NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Crypto Exchange

NEAR Protocol is a smart contract-based blockchain, aiming to compete with the inescapable king of dApps – Ethereum. NEAR’s mainnet was released in 2020 and strives to become the best community-driven cloud computing platform. There are three names at the root of the project: [Illia Polosukhin](https://twitter.com/ilblackdragon), [Alexander Skidanov](https://twitter.com/alexskidanov), and [Erik Trautman](https://linkedin.com/in/erik-trautman). The NEAR platform is perfectly designed for dApps to overcome the limitations of other smart contract-based blockchain projects. Its main feature in this area is a community-governed sharding mechanism that allows NEAR to provide high throughput, high speed, and good cross-compatibility. The NEAR team states that its network’s TPS is as high as 100,000 transactions per second, while transaction fees are 10,000x less than Ethereum’s. NEAR is a native currency of the NEAR blockchain. It’s primarily used to pay transaction fees and data storing across the blockchain. Moreover, NEAR Protocol supports other tokens, “wrapped” from other blockchains. For example, one of the project’s big achievements is its bridge with Ethereum, which allows users to transfer their ERC-20 tokens to the NEAR network.