NEAR Protocol Can Change The Internet Forever-Here’s Why

Unrestricted access to the internet is a fundamental human right.

Big data collection run by massive multinational tech giants and increased surveillance by the state are becoming an ever greater threat to personal liberty and the individual in the digital era.

Tyrannical and heavy handed governments such as the CCP, the North Korean regime, and many countries in the Middle East have either completely shut down and restricted internet access in the past, or maintain an iron grip over the infrastructure in their countries via national firewalls and other censorship mechanisms.

The most startling example I can think of is when the Mubarak regime shut down the internet in Egypt during the 2011 Egyptian revolution in an effort to maintain control over a crumbling government.

Where there is a will there is a way though, and despite efforts to cling to power the Egyptian people successfully overthrew the Mubarak regime.

Egypt’s story had a happy ending—with Mubrarak being deposed after nearly 30 years of rule with a nearly bloodless revolution, but what if the Egyptian people hadn’t been so lucky?

What if the shut down of the internet had quashed the nationwide protests, as it had in many other countries where the citizens took to the street to demand administrative change?

In a world where faceless multinational corporations and surveillance states maintain and seek to monopolize ever greater control over our lives, our data, and our means of communicating with one another, many individuals feel powerless in the face of the centralized panopticon.

So what could the antidote to this synergy of corporate and state control be?

NEAR protocol claims to have the answer…

NEAR was founded by former Microsoft software developer Alex Skidanov and former Google engineering manager Illia Polosukhin in 2018, and with a little help from the legendary venture capitalist firm Y Combinator their startup received $50,000,000 in funding shortly after.

The protocol uses a delegated proof of stake model and features incredibly efficient communication between blocks which allows for validation to occur block by block rather than a predetermined batch of blocks at one time.

Shards are used to increase blockchain speed and efficiency rather than the traditional route of utilizing side chains; in effect, this allows NEAR to process 100,000 transactions per second. The number of potential shards NEAR can handle is theoretically unlimited at this time.

Other features include free human readable addresses, community oriented guilds which run general and administrative functions for NEAR, the utilization of governance tokens, and an inflationary supply as a result of 5% staking rewards.

The Block Crypto reported that NEAR recently raised $150,000,000:

The NEAR Foundation has closed a $150 million funding round less as it looks to become the hub of an open web3.

Three-Arrows Capital led the token sale with participation from Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Jump, Alameda and Circle Ventures, among others.

I had the pleasure of being in the audience for Jeff Gold’s recent talk at the Tulum Crypto Club; Gold who was representing the NEAR protocol explains:

Gold writes:

NEAR’s smart contracts can be written in Rust or AssemblyScript as well and with their near-api-js package it opens up the freedom to coders from established programing languages to get involved in creating the future of web3 with a super smooth transition. The focus at NEAR is to build a community and reward developers gas fees of their creations on top of anything they earn from the dapp itself.

NEAR aims to be the backbone of the new internet—a decentralized forum free from government control and corporate coercion, and with the powerful cryptographic tech behind the protocol, I think NEAR is promising.

A decentralized internet is a free and open internet—the greater the tech and the community behind that tech the more immune it becomes to the aggression of large centralized powers.

If you would like to learn about, join, buy, or develop for NEAR then I have a few links for you below. Just as a friendly reminder none of this is meant as investment advice, always do your own research before making any investment:

Those of you who want to learn more about NEAR can visit https://near.org/

Aspiring developers for NEAR can visit https://learnnear.club/

Want to buy some NEAR? Just visit http://wallet.near.org

Join the NEAR community Discord at https://discord.gg/UzY7nGTH

Join the NEAR Telegram channel at https://t.me/cryptonear

You can also follow Jeff Gold at https://twitter.com/DJJeffGold/with_replies

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