[ANN] Near Protocol: NEAR Launches Nightshade Sharding, Paving the Way for Mass

[cryptoknows]

What is Near Protocol?

NEAR protocol is an open source, high-bandwidth smart contract platform for building decentralized applications (dApps). Near is also a Proof-of-Stake blockchain that launched its main network in mid-2020. This system will help overcome some of the limitations of competing decentralized systems, for example: low bandwidth, slow transaction speed, and poor cross-compatibility.
An easy-to-use and developer-friendly blockchain platform that includes a range of innovations to increase scalability and reduce costs between developers and end users. Using the platform’s capabilities, developers will be able to launch their projects in just a few minutes using open source code, which reduces the barrier to entry for new users to a minimum.
Near Protocol raised nearly $ 50 million in a private round of funding during the first four months, even before the blockchain was built, and this happened during the not-so-active times of the cryptocurrency market (thousands of people believed in the project before it started functioning). All this, of course, would not have been possible without a very experienced and renowned development team. We will briefly present them..

Main features of the Near blockchain:

• Proof-of-Stake (PoS)
• Rainbow Bridge
• Transaction processing speed (100,000 Per second)
• Open source and the entry threshold for new developers
• Supports Dapps
• Developed community

Team:

NEAR Protocol was created by Ilya Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov. The progromists began developing the project as early as 2018. After a stunning launch, the development team had a staff of over 50 people from such eminent companies as: Facebook, Google and MemSQL, Microsoft. Also, the developers have many victories in the championships in programming, which ultimately gives a huge plus to the trust in the work of the entire ecosystem of the project.

Aurora and Rainbow Bridge

What about Aurora?

This is a rather complex system of protocol interaction, but very simple for users to implement. In simple terms, this second lyers application will help Ethereum developers and users combine 2 blockchains at once. Aurora will combine a fully functional Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) and a powerful cross-chain bridge between Eth and Near, thereby allowing the implementation of ETH smart contracts in the NEAR protocol, giving developers the choice.
Neo said in the Matrix .“Choice. The problem is choice.”

After all, when the choice of two technologies through 1 way, the choice becomes obvious, right?

Rainbow Bridge

Near was no exception among cross-blockchain platforms. The project has its own so-called bridge between Erc-20 tokens and the Near ecosystem. This solves the issue of scalability and fees between these systems.
Connection to the Ethereum network in my case occurs through metamask, and to the Near network through Near Wallet, which we talked about earlier.
To interact with Dapps within the Near network, this function is a must. By choosing the required token, you can redirect it from the ETH blockchain to the Near blockchain, for example, by changing USDT you will receive nUSDT

Announcements

↓↓↓↓↓

NEAR Launches Simple Nightshade!

NEAR is launching phase 0 of its roadmap towards a fully sharded blockchain. This phase, nicknamed Simple Nightshade, will kickstart a year of changes and additions to the NEAR blockchain that when complete, will make it super-fast, incredibly secure, and capable of onboarding millions of users into the world of Web3 without skipping a beat.

Since NEAR released the design for the protocol back in 2019, it was always designed to be a sharded blockchain. However, when we were preparing for the launch in early 2020, we realized that there was no need to launch a completely sharded network. Sharding is a very complex piece of technology, and the network was brand new. It didn’t need to be capable of handling hundreds of millions of transactions at launch.

We decided to focus on the stability of the network first and launch sooner, so developers and entrepreneurs can start building on the NEAR Mainnet as soon as possible. However, after a few months, demand shot up.

We have seen the average number of daily transactions rising to 300k. With the emergence of more and more projects building on NEAR, the number of transactions is only going to increase in the coming months. While the network is still currently using only 5% of the total capacity, we wanted to start the transition to sharding now to avoid any unpleasant surprises and ensure we can support all the applications on NEAR.

Like with our mainnet launch, we’ve taken a cautious and pragmatic approach to roll out any new features on NEAR to ensure our community is able to keep building without losing key functionality. As a result, we have created a four-stage rollout of sharding, which we’ve detailed below.

Phase 0: Simple Nightshade – Increasing the Throughput of the Network

In this initial phase, we will shard the state, but not processing. We are going to split the current state into four shards while still having all validators track all shards. Nonetheless, the throughput of the Network will significantly increase.

In this step, we have built a mechanism to split a shard into multiple parts through live upgrades, which will serve as the foundation for dynamic resharding in the future. Meanwhile, because every shard is still validated by all validators, the safety guarantees remain the same. We plan to launch phase 0 in November 2021.

Gaming continues to experience exponential growth worldwide, and NEAR is powering a new generation of games that merge NFTs and DAOs, unlocking meaningful rewards for the time players invest in virtual worlds.

