NEAR ;)

NEAR has evolved tremendously in the two years since the mainnet launch in October 2020. More than 20 protocol upgrades were done live, most recently the launch of Sharding Phase 1. As we look ahead to the next two phases of sharding and beyond, it’s time for an updated protocol roadmap.

This post will outline the next two years of evolving the NEAR Protocol and the technical priorities we believe will benefit builders and users the most. The roadmap is meant to be a living document and anyone is welcome to make suggestions or proposals on how the protocol should evolve.

The roadmap has two major components: Experience and Core. The Experience section encompasses user and/or developer experience and the protocol features needed to enable those experiences. As an example, an iPhone user can freely start to use applications built on top of NEAR without having to register an account if we have meta transactions and support for Secp256r1 keys.

The Core section, on the other hand, covers major efforts to improve the scalability and decentralization of the protocol. Most notably, this features the launch of phase 2 of sharding, which scales the network to 100 shards with no validators tracking all shards. Phase 2 is planned for 2023. The roadmap goes through 2024 with the delivery of phase 3 of sharding, which dynamically adjusts the number of shards based on demand.

FTX Bankruptcy: A Totally Preventable Tragedy

FTX is a cryptocurrency exchange built by traders, for traders. It offers innovative products including industry-first derivatives, options, volatility products, and leveraged tokens. Their mission is to develop a platform robust enough for professional trading firms and intuitive enough for first-time users and that makes it stand out from the competition. When compared to some of its rivals, it supports over 300 coins, which is a sizable quantity.

The recently resigned CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, founded FTX in 2018 with Gary Wang who is the current CTO. He initially co-founded Alameda Research which is a quantitative trading firm in September 2017 with Tara Mac Aulay. As a pioneer in both bitcoin liquidity and quantitative trading, Alameda offers round-the-clock OTC services and aids FTX in keeping deep order books.

The exchange, which was created by Alameda as well, raised $8 million in three investment rounds. The Series B round, which came after the 2019 Seed and Corporate rounds, was finished in March 2020. Liquid Value Capital committed capital to it. While One Block Capital, Kenetic, FBG Capital, and Greylock Partners all invested in the Seed round, Binance served as the round’s Lead Investor.

Interestingly, it seems that FTX was founded on a similar house of cards to TerraUSD. Similar to many other exchanges, FTX featured FTT, a cryptocurrency token created to fund the exchange’s numerous projects.

Owners of FTT might stake the token to generate money from their holdings or use it to get discounts on FTX trading fees. It’s a typical tactic; Binance, for instance, provides Binance Coin (BNB) and Binance USD, two native tokens (BUSD). But because of how the token was utilized to sustain FTX, SBF’s empire was overly vulnerable to FTT price fluctuations.

Solana & FLOW

Solana is a platform that seeks to provide a foundation for decentralized applications (dapps) in a way that prioritizes scalability.

With this aim, Solana is one of several competing blockchain projects such as Ethereum, Zilliqa, or Cardano that hopes to grow an ecosystem of cryptocurrency-powered products and services.

To differentiate itself, Solana introduces a combination of architectural design choices that attempts to offer faster transaction settlement times and an infrastructure that focuses on flexibility that enables developers to write and launch customizable applications in multiple programming languages.

To achieve these features, Solana’s network’s native cryptocurrency, SOL, is used to execute custom programs, send transactions, and incentivize actors that support the Solana network.

Flow is a blockchain platform that originally was designed for gaming purposes, but has expanded since its launch in 2020. The flow blockchain enables fast, low-cost transactions and supports smart contracts. It powers blockchain applications including NBA Top Shot, a non-fungible token (NFT) offering. Flow also has a native cryptocurrency that trades under the symbol FLOW.

If you are considering investing in FLOW, it’s essential to understand how flow works and compares to the leading blockchains. Here’s a closer look at flow, both the cryptocurrency and blockchain platform.

What Is Flow?

Flow is a blockchain network designed to enable transactions that are fast and cheap. The flow blockchain is a competitor to ethereum, another blockchain platform that supports a native currency plus an ecosystem of blockchain-based projects.

Note

The flow blockchain was developed by Dapper Labs. Dapper Labs is also the team behind CryptoKitties, a blockchain-based game to buy, sell, create, and trade digital cats.

The flow blockchain was launched in conjunction with Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot, a blockchain-based digital collectibles marketplace that specializes in basketball cards.1 According to Dapper Labs, as of May 2022, the flow blockchain has processed more than 20 million NBA Top Shot transactions worth over $1 billion.2

Flow was first built as a tool for Dapper Labs’ game developers to meet their own needs, and later launched publicly to support other decentralized applications.

The coin supply is not capped, although the inflation rate of FLOW—the annual rate at which new tokens are generated as rewards leading to an increase in supply—is currently limited to 3.75%.3

Special Features of Flow

The flow blockchain was designed to support games and consumer applications, and can potentially process the transactions of millions of active users. Games, collectibles, and related apps can be supported by the flow blockchain.

By supporting interaction among smart contracts, the flow blockchain is positioned to allow for a large number of applications on its platform, much like the ethereum blockchain.

Flow also claims it is more efficient than other blockchains because the job typically done by each miner—computers that work to verify transactions and maintain the blockchain’s records—is divided across five nodes. Such segmentation, according to Flow, reduces redundancy in the work done by each node and results in faster throughput.4

Methodology