The number of blockchains that developers can build on is growing every day, each with their own specifics and capabilities. So why do we think farming on NEAR is the best choice? Well, no matter which perspective you use, blockchain wins – in this article we will explore the specific reasons why.
NEAR blockchain summary
NEAR is a public Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain designed to host decentralized applications (dapps) through the use of smart contracts. Although it is sometimes called a competitor to Ethereum, this is not entirely true. Despite Ethereum’s well-known scalability issues resulting in high transaction fees, it still remains the largest ecosystem for decentralized applications and will remain so once the much-anticipated Eth 2.0 upgrade is rolled out. Because of this, NEAR offers not only as a competitor to Ethereum, but also cross-chain capabilities; That said, besides its own features, Ethereum-compatible dapps can be launched on NEAR with minimal modifications.
Here are some of NEAR’s main features:
carbon neutral
We mentioned above that NEAR uses the PoS consensus mechanism, favored by newer blockchain technologies as a much greener and more efficient alternative to Proof of Work, which has come under fire over the last year due to high carbon emissions. NEAR has gone one step further and received the carbon neutral product label from South Pole, an organization that works with companies to implement ecological solutions. Their testing found NEAR to be 200,000 times more energy efficient than Bitcoin.
shards
If the blockchain sector is to grow, it must become more scalable and accommodate the influx of transactions that come with new users. Layer 2 solutions built on top of existing blockchains ease the pressure on core (Layer 1) networks like Ethereum, but are stopgap solutions with their own limitations and usability issues.
NEAR had mass adoption in mind from the start, with its Nightshade sharding architecture as a key feature. With sharding, the network is divided into smaller parts, so that every transaction does not have to be sent to all validators. This relieves traffic jams at peak times. Nightshade will be implemented in four distinct phases and will eventually include dynamic sharding, with shards being automatically created or pruned based on network pressure.
Low fees and fast transactions
In terms of its PoS consensus mechanism and sharding capabilities, NEAR offers transactions that are extremely fast and affordable, often much less than $1, and with near-instant finality.
multichain capabilities
As indicated above, pure competition between blockchains has now given way to collaboration. While more blockchain connections are planned, the biggest fish is undoubtedly Ethereum, which is why NEAR has given both developers and users ways to connect to the blockchain:
- aurora – An EVM created by the NEAR protocol that allows developers to launch Ethereum-compatible applications on the NEAR network. Smart contracts do not need to be rewritten and the base currency is ETH, meaning developers and users can take advantage of Ethereum applications while benefiting from NEAR’s low fees, fast transactions and security.
- rainbow bridge – A way for users to transfer Ethereum and other ERC-20 assets to the NEAR network quickly and easily. As stated on the Rainbow Bridge website:
The Rainbow Bridge allows any information that is cryptographically provable on NEAR to be used in Ethereum contracts and vice versa.
This means that once ETH and other tokens are on the NEAR network, they can be used without experiencing congestion or high fees, especially at peak times.
Ease of use and developer
One of the main priorities of the NEAR protocol is ensuring ease of use on both the developer’s side and the user’s side.
For users, Features are:
-
Human-readable account names, as opposed to the usual cryptographic wallet addresses.
-
The ability to explore NEAR Dapps without having to connect a wallet.
-
Educational blogs, guides and tutorials to help new users navigate the world of DeFi and Web3.
for developers, Features are:
- Guilds – specialized teams of experienced developers from around the world who support those building a DApp on the NEAR blockchain.
- Fair payment of fees generated by their smart contracts.
- NEAR Foundation grants.
- CLI, SDKs, APIs and other tools to support efficient and cost-effective development with different languages, even JavaScript.
Native stablecoins
In April 2022, the NEAR-native stablecoin, $USN, was launched via Decentral Bank DAO. Overcollateralized by USDT in the short term, it will be supported by a number of different assets in phase two, including NEAR and ETH. This represents a major development that allows users to take advantage of:
- A stable medium of exchange between NEAR-based DeFi protocols.
- Arbitrage opportunities if price temporarily deviates from its $1 peg.
- Greater usage and stability of the $NEAR token.
NEAR is growing – key data
Due to the many features mentioned above, the NEAR ecosystem – which only launched on mainnet in 2020 – is growing at a tremendous rate. Here are some numbers to give you an idea of the blockchain expansion.
- number of accounts – NEAR has around 17 million accounts at the time of writing, up from just 3 million six months ago.
- number of projects – Over 700 projects are now being built or will be built on the NEAR, Aurora and Octopus networks.
- Number of Transactions – Transactions are steadily increasing and have averaged around 350,000 per day for the past month.
- Number of active developers – From 2020 to 2021, the number of active developers on the NEAR network grew fourfold, one of the largest increases. This is extremely promising, after all this is not only a vote of confidence, but more projects means more users.
NEAR as your choice for yield farming
So, we’ve got an overview of NEAR’s features and seen how the blockchain is growing sustainably in terms of users and developers. For this reason we believe that it represents the best and most dynamic environment for yield farming.
Let’s take a look at three trending projects on NEAR:
Building
Burrow, a lending platform similar to Aave and Compound, calls itself an interest rate protocol that unlocks returns from base layers through tokens like stNEAR and stETH, and unlocks returns from tokens based on other blockchains thanks to NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge.
One of Burrow’s most interesting features is its self-paying loans. This works by users posting collateral for loans that earn interest, thereby repaying the amount borrowed over time.
Ref finance
Operating through AMM Smart Contracts, Ref Finance is NEAR’s premier DEX, allowing users to trade, stake, provide liquidity and farm while benefiting from NEAR’s fast transactions and ultra-low fees.
Ref Finance users can benefit from multiple pools in one contract, atomic transactions, customizable pool fee, and optimal returns for pools composed of stable assets. This is thanks to Ref’s multi-chain aggregator, which aggregates data from decentralized exchanges in NEAR and Aurora to leverage liquidity for better pricing and reduced trade divergence.
PembRock Finance
PembRock is NEAR’s first leveraged yield farming protocol, enabling farmers to leverage their assets by up to 3x for greater rewards. PembRock’s user-friendly interface makes leveraged farming as seamless as possible, with customizable positions, integration with Ref Finance, farming automation and automatic returns, while taking full advantage of NEAR’s great features.
The fact that users can use funds and access a range of currencies means that a range of different strategies can be used to profit regardless of prevailing market conditions. There are also bonuses for early adopters where they can get a share of the native $PEM token which can be staked in the near future as part of the PembRock DAO for log profits and decision rights.
What did we learn?
NEAR has positioned itself as a blockchain that puts users first, while developers receive ongoing support through a team of experts, grants from the NEAR Foundation, and NEAR Guilds. This has fueled the development of dapps from a wide variety of domains such as the metaverse, environment, gaming, music, and of course, DeFi. These advances place the NEAR protocol at the heart of Web3 development.
find out more
While we hope this article has been of some use to you, you can always dig deeper to explore everything NEAR has to offer. Here are some links for more information:
BrilliantNAH
Welcome to NEAR | NEAR documentation
NEAR’s native stablecoin USN launches 2.0 | NEAR protocol (medium.com)
Construction – Medium
Ref Finance – Guide
PembRock Finance – PembRock School
LOADING
. . . Remarks & more!
Learn Crypto Trading, Yield Farms, Income strategies and more at CrytoAnswers
https://nov.link/cryptoanswers
Comments are closed.