Vorto Gaming - is a leading blockchain gaming company that has set out to create an economy owned by the players, for the players. Its marketplace, Vorto Network, allows users to browse, buy, sell, and trade NFTs and in-game assets. It empowers players to monetize their time and attention to find, craft, and seamlessly generate NFT assets of in-game digital items.
Their model is simple: the more you play, the more you earn. This radical transformation in gameplay gives both power and control back to the players.

Hash Rush - is the first title being launched on the Vorto Network. First developed in 2016, this real-time strategy game, where players establish Crypto Crystal mining colonies and play-to-earn as they mine, complete quests, and defeat enemies, received the Best Innovation Award at the 2018 GamesCom, Europe’s leading trade fair for digital games culture.
Hash Rush has since undergone a visual overhaul and will relaunch on the Vorto Network in Q1 2022. Available now, a limited number of Founder Bundles can be purchased on the Vorto Network. These three individual bundles each include limited NFTs for Hash Rush that give access to unique heroes unavailable elsewhere.
In addition to Carax, the Conjurer, Farion, the Crystal Shield, or Melighar, the Grand Sage, is an exclusive cosmetic skin for the Ernack workers, who mine crystals, build mines, defend your base, and defeat monsters in gameplay. A fourth bundle, The Triumvirate, combines all three hero NFTs and the additional skin.
The Vorto Network will operate on NEAR Protocol. Along with Hash Rush, Vorto is poised to bring NEAR’s capabilities to a broader gaming audience.

The Cheddar Free Community Farm

Loyalty Token CheddarFi launches rewards for all holders NEARProtocol

What’s a Loyalty Network?

Loyalty networks are designed to reward users and partners by providing value through incentives and discounts. The Cheddar Farm is the first protocol that bootstraps a NEAR token ecosystem. Cheddar token rewards loyal users by providing discounts, power-ups, and exclusive access through Cheddar partners.

1) 20 Days of FREE farming who stakes $NEAR
2) 1 Staked NEAR will farm 1 Cheddar after 20 days of staking.Man farmer
3) Claim Cheddar anytime to your NEAR wallet Man technologist
4) NO CAP. Total staked NEAR = Total minted Cheddar

OIN Finance will accept stNEAR as collateral in its stablecoin platform.

A new partnership between @meta_pool and @FinanceOin
This partnership with  @FinanceOin will provide additional utility to  @meta_pool There will be an AMA on September 23rd in the OIN Finance Telegram to kickstart this partnership!

Meta.Pool

Meta Pool is a liquid staking protocol built on NEAR. People stake their NEAR tokens with Meta Pool using automatic staking strategies and receive "staked NEAR" tokens they can use in the DeFi NEARverse or they can be swapped any time back to original NEAR tokens to unstake.

Oin.Finance

OIN is a decentralized stablecoin issuance and trading platform. While MakerDao allows only mainstream assets to be used as collateral to issue DAI, OINDAO allows projects, large or small, to issue their own brand labelled synthetic assets that are collateralized by their own coins; in essence, any projects can mint their own stablecoins to participate in the greater DeFi ecosystem. Having commenced with Ethereum, and gradually expanding to other popular ecosystems such as Elrond, Polkadot, Avalanche, and most recently Binance Smart Chain, OIN’s aim is to become a one-stop shop for cross-chain stablecoin issuance, trading, and implementation.

Paras.id - Skyward.Finance IDO 14-21 September

What is Paras?

Paras is an NFT marketplace that focuses on digital collectibles. We thrive upon bringing conventional collectibles to crypto space. We believe that every single physical art form needs to be stored and digitized to keep it future-proof. Paras, an all-in-one digital collectible marketplace, is eager to diversify the assets to digital collectibles.
Paras is happy to announce the launch of the $PARAS token and our IDO during which we will distribute 5% of $PARAS token on Skyward Finance from September 14th - 21st.

Aurora teamed up with Etherscan!

Aurora & Etherscan

“We are happy to utilize our experience in building block explorer solutions into supporting Aurora, and extend our own vision of providing equitable access to blockchain data”, says Matthew Tan, Founder & CEO of Etherscan.
“Etherscan provides the familiar interface of the explorer,” says Alex Shevchenko, the CEO of Aurora Labs. “Users and devs won’t need to educate themselves on how to use the Aurora block explorer, instead they would get the familiar tool.”
As you have already understood from all the information provided above, Etherscan will help to establish an excellent block browser for Aurora, with an intuitive interface, which will facilitate many technological solutions within the Near ecosystem.
Follow the news on the official Twitter pages of @auroraisnear and @etherscan ! At the end of 2021, these two massive aggregators will launch a product of an incredible level that will change the perception of the development of smart contracts. What could bring the largest Ethereum ecosystem even closer to Near Protocol!

