The richness of today’s web emerged from the combined efforts of millions of people taking advantage of “permissionless innovation” — the ability to create content and applications without asking anyone first. Unfortunately, the lack of freedom for data has resulted in an environment which is actively adversarial to the interests of its participants.
A small number of companies have enticed vast numbers of users to join by luring them in with network effects and then captured them by holding their data to prevent them from seeking alternatives. Similarly, these massive platforms have enticed applications to build atop their ecosystems before either cutting off access or actively opposing their interests when the applications became too successful. As a result, these walled gardens have stifled innovation and effectively monopolized vast sections of the web.
In the future, we can fix this by using new technologies to re-enable the permissionless innovation of the past in a way which creates a more open web where users are free and applications are supportive rather than adversarial to their interests.
We have already seen the power of this kind of freedom in the financial sector, where decentralized digital currencies like Bitcoin and their underlying blockchain technology have facilitated billions of dollars of peer-to-peer transfers at a fraction of the price of the traditional banking system. The same underlying technology also allows participants in the $50B+ virtual goods economy to track, take ownership and trade these goods permissionlessly among themselves. It allows real world goods to cross into the digital realm, with verified ownership and tracking just like the digital ones.
Beyond what we’ve seen today, a web where freedom of data enables permissionless innovation by default will drive a new form of software development. In this web, developers can quickly construct applications from open state components and power their efforts with new business models which are enabled from within the software itself rather than rely on parasitic relationships with their users. This doesn’t just accelerate the creation of applications which have a more honest and collaborative relationship with their users but it also allows for the emergence of entirely new businesses built on top of them.
These new applications and the open web that powers them can only be enabled by the right kind of infrastructure. The platform of the new web cannot be controlled by a single entity nor have its usage limited by insufficient scalability. It must be as decentralized in design as the web itself and supported by a widely distributed community of operators so the value it stores cannot be censored, modified or removed without the permission of the users on whose behalf that value is stored. It should be secure and stable enough to form the backbone of the new economy.
This is the infrastructure of NEAR.
NEAR is a decentralized application platform which is designed to enable the open web of the future and power its economy. It uses the same core underlying technology that made Bitcoin an unkillable currency and combines it with cutting edge advances in community consensus, database sharding and usability. On this web, everything from new currencies to new applications to new industries can be created, opening the door to a brand new future.
NEAR is a carbon-neutral layer-1 blockchain network that is scalable and secure thanks to its unique implementation of sharding called Nightshade. NEAR is built with a focus on usability and ease of use, for both developers and users.
NEAR leverages token economics in a unique way that empowers both creators and developers, who for example earn 30% of the fees their contracts generate, while network participants earn rewards for validating transactions or providing storage.
NEAR is designed to be an interoperable L1 network that can, through different services, provide a scalable infrastructure that communicates with other chains and ecosystems.
Nightshade is the implementation and design of NEAR’s sharded architecture.
Sharding splits the work of processing transactions across many participating nodes to ensure the network can scale as it grows in users and demand making NEAR ready today for mass adoption of Web3.
