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✏️ Introduction: What is NEAR Protocol? → source
NEAR Protocol is a public Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that aims to bring DeFi to the masses with low transfer fees and fast transactions. NEAR competes with Avalanche, Solana, Cardano, Algorand, the new version of Ethereum, and other PoS networks.
NEAR’s founders are Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin, who hail from Ukraine and were educated in computer science and mathematics. They have been working on NEAR Protocol since 2017 after contributing to Ethereum’s open-source code. NEAR mainnet came online in August 2020.
At the core of NEAR’s coding design is sharding. Even before blockchains were popularized, sharding has been in use to optimize computer network activity. Sharding works by breaking the blockchain into sections (shards), where each shard handles only a fraction of the network’s total load.
NEAR further tweaked the concept of sharding with its unique Nightshade solution, launched in November 2021 as Simple Nightshade. Because validators no longer have to process all incoming transactions, but only those within shards, Nightshade facilitates infinite scaling. This is how it is possible to simultaneously have negligible fees and fast transaction speeds. Moreover, NEAR’s Nightshade is revolutionary for the following reasons:
- The blockchain is sharded as a single-state blockchain.
- Every NEAR block accepts all transactions from other shards.
- When one block changes its state, other shards change their states as well.
In practice, when it comes to physical information transmission, NEAR validators don’t have to download data whenever the block’s full state changes. Rather, they maintain shard states, as split data chunks per shard.
Altogether, Nightshade sharding solution delivers near-instant transaction speeds without sacrificing decentralization.
📝 Methodology
In this dashboard, we examine the metrics related to the NEAR protocol to answer the question, how healthy and transparent is the NEAR protocol?
We have used such flipside data to answer the above question. The most significant topics examined in this dashboard are:
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Transactions made on the NEAR ecosystem:
The number of transactions is very important because of the transaction cost and speed in a chain. This metric is essential for projects to earn profit and for ordinary users to perform their transactions quickly at the lowest cost.
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$NEAR transfers and $NEAR holders:
Transactions related to the governance token of a chain and its holders are also an important measure of the chain's health and show the degree of decentralization.
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Staking Activity:
Blockchains that are developed based on POS technology, to some extent, their security depend on the volume and distribution of staking.
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Developer activity on the NEAR’s GitHub:
Updating and developing a protocol’s source code is also a very important point to consider in terms of security and dynamics. This point is especially important for developers.
The most important tables used in this dashboard are the Tables fact_transactions, fact_transfers, fact_prices, and dim_staking_actions. We have used the table github_activity to get the data related to NEAR's GitHub.
✅Observation & Insights:
- The number of transactions on the NEAR chain has experienced magnificent growth since September, from about 270K transactions to 870K transactions. Of course, after September 14, it entered a slow downward trend and reached the previous numbers at the end of 2022.
- The number of active users also reached 182K on September 14 with a stunning growth of 13 times since September 12. It continued to enter a downward trend but did not reach the previous numbers, and at the end of 2022, it was in a better situation than before September.
✅Observation & Insights:
- The number of transactions per minute(TPM) and per second(TPS) has seen a staggering growth since early September, with a 4x increase.
- The upper right graph also shows the success rate of transactions made on the NEAR chain, which has grown since the beginning of September with a significant increase in the number of transactions, and this number has been above its 7-day moving average.
- Of course, on some dates, the success rate of transactions has faced drastic reductions, which should be further investigated.
- It seems that September has been a very important month for the Nair chain in terms of changes in increasing efficiency.
✅Observation & Insights:
In the graphs above, you can see the number of new users as well as their share of the total number of active users on the NEAR chain.
- The number of new users has also experienced a sharp growth since the beginning of September, and a peak of 151,000 new users can be seen on September 14.
- The highest share of new users also occurred on September 13 with a share equal to 47%.
✅Observation & Insights:
The transaction fees in the NEAR chain have a direct relationship with the price of the $NEAR token, which is clear from the graph on the left.
The average fee in the NEAR chain is very low and it is equal to $0.0044 on average, and during the last 6 months, it has reached $0.0015 in its worst case, which is a very low number compared to other layer-1 blockchains.
✅Observation & Insights:
According to the two graphs above and the graph on the left, it seems that although the number of transfer transactions and the number of users transferring $NEAR tokens in the NEAR chain has increased significantly in September, the volume of $NEAR transferred is not significant compared to the rest of the time, and it looks normal in terms of volume.
In the chart below, you can see the top 20 $NEAR token holders, the 3 wallets with the largest volume are equal to:
- binancecold3.near
- a778de7fc42034af1c85cac901fd40392dfc1cc69c3a688ea149112f57b0063e
- nearcoldtree.near
✅Observation & Insights:
In the 3 charts presented below, the data is shown weekly.
- The highest volume of staking during the last 6 months is related to the week of August 29, and also the highest volume that has been unstaked is related to the week of November 14.
- In general, the staked volume of $NEAR during the last 6 months was positive and was equal to 76m $NEAR.
- The number of stakers has been increasing in general and to some extent, it can be said that the average volume of staking per user has also been increasing.
- On the other hand, the number of unstakers has not changed, except for a few cases, and has been generally stable.
- The average volume of unstaking in the period from October 24 to November 14 has increased sharply.
✅Observation & Insights:
Since the beginning of NEAR blockchain launch, the number of activities on its GitHub has always been increasing, with a total of 26.1K contributions, and the most active repo in terms of the number of contributions was nearcore, which accounted for 29.8% of the contributions.
The number of contributors has always been increasing and 1,333 people have been active on GitHub, working on 130 repositories.
These numbers and their growing trend can be very useful for developers.
🔍 Conclusion
- Since the beginning of September 2022, the number of transactions, the number of active users and the number of new users on the NEAR chain have grown significantly, with 82.2m transactions and 2.62m unique wallets during the last 6 months.
- Also, the average transaction fee has been decreasing since mid-September, and overall the transaction fee during the last 6 months was equal to $0.00446.
- Transaction success rates have also experienced an upward trend since early September.
- The volume of staked $NEAR during the last 6 months was equal to 76m, and the largest volume of staked was on pool figment.poolv1.near.
- 26.1K contributions have been recorded in NEAR GitHub by 1333 users on 130 repositories, where nearcore, near-wallet, docs, near-api-js, and near-cli repositories are in the first to fifth ranks in terms of the amount of participation.