Ref finance 4x Farming in live now!

Available pairs

Ref - wNear : APR 384.7 %
Oct - wNear : APR 379.6 %
Dai - wNear : APR 419.9 %
USDT - wNear : APR 380.5 %
WETH - wNear : APR 259.2 %
Skyward - wNear : APR 82.4 %

To 1 day TVL increased from 4 mln to 21 mln!

Links:
app.ref.finance/farms - Farm
https://cheddar.farm/ - Cheddar Farm
https://near.org/ - Site
https://aurora.dev/ - Ethereum EVM
https://skyward.finance/ - IDO Platform
https://paras.id/ - nft marketplace
https://app.ref.finance/ - DeFi
https://metapool.app/ - liquid staking on Near
https://ethereum.bridgetonear.org/ Swap Eth - Near

https://hashrush.com/ - Hash Rush

https://vortogaming.com/ - Gaming Devs on Near Protocol

[cryptoknows]

Opera to add NEAR Protocol to its Built-in Browser Crypto Wallet

The web browser’s hundreds of millions of users will be able to easily access and transact on the NEAR blockchain and with NEAR tokens within Opera.

Sept 30, 2021 — Opera, the world’s first browser with Web 3 capabilities and a built-in crypto wallet, today announced plans to support NEAR Protocol, one of the world’s emerging blockchains, through a new integration via Opera’s native crypto wallet. The collaboration not only opens Opera up to a new audience of blockchain and crypto enthusiasts that are part of NEAR’s rapidly growing community, but it also gives application developers relying on NEAR increased reach through Opera’s massive user base. Opera users will be able to enjoy speed and scale with low gas fees 1000+ times cheaper than Ethereum. They will be able to transact NEAR assets directly within the Opera browser and experience NEAR’s permissionless Rainbow Bridge that supports transferring ERC20 and ERC712 tokens with Ethereum.
NEAR will become another Key Layer 1 blockchain to be incorporated into the Opera browser, making Opera’s non-custodial wallet truly multi-chain. Opera is the browser of choice for hundreds of millions of users worldwide. In 2018, Opera became the first major browser to include a native crypto wallet and Web 3 support. Opera’s novel features allow people to make transactions and interact with the blockchain-based internet of the future, also known as Web 3.
The company’s decision to introduce NEAR support to its wallet integration marks another step in the development of future-oriented applications, which talk to as many blockchains as possible, providing the most seamless experience to the users and is climate neutral. Integrating NEAR directly in the Opera browser’s crypto wallet means users will be able to easily send and receive NEAR tokens via a seamless user interface without any third-party browser extensions or separate wallet applications. Opera and NEAR are both aligned to making crypto accessible, easy to use and easier to build on. Through this browser integration, users’ crypto experiences will be significantly more enjoyable.
“Like Opera, NEAR’s easy user flow and reliable technology makes mainstream adoption of crypto frictionless,’’ says Susie Batt, Lead of Crypto Ecosystem at Opera. “BTC is blockchain version 1, ETH is version 2, and NEAR is version 3.”
“I’m excited about the mass market reach of Opera meeting NEAR’s rapidly expanding ecosystem of easy-to-use applications. NEAR is the first blockchain that’s ready for mainstream adoption. It’s important to continuously lower the barrier to adoption of the Open Web, and this is a significant step in that direction.” says Co-founder of NEAR Protocol, Illia Polosukhin.
NEAR is scheduled to be available in Opera’s browser for Android in the near future.

[cryptoknows]

NEAR Foundation Awards Panther Protocol Grant To Improve Privacy

Panther, the end-to-end privacy protocol helping to make DeFi regulation compliant has been awarded a grant by the NEAR Foundation.

Panther will receive $40,000 to help develop and deploy the protocol’s privacy solutions on NEAR’s Ethereum Virtual Machine.
“We are thrilled to support Panther Protocol’s mission to provide zero-knowledge assets to the NEAR ecosystem and beyond,” says Josh Daniels, part of the ecosystem grants team. “The NEAR Foundation embraces the reality of a multi-chain future and recognizes the importance of privacy to ensure retail and institutional trading strategies stay confidential yet compliant.”
Panther Protocol was created to enhance DeFi by making privacy available in dApps and protocols by default.
“We are pleased to partner with the NEAR foundation to establish shielded pools and other components of Panther’s privacy-preserving infrastructure on the NEAR blockchain, taking one more step towards an interoperable, private, and compliance compatible blockchain future,” says Oliver Gale, co-founder, and CEO of Panther, about the partnership.
NEAR and Panther agree that privacy is an essential human right. Panther has received a grant from NEAR to explore the development of open-source privacy infrastructure (Rust libraries, APIs, and tooling) needed for a native Panther deployment on NEAR. This includes the deployment of Panther’s privacy solutions on NEAR’s EVM, Aurora.
Due to the current architecture and high volume of Ethereum transactions that pushed gas fees to all-time highs, Near’s Aurora is becoming an intelligent choice for developers that are looking for 1,000x lower gas fees, 50x higher transactions per second, and 2 seconds finality.
Aurora solves the current issues plaguing Ethereum while preserving the development ecosystem value Ethereum has. These factors were critical for Panther to prioritize the development of its scalable privacy infrastructure on NEAR’s blockchain.

