Draft:NEAR Protocol
Submission declined on 1 August 2025 by Caleb Stanford (talk).
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| Submission declined on 31 July 2025 by RangersRus (talk). This draft's references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article. In summary, the draft needs multiple published sources that are:
This submission appears to read more like an advertisement than an entry in an encyclopedia. Encyclopedia articles need to be written from a neutral point of view, and should refer to a range of independent, reliable, published sources, not just to materials produced by the creator of the subject being discussed. This is important so that the article can meet Wikipedia's verifiability policy and the notability of the subject can be established. If you still feel that this subject is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, please rewrite your submission to comply with these policies. Declined by RangersRus 4 days ago. | |
| Submission declined on 30 July 2025 by Caleb Stanford (talk). This draft's references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article. In summary, the draft needs multiple published sources that are: Declined by Caleb Stanford 5 days ago.
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| Submission declined on 29 July 2025 by Kovcszaln6 (talk). This draft's references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article. In summary, the draft needs multiple published sources that are: Declined by Kovcszaln6 6 days ago.
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Comment: Thank you for the WP:Three sources. Analysis of these: Source 3) (Coinbase) is not independent as commented by pythoncoder. Source 1) I am not familiar with Forbes Spain (or the author Joel Jabalera), but I suspect this falls under WP:FORBESCON. A quick readthrough of the article shows a lot of signs of promotional tone rather than independent coverage, so I wouldn't consider this coverage to be reliable. Source 2) appears to be a technical report from Harvard Business School, this meets WP:Self-published. If the author is associated with NEAR, this would be classified as primary, and I don't think the article is peer-reviewed, so WP:RSNPREPRINTS also applies. Based on all of the above, the article topic is presumed not to meet WP:GNG. Caleb Stanford (talk) 16:27, 1 August 2025 (UTC)
- Comment: Coindesk is not considered independent. You can cite it but it doesn’t count for notability. See WP:NCRYPTO —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 11:13, 1 August 2025 (UTC)
- Comment: WP:GNG may not be met, and WP:CONTEXT. The refs are not formatted correctly, please use the 2017 wiki editor to generate them. For GNG, please see WP:Three sources for some advice. Caleb Stanford (talk) 22:42, 30 July 2025 (UTC)
- Comment: After addressing the notability issue, please also try to use more secondary sources. Kovcszaln6 (talk) 18:21, 29 July 2025 (UTC)
NEAR Protocol is a sharded blockchain with smart contracts, human-readable accounts, and a flexible key management system. Its native cryptocurrency is NEAR.
Three best sources
[edit]1.Forbes Spain [1]: An in-depth and independent article published in 2022 that explains what NEAR is and explains its technological aspects.
2. Harvard Business School Case Study [2]: An in-depth and independent case study that touches on the complete history of NEAR, its technological components, its ecosystem and its potential use on AI.
3. Coindesk [3]: An in-depth and independent article published in 2022 and updated on 2024, that explains the history of NEAR and how its technological stack works.
Besides this, NEAR has been covered in CNBC, Forbes India, TechCrunch, and Forbes USA among others.
Moreover, and according to an independent source, as of today (Aug 1st, 2025) NEAR is the blockchain with most number of active accounts and is top 4 in number of transactions
History
[edit]NEAR was conceived in 2017 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov. Development started in 2018, with the network going live in 2020 as a monolithic chain.[4][2][1]
In 2021 the network started migrating towards a sharded design named Nightshade, authored by Polosukhin and Skidanov.[3]
During 2024 two major network updates were released. The first one introduced stateless validation, allowing to divide the network into independent shards.[5] The second enabled NEAR smart contracts to sign transactions for foreign chains, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana.[6]
Architecture
[edit]NEAR Protocol is a decentralized network, in which a fixed number of nodes validate transactions using a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, and register them in a blockchain.[3][7]
Validators are grouped into independent shards, each responsible for a portion of the network's state and transactions. Approximately every 600 milliseconds a new block is produced. Approximately every 12 hours (known as an epoch) the network's validators are re-elected and re-assigned one of the existing shards. [7]
Accounts
[edit]In order to act within the NEAR network, users must create an account. Accounts are identified through either human-readable name, e.g. alice.near, an alphanumeric string or ethereum-like acccounts.
NEAR accounts hold NEAR tokens, but can be created with no balance.
Keys
[edit]Each account is associated with zero, one or more public-key cryptography, which are used to sign transactions.
NEAR Protocol distinguishes between two types of keys: Full-access keys, which allow complete control over the account, and function-call keys, which grant limited permissions to calling specific functions on a specific smart contract.
Smart Contracts
[edit]All NEAR accounts can host programmable logic known as smart contracts, which are written in high-level languages such as Rust or Python and compiled into WebAssembly. A global registry of smart contracts exists, allowing accounts to share and reuse code across the network.
Smart contracts can interact with each other through asynchronous function calls. They can also yield execution and resume once an external call is received.
Transactions
[edit]Transactions allow accounts to perform an action (or series of actions) against a specific target account on the network.
The actions an account can make are limited to: call a function on a contract, create a sub account, deploy a contract on itself, add or remove a key on itself, delete itself. Accounts can also natively delegate the transaction costs to another account through an action known as DelegateAction.
Gas
[edit]All transactions incur a fee known as gas, which is paid by the account initiating the transaction. Fees are fixed, and users cannot pay extra gas to prioritize their transactions.
- ^ a b "Near Protocol, la blockchain de última generación más accesible hasta la fecha". 5 February 2022.
- ^ a b "NEAR Protocol: Self-Sovereignty in the Age of AI - Case - Faculty & Research - Harvard Business School".
- ^ a b c "What Is Near Protocol and How Does It Work?".
- ^ "NEAR Protocol raises $21.6M from A16Z and launches its MainNet, beating Ethereum 2.0". 4 May 2020.
- ^ "NEAR Blockchain Gets Major Upgrade to Add 'Stateless Validation'". 22 August 2024.
- ^ "Near Protocol's Illia Polosukhin on enabling transactions across multiple blockchains". CNBC. 5 April 2024.
- ^ a b "What is NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?".
- in-depth (not just passing mentions about the subject)
- reliable
- secondary
- independent of the subject
Make sure you add references that meet these criteria before resubmitting. Learn about mistakes to avoid when addressing this issue. If no additional references exist, the subject is not suitable for Wikipedia.