What is NEAR Protocol?

NEAR Protocol is a smart contract capable, public Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that was conceptualized as a community-run cloud computing platform. Built by the NEAR Collective, NEAR was designed to host decentralized applications (dApps), and strives to compete with Ethereum and other leading smart contract-enabled blockchains like EOS and Polkadot. NEAR’s native token is also called NEAR, and is used to pay for transaction fees and storage. NEAR tokens can also be staked by token holders who participate in achieving network consensus as transaction validators.

NEAR Protocol is focused on creating a developer and user friendly platform. To accommodate this mission, NEAR has incorporated features like human-readable account names as opposed to only cryptographic wallet addresses, and the ability for new users to interact with dApps and smart contracts without requiring a wallet at all.

Methodology

It has been that the definition of a transaction on NEAR is that all actions are performed "on top of the receiver's account" and also that the receiver account is "the account towards which the transaction will be routed." Also in the nearlib SDK, the transactions interface includes a method called signTransaction that requires receiverId as a parameter. Conceptually every transaction always has a sender and a receiver, even though sometimes they might be the same. Because we always convert a transaction to a receipt that is sent to the receiver, it doesn't matter conceptually whether they are the same, even though in implementation there might be a difference. []

As far as the intention of the users who have recently joined the NEAR blockchain (new users) might be so important, we have investigated the daily variation of the new users on NEAR according to the type of receivers (contracts and wallets), which in turn shows what contract and wallet has attracted the attention of the new users during the past two weeks. It is worth mentioning that the 'near.core.fact_transactions' table has been employed in this dashboard to conduct this analysis.

As can be seen from these charts, the total trend of the daily number of new users is decreasing slightly from 11 to 14 Feb 2023, however, its trend is increasing overall, especially after 14 Feb 2023. Moreover, 'token.sweat', 'tge-lockup.sweat', and 'embr.playember_reserve.near' are the top three contracts. It is also important to note that 'e589457354361489a89039b8be6737cbc2db4d13919b6ccf23889a60f3b0d8f3' is the most popular wallet adress during the past two weeks.

Results