NEAR Protocol

Near Protocol can be seen as a potentially promising project. The product itself is especially interesting due to the fact that it targets a big market segment of low-end devices (such as mobile phones). These low-end devices have not received much attention of prior projects up until now, and thus Near Protocol is seeing an opportunity in the space. Moreover, it aims to tackle the common problems of scalability and decentralization in the space to be capable of creating an environment in which dApps can be run by low-end devices.
Near Protocol is an infrastructure project and competitor benchmark valuations are quite high which might indicate an attractive return on investment if the project is seeking for a reasonable fundraising amount. Unfortunately not all key information is given at this stage, and thus it is not able to evaluate the projects’ business model and the token sale details.
In regards of the proposed technology, the project is claiming to provide a better sharding solution than Ziliqa (more here) while simultaneously having a ledger that is more decentralized due to mobile devices as network nodes. Up until now unfortunately no code has been publicized nor technical papers published in which all of this has been outlined. The development roadmap has also been constructed very ambitiously if one compares it to other projects in the space. This ambition comes probably from a very talented team of software engineers with extensive career histories at top companies and various achievements. Blockchain development has not been their main focus over the last years, but they have been working already on sharding solutions for MemSQL, which is used by big companies like Goldman Sachs, Uber, Comcast and many others.In conclusion, the Near Protocol project is definitely one to keep an eye on. As additional information are going to be released in the future, one will be able to evaluate the project better from an investment perspective. It will also be interesting to see if the team can indeed catch up with the ambitious roadmap and if business & marketing matters will not come too short. A team full of developers might be beneficial for the tech but can simultaneously be disadvantageous for the general project since other areas such as business development, marketing and community development are in danger to be neglected.

What I like:
What I dislike:
Overall, I love it. An award winning team came up with a sharding solution which on paper looks comparable to Ethereum 2.0, raised $12 million and already have a public testnet – pretty impressive. There’s still a lot of work ahead of the team, which is yet to put out a proper whitepaper, release a roadmap, information about a public sale, ecosystem partners, detailed plans for adoption and so on.
But they do have a very well funded team of smart people that are constantly releasing new code and engaging the developer community. With the mainnet scheduled by end of this year, they will be ahead of Ethereum 2.0 and neck to neck with their competition. Exciting times ahead, I will keep my eyes on this one.