Follow Near and Panther Protocol on social media to be the first to hear about these announcements.

Near - https://twitter.com/nearprotocol
Panther - https://t.me/joinchat/GJ64F-nRiIF86Cxn

[cryptoknows]

NearCON Location/time: Lisbon OCT 26 - OCT 27, 2021

NEARCON is an event open to everyone to come and celebrate NEAR's 1 Year Anniversary since Mainnet launch. Immerse yourself in two days of talks, networking, workshops and a whole lot more provided by the NEAR Ecosystem and its Community.

• 2 Solid Days
  Two days of deep dives into the NEAR Community and Ecosystem
• Content Rich
  Come watch 20+ Presentations from thought leaders delivering the latest insights

• Something for Everyone
  Opportunities for Developers, Creators, Investors, Founders, and Community Members to connect and learn more about NEAR
• Range of Discussions
  Talks on DeFi, NFTs, Gaming, Protocol Updates, Developer Tools, and more
  NFT and VR Gallery from NEAR Creators
• Community-First
  Community Choice Awards spotlighting our Community Members
• Lasting Connections
  Networking opportunities to connect and build relationships with NEAR

Come celebrate NEAR Protocol and its one year anniversary on mainnet

The founders of the Near Protocol Ecosystem will be speakers

Link: https://nearcon.org/ - to visit

[cryptoknows]

AuroraDAO Approves $AURORA Token

AuroraDAO approved the creation of the official project token. $AURORA token has a total supply of 1 billion. The network of deployment is Ethereum, bridged to NEAR and Aurora using the Rainbow Bridge.

Official token launch date will be the IDO date. IDO parameters should be approved by the DAO in an additional voting.

Token Use Case

$AURORA is a governance token, a portion of the token is allocated to the Community Treasury. The treasury is used to fund existing projects and project proposals through a Kickstarter–type platform: projects are submitting the applications, while users are voting for them. The details of the platform are to be decided by the DAO.

Some of the following initiatives may or may not be implemented, as per AuroraDAO decisions:

$AURORA token staking;
Incentives for token holders to take part in voting with the allocation of $AURORA from the Community Treasury;
Rainbow Bridge transfers fees;
Rainbow bridge fast transfers fees;
Aurora contract additional execution fees;
Aurora validator private transaction pool service;
Farming of locked funds in the Rainbow Bridge connectors;
Tokenomics
A portion of the tokens will be locked and to be subject to an unlocking scheme which will be determined by the DAO. The rest of the tokens will be used in various initiatives to develop NEAR and Ethereum ecosystems with the help of Aurora solutions.

Aurora raises $12 million in its first funding round

Aurora has recently closed its first private round of funding by raising a total of $12M.

Aurora, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for scaling decentralized applications on NEAR, recently closed its first private round of funding by raising a total of $12M. In doing so, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital and other funds voiced their support for Aurora’s vision of becoming an Ethereum-scaling solution.

Over 100 investors took part in Aurora’s funding round, which was split between the ecosystem and venture capital buckets. The success of the raise reinforces Aurora’s appeal among the community and its objective to bring scaling solutions across the crypto ecosystem.

The Ethereum ecosystem bucket of investors features among others such projects as Zero Knowledge Validation, Global Coin Ventures, imToken, Chronicle. This representation, coupled with the use of ETH as the base token, illustrates Aurora’s vision of supporting and helping scale Ethereum projects.

[cryptoknows]

Proximity Labs, a research and development firm, announced the creation of a $350 million grants vehicle to help build decentralized-finance applications on the NEAR blockchain

The vehicle, a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, aims to distribute the money in NEAR tokens over about four years in amounts ranging from about $5,000 to several million dollars, Proximity’s announcement said. The grants DAO is open to all DeFi projects, it said.

DeFi projects such as Curve, Sushi, Dodo and Kyber have launched or are in the process of doing so on NEAR’s blockchain, which is designed to be fast, secure and infinitely scalable. It’s backed by venture-capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz’s A16Z, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com and Baidu Ventures.

