INTRODUCTION

NEAR Protocol is a secure open-source blockchain designed to ensure the fast and easy development of decentralised applications (dApps).

The platform was launched in 2020 by former Google engineer, Ilya Polosukhin, and Microsoft developer, Alexander Skidanov. NEAR Protocol immediately attracted a great deal of attention from the community and large investors and was highly appreciated by Vitalik Buterin. The Ethereum CEO and co-founder admitted that NEAR developers have already managed to implement ideas that are planned to be introduced with Ethereum 2.0.

NEAR Protocol runs on the Delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm, as well as uses a sharding approach, which allows the network to increase its capacity and efficiency.

In this dashboard, we will look into the activity of the ecosystem. NEAR has expressed its goals to decentralize in 2023. Simply put: are these efforts working?

Conclusion

• Even though validators and stake pools in 2022 has been much more than 2023 so far but their daily charts indicates that they will probably grew much more in 2023 compared to 2022 which will be resulted in more decentralized network.

Decentralized actions like staking or depositing are dominant over centralized actions like unstaking in last 3 months.

Lowering the barriers to entry for nodes accomplishes more than simply decentralizing the network.  In a horizontally scaling system like NEAR’s, the more nodes which can participate, the more it can scale as well.

The number of swappers and swaps has increased almost since the beginning of the new year, which shows the improvement of decentralization In the long run, the average number is almost constant

In the last few months, the number of transactions and unique users of cex has decreased a lot This indicates a decrease in people's interest in using centralized exchanges

In the new year, the amount they have unstaked has increased much more than in 2022, so that from 14.4 million stakes, almost 13.1 million have been unstaked. This is a bad component for decentralization

• Daily number of swaps and swappers has been increasing since first of January in new year, indicates improvement of this aspect of decentralization of Near network.

• Area chart above shows daily shares of staking and unstaking transactions since last 3 months and as we see staking actions has peeked highest on November 9th 2022 with 1,020 transactions and has been decreasing since towards 2023.
• Unstaking actions has been dormant for most of last 3 months and peeked highest on Jan 10th 2023 with 1,345.