NEAR is in the Top 50 – Crypto Valley VC Report

NEAR is happy to announce that it has been listed as one of the Top 50 Blockchain Technology firms in Crypto Valley! NEAR is included in the 6th edition of the Crypto Valley VC Top 50 Report, created by CV VC AG in collaboration with its technology partners PwC and inacta. The Top 50 is chosen based on funding, valuation, and employees. Together, the Top 50 had a total valuation of US$254.9 billion

The Crypto Valley VC Top 50 is a periodical report on market valuation developments from Crypto Valley, which includes Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The CV VC Top 50 Report aims to highlight the impact of Crypto Valley on the Swiss economy and job market. The report shows the growth of the crypto and blockchain space and highlights the best companies in terms of funding, valuation, and employees.

This is the 6th edition of the CV VC Top 50 report and in this edition, NEAR is in the Top 50 under the Blockchain and Protocol sector!

To read the full report, please visit: https://cvvc.com/top50.

NEAR Report – by Mally Anderson

More than a decade after Bitcoin’s genesis block and five years since the Ethereum mainnet launched, blockchain networks support trillions of dollars in value and have millions of users worldwide, but they have not achieved anything close to mainstream global adoption. Many use cases have been unavailable to blockchain builders––especially in the last year, with the rise of DeFi on Ethereum and the resulting network congestion––because of slow confirmation, high gas fees, and high hurdles to onboarding users. The crypto ecosystem will likely evolve to become more multichain to address these bottlenecks and a range of layer-one protocols and layer-two solutions will apply their own strategies to address scalability and usability.

NEAR’s approach is to focus on the developer and user experience. By focusing on accessibility and usability, it can become just as easy to develop a decentralized application on a blockchain as it is to build any other kind of application on today’s internet––and just as easy to use. NEAR Protocol is a fully decentralized, community-controlled layer-one blockchain protocol and smart contract platform. The mission of the NEAR collective is to accelerate the world’s transition to open technologies by growing and enabling a community of developers and creators.

Beyond ease of use to support global adoption, the network must be able to scale to meet that volume of demand––which NEAR can, using dynamic sharding and a novel consensus mechanism. Dynamic sharding divides the system into parallel shards that each handle a subset of the computation and which can be added or removed based on usage. This horizontal scaling approach (as opposed to vertical scaling, as with Ethereum layer-twos such as rollups) raises the network’s potential throughput to more than 1000x that of Ethereum 1.0, across 100 shards. Combined with gas fees between 1000x and 10,000x cheaper than those on ETH, this horizontal scaling approach also opens the door to greater usability. 

Developer experience and end-user accessibility are the top priorities for NEAR, all the way down to the protocol level. Developers can use familiar tools, such as Rust or AssemblyScript, to build on NEAR’s WASM-based runtime, and the application build/test/deploy cycle is much faster and simpler than on most networks. Transaction fees are predictable and developers can earn a rebate of 30% of the gas moving through their smart contracts. 

NEAR believes the future of blockchain relies on progressive onboarding for users new to crypto. NEAR’s unique contract-based account model provides the flexibility to onboard users to an application who either don’t hold NEAR tokens or have never interacted with a blockchain––a process that can take dozens of steps and complex fiat onramps on most other networks. Human-readable, named account addresses (i.e. cryptovalley.near) replace long, clunky hex strings and can support multiple names within a single public key. With progressive onboarding, the crypto elements of using decentralized apps on NEAR can be 100% abstracted away from the user and the complexities of gas fees, storage costs, seed phrases, and keys are obscured from their experience until they are ready to claim their wallet and hold their own tokens.

Because NEAR is a sharded scalable blockchain, the easiest point of comparison is Ethereum 2.0––but this does not mean they are competitors. Quite the opposite, in fact: NEAR is compatible and interoperable with Ethereum 1.0 today. The hope is that NEAR solves many developers’ pain points and blockers around cost and scalability today, without having to commit fully to one network or the other.

NEAR will soon interoperate with Ethereum via a fully decentralized asset bridge and EVM support, which will allow Solidity contracts to run on NEAR without any code rewrites. The ideal for many developers and application builders in today’s blockchain landscape is to run a product on multiple blockchains and get the best of each: they can leverage community and liquidity on one, while leveraging performance on another. Using the ETH-NEAR bridge, a developer can have the same asset on both blockchains and let apps communicate across the bridge. 

In order to realize the NEAR collective’s vision of a world where all people have control of their money, data, and power of governance, we need a positive-sum approach to growing adoption of all open technologies and decentralized networks. Rebuilding a truly open, decentralized web is not about performance and features alone, but about empowering builders and entrepreneurs to make their ideas a reality and onboard users without barriers.

CV VC is an early-stage venture capital investor with a focus on startups that build on blockchain technology. In addition to the venture capital investments, we operate our own incubator and ecosystem business under the CV Labs brand, consisting of co-working spaces, advisory and events.

Learn more about our opportunities to invest in the next generation of blockchain startups, our one-of-a-kind blockchain incubation program and how startups get funded, our corporate advisory and consulting services, and our community-focused co-working spaces.

ABOUT NEAR

NEAR exists to to accelerate the world’s transition to open technologies by growing and enabling a community of developers and creators. NEAR is a decentralized application platform that secures high value assets like money and identity with the performance necessary to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of Open Finance and the Open Web in their hands. NEAR’s unique account model allows developers to build secure apps that consumers can actually use similarly to today’s web apps, something which requires multiple second-layer add-ons on other blockchains.

If you’re a developer, be sure to sign up for a developer program and join the conversation in NEAR Discord chat. You can also keep up to date on future releases, announcements, and event invitations by subscribing to NEAR newsletter, or following @NEARProtocol on Twitter for the latest news.