There are now more than 1.3 million active accounts on the network, according to the statement. In addition, total value locked has exceeded $150 million, and includes NEAR native assets -- alongside Ethereum network assets such as Ether, USDC and Tether via its Rainbow Bridge connection.

Link to news: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/a16z-backed-blockchain-gets-350-million-grants-vehicle-for-defi

[cryptoknows]

NEAR Announces $800 Million in Funding Initiatives To Support Ecosystem Growth

The NEAR ecosystem is announcing a monumental $800 million in funding initiatives targeted at accelerating growth. The announcement, which includes the $350 million in funding announced by Proximity Labs last week – reported in Bloomberg – is designed to build on the momentum in the NEAR ecosystem over the last 12 months. While NEAR is giving all communities access to this record amount of funding, it will be focusing on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) teams who are actively revolutionizing and reimagining the way we interact with money. DeFi projects on NEAR have already hit a significant milestone of more than $150M Total Value Locked (TVL). NEAR has an ambitious goal to grow that number quickly and securely. NEAR is also actively looking for projects focused on NFTs, DAOs, and gaming.
NEAR’s next chapter is all about fostering growth by helping developers access best-in-class support and providing users with a frictionless experience using and navigating the web3 world. New funding helps accelerate this process.

NEAR levels up

Of the $800 million in funding, $100 million will be allocated to Startup Grant Pools. More than 20 startups will be identified and given $5M each in funding to redistribute to key stakeholders – the ecosystem ultimately decides who gets funding.
Some $250 million will be allocated to ecosystem grants helping existing projects further develop and scale. The remaining $100M will be allocated to Regional Funds: money allocated to foster the development of NEAR’s largest community regions in Asia, Europe, and the US.
Prior to this announcement, NEAR had already spent $45M across more than 120 projects, including Core Protocol Infrastructure Grants to the likes of:

• Textile
• Liquality
• CronCat
• Kurtosis
• The Grain Programming Language

The sleeping giant awakes

NEAR has been building on its roadmap steadily and securely. Later this year, it will launch the next phase sharding, nicknamed Simple Nightshade. NEAR will go from one to four shards, increasing scalability while not compromising on simplicity. Developers won’t have to add any additional code to smart contracts or adjust their platforms and users will continue to experience the same great UX, but at faster speeds.

Once complete, NEAR will be decentralizing further by lowering the barrier to entry to its validator network, increasing the number of validators first to 100, and then to a few hundred in Q1 2022. As part of this process, there will be further funding to projects helping the rollout and development of NEAR’s sharding technology.

[budlo]

Aurora DAO Approves AURORA IDO

Basic information
- Total amount of sale: 1,000,000 $AURORA
Platforms for sale:
- SmartPad (Aurora);
- BocaChica (NEAR);
- Skyward (NEAR).

SmartPad Sale
Date: November 4, 2021
Amount: 50,000 $AURORA
Price: $1
Accepted tokens: ETH

BocaChica Sale
Date: November 11, 2021
Amount: 300,000 $AURORA
Price: $1
Accepted tokens: NEAR

Skyward Sale
Date: November 17, 2021
Amount: 650,000 $fAURORA
Price: non-fixed
Accepted tokens: NEAR

More information there https://aurora.dev/blog/aurora-dao-approves-usdaurora-ido


DIA Oracles Now Available Natively on NEAR

Due to its crowd-sourcing approach, the DIA oracle enables dApps to have access to a broad library of digital and traditional assets off the shelf, sourced from multiple on-chain and off-chain sources. Additionally, DIA can generate price feeds of any asset listed on centralised and decentralised exchanges. Moreover, DIA’s oracle platform will offer its granular layer of customizability to build decentralised applications on NEAR, with multiple methodologies for data sanitisation and computation.

DIA (Decentralised Information Asset) is an open-source, financial information platform that utilises crypto-economic incentives to source and validate data. Market actors can supply, share and use financial and digital asset data.
https://medium.com/dia-insights/hello-near-protocol-dia-oracles-now-available-natively-on-near-3bbef5b3f13


QSTN: Redefining data, NFTs and DeFi on Near Protocol

What is QSTN?
QSTN is a web application where users participate in surveys, quizzes and short questionnaires to earn cryptocurrency.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology, which all cryptocurrencies use as an immutable “news feed” for activity on-chain.
By integrating NEAR and their respective blockchain, users on QSTN can verify their answers were recorded on the blockchain.
Now, users will not need to “trust” because the time stamp is immutably on-chain.

