Near Protocol (NEAR) price, chart and history
Near Protocol is $4.72, down 5.57% in the last 24 hours. Market value $6.17 billion, rank #25.
About Near Protocol
NEAR Protocol is a blockchain for building apps, such as token exchanges, games and, increasingly, AI-powered services and automated agents. Its coin, NEAR, pays transaction and storage fees and can be staked to help secure the network in exchange for rewards. The project aims to feel easy for everyday users, with readable account names instead of long codes, and it promotes tools that let people act across several blockchains from one NEAR account.
NEAR was co-founded by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov. Polosukhin previously worked at Google Research and co-wrote the well-known 2017 paper that introduced the transformer design behind today's AI chatbots; Skidanov had worked at MemSQL and Microsoft. The team began as an AI startup before turning to blockchains, and the network went live in April 2020. The Switzerland-based NEAR Foundation supports the ecosystem, and the project raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture investors.
NEAR uses proof of stake and splits its workload across several parallel pieces called shards, a design named Nightshade, so capacity can grow as demand rises. Since 2024, validators can check shards without storing all their data, which lowers running costs. The coin has no fixed maximum supply: new tokens are created every year, though this rate was halved in 2025. Risks include heavy competition among smart contract chains, past hacks of apps built on NEAR, and concerns about how concentrated its validators are.
- Created by
- Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov
- Launched
- April 22, 2020
- How it's secured
- Proof of stake with sharding (Nightshade)
- Supply
- No maximum; about 1.3 billion NEAR in 2026, with roughly 2.5% new issuance a year