Papers
Since 2018, the NEAR ecosystem has been a pioneer of technical innovation. Spanning the NEAR blockchain and user-owned AI, these papers lay out the fundamentals for technology that will power the user-owned internet.
The NEAR White Paper
The NEAR white paper describes the plan for a decentralized application platform emphasizing usability and scalability, with the goal to build a more open web where apps are controlled by a decentralized community rather than by centralized entities. Covering technical specifications, tokenomics, use cases, and security, it is a comprehensive overview of the NEAR Protocol.
Sharding Design: Nightshade
First published in 2019 and updated with version 2.0 in 2024, Nightshade is the NEAR Protocol sharding design. Sharding is a scaling architecture where the blockchain is divided into multiple parallel chains, or shards, which enables NEAR to scale horizontally with demand. Updated to include stateless validation, where both the state and processing are divided among shards, NEAR is now one of the most technically advanced protocols in Web3.
Proof-of-Response
“Proof of Response” is a novel primitive for decentralized systems, providing a mechanism to guarantee liveness and responsiveness of services. Because these systems contain so many participants and interdependencies, utilizing Proof-of-Response incentivizes reliability and enables better performance overall. It can be used by many types of protocols and many different use cases, from AI to crypto and beyond.
Decentralized Confidential Machine Learning
DCML is a novel approach to creating a decentralized, confidential machine learning cloud that utilizes Trusted Execution Environments or TEEs (CPU and GPU) to enable verifiable and private inference. DCML introduces end-to-end confidentiality and paths to monetization for both closed- and open-source AI builders, enabling many new use cases that require data privacy.