QSTN goal is to create a ecosystem where users can monetize their data and learn about cryptocurrency at the same time.
If you don't already, follow us on Twitter, because we will be hosting weekly “QSTNs of the Day” for qsties to earn the first official “QSTN” NFT.
https://medium.com/@qstnus/qstn-redefining-data-nfts-and-defi-on-near-protocol-d7cd8fb050f4


Aurora IDO on SmartPad Nov 5 at 13:00 UTC
https://twitter.com/auroraisnear/status/1456246263230255115
Although i'll take part in the sale it seems to me that the estimate of $ 1 is too high. What do you think?

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

[budlo]

Due to the delay of the SmartPad team, only yesterday the ido of AURORA started.
Having gone deeper into the project i decided to skip this ido. I don't like the token distribution method that the team made.
The project estimate is too high and it seems to me that in half a year i'll be able to buy a token at a cheaper price and the project itself will be more developed after this time.

[budlo]

Announcing Aurora’s First DEX and Liquidity Farming Platform

The v1 release serves as the beta where we introduce the DEX to the community using a familiar Uniswap/Sushi based interface. The team is already currently working on v2 which will showcase a fully custom UI that is more information-rich, and adhering to NearPad’s emphasis on design and user experience.

With the DEX launch, we’re now paving the way for liquidity and yield farming flow from Ethereum to Aurora. However, to make the reward distribution fair and equitable to all participants, reward distribution for liquidity pool token stakers will be delayed by 12 hours. This is to allow everyone to stake their liquidity pool within a reasonable time and start earning rewards without being handicapped by their time zone.

“The launch of the DEX marks the real launch of NearPad, as its mission to become the DeFi hub on Aurora becomes more tangible. We’re excited to work with Aurora, Near, and the budding ecosystem projects to make a more enticing and comprehensive offering to all community members.” — Aiden Knox, core contributor

To start farming, go to: https://dex.nearpad.io/
https://nearpad.medium.com/announcing-auroras-first-dex-and-liquidity-farming-platform-92f888d757e4

[cryptoknows]

NEAR Launches Nightshade Sharding, Paving the Way for Mass Adoption

Simple Nightshade
Today, the code for phase 0 was successfully deployed to the mainnet – it can take several hours or days for the code to be integrated by all network participants.

This phase, nicknamed Simple Nightshade, will kickstart a year of changes and additions to the NEAR blockchain that when complete, will make it super-fast, incredibly secure, and capable of onboarding millions of users into the world of Web3 without skipping a beat.

In this initial phase, we will shard the state, but not processing – meaning the blockchain will still be validated by all the network’s validators. The state will be split into four shards, significantly increasing the throughput of the network. 

Before sharding, blockchains would become congested as the project became more popular.
In this step, we have built a mechanism to split a shard into multiple parts through live upgrades, which will serve as the foundation for dynamic resharding in the future – more on that later. Meanwhile, because every shard is still validated by all validators, the safety guarantees remain the same.

What does this mean for users?

It means they get the same simple, easy-to-use experience, but with increased speed and performance. One of blockchain’s biggest challenges has been scalability: how does a network grow to handle increased activity without compromising on security? Our solution to that question is Nightshade Sharding. 

While there are many new blockchains claiming to have thousands of transactions per second (TPS) and many layer 2 scaling solutions, due to their non-sharded designs, they would all hit an upper limit of what the network could handle eventually.

NEAR’s Nightshade Sharding, on the other hand, allows NEAR Protocol to scale linearly with the number of shards, thereby having the ability to satisfy the demand for transactions as more and more users start to use NEAR. Ultimately it prepares NEAR for mass consumer adoption of billions of users.

What does this mean for developers?

Similar to users, developers will not have to change existing processes in order to take advantage of the increase in speed and scalability.

Thanks to Nightshade’s homogeneous design, developers are not exposed to the details of sharding from the very beginning and they will remain unaffected by this upgrade. More specifically, internally we treat cross-contract calls the same regardless of whether two contracts are on the same shard. Therefore, developers should expect no changes to their experience of developing on NEAR.

What does Nightshade Sharding change about the network’s performance?

While transactions per second are often used as a measure of a network’s speed, there are many other factors that go into how quickly a blockchain can verify a transaction.

At NEAR, network congestion, transaction finality and cost are all parts of the puzzle when it comes to assessing how ‘quick’ a network is. For reference, for token transfers, on one shard we can do 800-1000 TPS and with the upcoming sharding with four shards, we will be able to do a minimum of 2500-3000 TPS.

Ultimately, NEAR’s Nightshade is theoretically limitless (by increasing the number of shards) and can handle millions of transactions per second.

