Near Protocol is one of the major peers of Ethereum and as it was introduced quite a while ago most of the add-ons that Ethereum is only now planning to launch are already in place.

First of all, Shard Chains allow for the boosting of data capacity and transaction speed. This mechanism allows for the entire network to be divided into individual segments or shards, and each of these contain a unique number of smart contracts and balance data. In other words, the network is split into smaller working segments that exist side-by-side and enable 100,000 transactions to be made per second, while commissions are much lower than in the Ethereum network. New blocks are minted by validators according to their NEAR token stakings, or PoS protocol.

There are more advantages, such as the opportunity to create readable wallet addresses (names instead of long set of symbols and digits), the Layer2 Aurora solution for the fast launch of Ethereum-based apps, and many other. The market cap of NEAR is currently at $3.4 billion, or 1.7% of Ethereum’s massive $202 billion market cap vs 3% in April 2022. Technological advantages and large investors behind NEAR may allow the project to increase its market cap to 25% of Ethereum’s, meaning that NEAR token prices may surge by 900%.

Long-term investors may delegate their tokens to validators to receive passive income with around 10% annual yield. Investors may choose to receive interest in USN tokens with 15% annual yield. However, in this case investors may not profit as NEAR tokens may possibly rally.