What is NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?
NEAR Protocol is a smart contract platform co-founded by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, with its mainnet going live in 2020. The network focuses on usability, offering human-readable account names such as alice.near instead of long hexadecimal addresses. It is also the chain behind NEAR Intents, the cross-chain swap system that NEAR Mobile Swap uses.
- Type
- Layer-1 blockchain
- Launched
- 2020
- Consensus
- Proof of Stake (Nightshade sharding)
- Max supply
- No fixed cap
- Swap network
- NEAR
- Sector (Messari)
- Smart Contract Platform
How NEAR Protocol works
Validators stake NEAR in a Proof of Stake system to produce blocks and confirm transactions. Nightshade sharding splits the network into parallel shards that process transactions side by side, which lets capacity grow as more shards are added.
What NEAR is used for
NEAR is spent on transaction fees and contract storage, and it is delegated to validators by holders who want staking rewards. Developers also use the chain for decentralized apps, AI agents and chain abstraction tools that operate across several blockchains.
NEAR supply
NEAR started with a genesis supply of one billion tokens and has no hard cap. New tokens are minted each epoch to reward validators, with the maximum annual inflation rate halved from 5% to 2.5% in October 2025, while 70% of transaction fees are burned.
Before you swap NEAR
When withdrawing to NEAR, you can send to a named account (like name.near) or to a 64-character implicit account, so check you have the correct one. Keep a little NEAR in your wallet to cover gas and storage for future transactions.