An ecosystem primed for growth

In addition to the work on the protocol by NEAR Inc, NEAR Foundation is creating an ecosystem for developers, entrepreneurs, and enterprises to thrive with ambitious funding programs including $800 million worth of global ecosystem funding (now valued at $1.2 billion).

We’re also seeing a thriving gaming, metaverse, and NFT ecosystem emerging, not to mention a DeFi ecosystem that has gone from strength to strength since mainnet launch one year ago.

For consumers, we’re making strides forward to make the crypto experience even easier to use. From simple, language-based wallet names, to two-factor authentication, and staking baked right into the wallet.

This is just the beginning of a period of explosive growth at every level. We can’t wait to show you what’s coming next.

[Bohdan820]

Dante Network partnership with NEAR

Dante is a data storage network with flexible cross-chain service, secured privacy and high scalability. They'll receive a grant from NEAR to build better privacy storage.
The Dante Network team is well-versed, the CEO of the company holds a Master's degree from Xiamen University, and the CTO is one of the internet development practitioners.

https://twitter.com/DanteNetwork/status/1463523630013288448

[nira09]

Near protocol has awarded a $50,000 USD grant to Wannaswap.
WannaSwap is one of the first projects on Aurora EVM. They have built a DEX to enable seamless asset swaps and liquidity provision for the Aurora ecosystem. WannaSwap is directly supported by NEAR protocol and AURORA.

[yurez]

Nearnauts is launching 1st December!
NEARNauts, the generative PFP project, aims to pioneer the NFT space on NEARProtocol.
Get your hands on one of these 10K randomly generated PFPs, which will be available to mint Dec 1st.
Strap in! https://twitter.com/NEARProtocol/status/1465341387872911362

[Roidz]

Nearnauts is launching 1st December!
NEARNauts, the generative PFP project, aims to pioneer the NFT space on NEARProtocol.
Get your hands on one of these 10K randomly generated PFPs, which will be available to mint Dec 1st.
Strap in! https://twitter.com/NEARProtocol/status/1465341387872911362

This is very good news sir. It turns out that a new project called PFP generative will be born.
Hopefully I can also get this randomly given PFP
Best wishes for the PFP project.

[Kitaiev]

Metaverse AI is developing an "Open Metaverse" on Web 3.0. on high speed and affordable NEAR Protocol

The Metaverse is Coming. It should be Open & Polymorphic...

- Privacy-preserving Decentralized Avatar & Identity Management.
- Zero-Knowledge proofs (ZKP) safeguards privacy in virtual worlds.
- Complete ownership of 3D avatars, identity & metaverse credentials.

https://www.metaverseai.org/

There is nothing yet but this definitely needs to be monitored.

[Bohdan820]

Metaverse AI is developing an "Open Metaverse" on Web 3.0. on high speed and affordable NEAR Protocol

The Metaverse is Coming. It should be Open & Polymorphic...

- Privacy-preserving Decentralized Avatar & Identity Management.
- Zero-Knowledge proofs (ZKP) safeguards privacy in virtual worlds.
- Complete ownership of 3D avatars, identity & metaverse credentials.

https://www.metaverseai.org/

There is nothing yet but this definitely needs to be monitored.

Reality Chain in collaboration with Unique One Network, an epchain candidate from Octopus Network, launched the first metaverse on testnet

https://demo.uniqueone.world/

At the moment, you can add your NEAR and ETH wallets to the whitelist to buy land on testnet: realitychain.io/whitelist

The next step in the development of the Reality Chain is the Paras metaverse.
The upcoming Paras metauniverse will be built entirely on NEAR Protocol (like the realitychain) and will be an option for Paras NFT artists to create art, furniture and clothing.
Everyone can also create their own gallery!

Project website: realitychain.io
https://t.me/near_ru/689

[Kitaiev]

Aurora is Now Live On Autofarm!

Functional features of Aurora currently include a bridge, block explorer and AMM exchange — TriSolaris, whose TVL doubled to $100 million in just a span of 3 days after its $TRI token launch.
7 new vaults from Aurora’s leading AMM DEX, TriSolaris, have been added to Autofarm. And more will be added along the way as the Aurora ecosystem continues to bloom!

https://medium.com/autofarm-network/aurora-is-now-deployed-on-autofarm-99e0aad1e419

[budlo]

Aurora partners with ConsenSys, Bringing MetaMask, Infura and more Ethereum Tools to NEAR

Aurora, the Ethereum scaling solution that allows projects built on Ethereum to utilize the cutting-edge technology of the NEAR Protocol, is partnering with ConsenSys, the enterprise blockchain company to provide access to its suite of developer tools.

The partnership aims to empower both the NEAR and Ethereum ecosystems by improving developer facilities - through the availability of the product suite - with the goal of increasing cross-chain interoperability.

