Try Quests to earn NEARNEAR - 11. Insight of the Week
The NEAR Foundation is running an "Insight of the Week" series. Keeping your analysis short and focused on excellent-quality visualization - provide the most fascinating or illuminating fact or insight that you can about the NEAR ecosystem, or any of the projects building on NEAR, over the past 7 to 14 days. When you tweet about the insight, don't just describe it - do your best to explain "why" what you chose is unusual, valuable, or noteworthy. If you're stumped, don't worry - we'll be running this type of bounty again in the future, so feel free to use this as a "test case" to begin thinking creatively and searching out clever insights.
Acknowledgment and supplementary Information
- Author: NSA2000
- Twitter of the Author: @NSA2000C
- Discord of the Author: NSA2000#5651
- Data from FlipsideCrypto
- Link of this dashboard’s tweet:
1. Introduction
==Near==
Near Protocol is a layer 1 blockchain network. It provides a platform on which developers can build decentralized applications (dapps). The most successful layer 1 blockchain is Ethereum, so protocols like Near are seen as challengers.
The key yardsticks for layer 1 networks are transaction costs, speed and the ability to maintain those features as transaction volumes grow. These factors are the focus for layer 1s like Near to improve upon Ethereum, which has encountered issues with costs and speed over the last few years.
Near Protocol is faster and cheaper than Ethereum. More importantly, it promises to be faster than some of the other largest challengers. When fully implemented, Near is expected to be able to process up to around 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). Ethereum’s largest rival, Solana, averages less than 3,000 transactions per second, according to its own blockchain explorer. Ethereum averages double-digit transactions per second. Bitcoin does less than 10. []
==Rainbow Bridge==
One of the most important features of the NEAR protocol is the Rainbow Bridge. It is a major application of the NEAR protocol, launched in 2021. Interestingly, the Rainbow Bridge token list includes ERC-20 tokens, wrapped tokens, stablecoins, and NFTs. You can swap these tokens between Ethereum and the NEAR protocol, and it helps developers, as well as users, manage the benefits of better throughput and lesser fees across the NEAR protocol. The Rainbow Bridge is completely decentralized and permissionless. It also offers the flexibility for bridging tokens by sending them directly to the NEAR wallet from Metamask as well as other web3 wallets.
The understanding of “What is Rainbow Bridge in NEAR protocol?” becomes easier, especially in terms of usability. You can start using the bridge by depositing ERC-20 tokens in Ethereum smart contract. Without the facility for direct token transfer between networks, the tokens would have to be locked and removed from circulation. New tokens must be created on the protocol to represent the original tokens, thereby ensuring constant value for the total circulating supply among both blockchain networks.
Generally, NEAR Rainbow Bridge transactions take almost 1 to 2 seconds for confirmation, with costs lower than $1. On the other hand, users may incur more costs for reverting the token back to Ethereum. The final value of the transaction would rely on the existing gas prices and traffic on the Ethereum blockchain.
==Aim of this analysis:==
The aim of this dashboard is to conduct a comprehensive review on the bridging into NEAR with a focus on the Rainbow Bridge in order to review the activity variation and trends over the past two weeks.
It must be pointed out that The Rainbow Bridge connects Near Protocol, Ethereum, and Aurora—an EVM-compatible scalability solution on Near—allowing users to move funds between the networks via smart contracts [] [].