEAR Validator Advisory Board (NVAB).

Zero Knowledge Validator

Zero Knowledge Validator is a validator node service supported by the Bison Trails platform, collaborating with PoS networks that allow new ZK paradigms to emerge. It is the simplest way to run infrastructure across multiple blockchain networks. Zero Knowledge Validator is one of the members of the NEAR Validator Advisory Board (NVAB).

DSRV Labs

DSRV Labs is a provider of PoS validation node services and infrastructure, located in South Korea. Currently, the company is active in representing validation programs for blockchain networks such as Terra, Celo, CODA, and NEAR.

Staked

Staked is located in Boston, USA, representing institutional investors to run block production nodes for distributed PoS protocols, using Google's Kubernetes for containerized deployment, helping institutions become nodes on PoS networks to earn staking rewards. The company has received investments from Pantera, Coinbase Ventures, DCG, Winklevoss Capital, and Fabric Ventures. Staked is one of the members of the NEAR Validator Advisory Board (NVAB).

Dokia Capital

Dokia Capital is a node operator and also one of the members of the NEAR Validator Advisory Board (NVAB), providing token staking services.

CHORUS

CHORUS is running validator nodes and related services for PoS blockchain networks. The platform currently serves as validator nodes for projects such as Solana, Polkadot, Near Protocol, The Graph, and Chainlink. Chorus is also involved in innovative technological solutions related to interoperability, such as helping to establish bridges between Cosmos SDK-based and Substrate-based blockchains.

Figment Networks

Figment Networks is a blockchain infrastructure provider based in Canada, also a platform for B-end services, currently providing infrastructure for NEAR, Tezos, Cosmos, Polkadot, and other blockchain networks to realize staking functions.

Bison Trails

Bison Trails, founded in 2018, is dedicated to providing blockchain infrastructure, currently supporting staking and network participation services for about 20 cryptocurrency protocols. Bison Trails' Query and Transaction (QT) product allows anyone building broad Web 3.0 applications to easily validate transactions and obtain information about transactions. Bison Trails has added support for the NEAR protocol, stating that it will help host validators for the NEAR protocol.

Huobi Pool

Huobi Pool has officially joined the NEAR Validator Committee, which consists of professional validator nodes that will provide key support for the governance and technological development of the NEAR network. In addition, in the future, Huobi Pool will also serve as one of the NEAR Validator Advisory Board members, providing support for NEAR ecosystem members involved.

OKEx Pool

OKEx Pool is a blockchain digital asset mining platform under OKEx and is one of the members of the NEAR Validator Advisory Board (NVAB).

Cryptium Labs

Cryptium Labs is a security-focused validator node operator run by protocol researchers and engineers. The company was established in the summer of 2018 and provides services for NEAR, Tezos, Cosmos, Polkadot, and other proof-of-stake blockchains, offering secure and highly available digital signatures.

Certus One

Certus One is a team of experts focused on blockchain, systems engineering, and security, specializing in blockchain application development and infrastructure, providing highly secure validation services for multiple PoS blockchain networks, including NEAR.

Buildlinks

Buildlinks focuses on on-chain governance and interoperability, aiming to contribute to Web 3.0 through groundbreaking ideas, and is one of the members of the NEAR Validator Advisory Board (NVAB).

Finoa (Financial services company, digital asset bank)

Finoa is a fully compliant digital asset bank located in Berlin, Germany, providing customized digital asset custody and asset service solutions for institutional investors (such as asset managers, venture capitalists, and family offices), high-net-worth individuals, and companies. Finoa has added support for storing and staking NEAR tokens.

Storage

IPFS

IPFS, or InterPlanetary File System, is a peer-to-peer distributed file system designed to create a persistent and distributed network protocol for storing and sharing files.

The Graph

The Graph protocol allows for rapid building of decentralized applications on Ethereum and IPFS using GraphQL. Distributed query processing occurs on a decentralized network, ensuring that data remains open and that DApps continue to run regardless. Developers can deploy to public infrastructure that they do not have to manage or trust.

On February 18, 2021, The Graph announced that it would integrate four new layer one blockchain systems, including Polkadot, NEAR, Solana, and Celo, meaning that the underlying public chains supported by The Graph have expanded from Ethereum, IPFS, and POA to seven.

Sia

Sia is a decentralized storage network created by Nebulous Labs. Using a peer-to-peer decentralized network, it creates a cloud storage market where some users act as hosts, providing available space on their disks, while other users act as tenants using that storage space.

Summary

The long-standing Ethereum scalability issue has pushed the market's patience to the edge, and DeFi participants have begun to take action to transfer projects, creating a great development opportunity for other public chain projects. Taking NEAR as an example, it has strong technical support, including the Rainbow Bridge, which has been deployed on the NEAR mainnet and is currently undergoing private testing for multiple Ethereum DeFi projects, attracting popular DeFi protocols including Balancer, 1inch, and AAVE. If it officially opens to the public between mid-March and early April, it will attract more project attention.

In addition, NEAR has already established NFT markets like Mintbase, Paras, and the DeFi game Berry Club, with the prediction market Flux also set to launch soon.

NEAR is trying to seize every market hotspot and layout while also funding and incentivizing more projects to enter. Although there is still a certain gap compared to the large and prosperous Ethereum ecosystem, with its underlying security and scalability support, it may become a major mainstream public chain platform in the market.