The product suite features projects including MetaMask, Infura, ConsenSys Quorum, Truffle, Codefi, and Diligence. MetaMask is the primary way a global user base of over 21 million monthly active users interact with applications on Web3. Over 350,000 developers use Infura to access Ethereum, IPFS and Layer 2 networks. In addition, 4.7 million developers create and deploy smart contracts using Truffle and ConsenSys Diligence has secured more than $25 billion in smart contracts with its hands-on dapp audits and testing tools.

https://aurora.dev/blog/aurora-partners-with-consensys

[kurgak]

Qortal: The Future of Blockchain Platforms

Press Release - December 1st, 2021

   Qortal (QORT) is infrastructure for a censorship-free Internet, alternative ISP, suite of P2P
solutions, and alternative to Ethereum. It is a self-empowering operating system that is free of
any regulation other than the 100% open source codebase itself. This is only possible with true
decentralization and that is exactly what Qortal can accomplish. Literally no man has the power
to censor or sanction others within Qortal’s infrastructure, other than group admins of their
subcommunities. Individuals are in complete control over their accounts, wallets, trades, and
messaging with no middle man.
   Qortal launched on June 29th 2020 in the most ethical fashion with no pre-mine, no ICO/IEO,
and no airdrop. Realizing the unfairness with existing PoW and PoS systems, and with a desire
to create an egalitarian system for all, Qortal implemented ‘minting’ where every minting account
that participates in processing blocks earns a portion of the block reward. In other words, there
is no competition to sign blocks and there is no way to buy power over the network as seen with
PoW and PoS systems. QORT coin is more than another cryptocurrency to mine as it powers
on-chain functionality with transactions and is the base pair for trading within Qortal’s true
peer-to-peer Trade Portal. QORT can also be a form of digital payment within the Qortal
Network where free web hosting allows e-commerce and job markets to thrive!

   As you can see, there is a lot to Qortal. Below are key highlights:

● Stand-alone infrastructure with a focus on individual sovereignty
● 100% open source codebase that is built from scratch (no clones)
● Egalitarian minting where everyone earns QORT for supporting the network
● Local wallets that the individual has complete and sole control over
● True peer-to-peer (P2P) cross-chain trading
● Free web hosting and public data storage where freedom speech and trade of
information can thrive unhindered
● Social media safe haven where only admins of their self-created groups can censor and
have control over
● Encrypted peer-to-peer text, voice, and video communications
● Infrastructure for ethical third-party projects to build securely
● Auto-updates that require 60% approval by DevTeam (decentralized solution)

   What Qortal has now:

● Network stability with over 3,000 nodes
● Secure accounts and local wallets for QORT, BTC, LTC, and DOGE
● Sponsorship and minting system where anyone can join to help support the network
● Working P2P Trade Portal with QORT, LTC, and DOGE (BTC is not live now)
● ‘Sleeping’ trade ATs to improve Trade Portal performance and scalability
● Database trimming to prevent chain bloating and improve scalability
● Auto-bootstrapping to sync nodes faster (Top-Only nodes are also an option now)
● Encrypted P2P messaging on Q-Chat
● Q-Chat Groups (public and private)
● Name Registration (can be used instead of address; can also be used as a domain)
● 100% open source custom kernels for Raspberry Pi boards built specifically for Qortal
What to expect next:
● Core version 3.0 to go live later this month with web hosting and public data storage
● App Store for add-on applications (everyone can create applications for users to opt into)
● Voting system so we all can help influence the project’s direction
● More coins added to the Trade Portal and wallets (BTC, ARRR, etc.)
● Sponsorship and minting system modification to improve integrity
● Encrypted private group messaging
● Mesh networking when the node base is large enough (end of year 2022 possibly)

   Qortal is also being built to provide ethical projects with a viable alternative to platforms like
Ethereum. So many projects claim to be decentralized and are not. They often fall short of
ethical standards or are outright scams. Qortal will not be a place for such things.
With the launch of version 3.0, Qortal will begin to rebuild the Internet as well as blockchain
space in an unhackable and ethical fashion. It’s time for change without hindrance! This is a
moment a lot of Qortians have been waiting for in the virtual land of Qortia! With this emerging
technology, mankind can unify, educate, and grow together while regaining control over our
digital lives. Qortal’s community believes in restoring balance to the people of the world. This is
not about anarch per se, but are certainly building an anarchistic platform free from any
regulation. Qortians are building infrastructure for a new system. One that cannot be hacked or
compromised, as it is truly decentralized and self-empowering! Join Qortal in this revolutionary
venture! You can find all of the official links and more information about the Qortal Project at
wiki.qortal.org  https://qortal.org/