NEAR Protocol (NEAR) is a layer 1 blockchain designed to be easy for both developers and everyday users. It uses a sharding technology called Nightshade to split the work of processing transactions across the network, which allows it to scale while keeping fees low. NEAR accounts can have human readable names such as alice.near instead of long strings of letters and numbers, and the network focuses on features like account abstraction and cross chain usability. Founded by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, the mainnet launched in 2020. NEAR is the native token, used to pay fees, to stake and to take part in governance.