Welcome to the Path of Decentralization for NEAR - How the Dashboard works?

This dashboard will use Tabs and Parameters:
- Tabs: The dashboard is segmented to show in a faster and easy way the important metrics of decentralization on Near, these are:
  - Introduction: Here is the main information about this dashboard, general metrics of Validators Pools and their names, the Methodology and finally the Summary which highlights the key findings of the Investigation.
  - Validators: Everything related to a single validator and their stake pool will be there.
  - Stake: Here i’ll showcase the general activity of Stake in Near,
  - Decentralization: And here are differents ways to prove decentralization.
- Parameters: Here you can decide on how to see the data from differents tabs:
  - Period: This parameter is for both Validators and Stake tabs. You can decide how to see the data by time period.
  - Validator: This parameter is for the Validators Tab and is for showing exclusive data of a single validator.

Near Protocol is a Public Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Blockchain

Aims to bring decentralization finance (DeFi) to the masses with low transfer fees and fast transactions.
With their sharding technology (Nightshade) they achieve speed and scalability.
Uses PoS consensus to secure and validate transactions on the blockchain.
In Proof-of-Stake, users show support to specific network validators by delegating NEAR tokens to them. This process is known as staking. The main idea is that, if a validator has a large amount of tokens delegated is because the community trusts them, and these validators can validate block transactions and add more blocks to the Blockchain.
Validators earn NEAR Token rewards for producing new blocks in the form of a static inflation rate of about 4.5% each year.
Stakers get rewarded in the form of that token, too. The token’s all-time highest price was $20.44 in January 2022.

Sources: Coindesk, Near blog, The Defiant, Nightshade

Who Are the Active Validators in 2023?

Here are the validators ranked by their stake amount in 2023, we can see that Figment is at the top with 8% of the total Stake and Astro Stakers at second place with one of the biggest amount of stakers because they have a 1% of Fee in comparison to the 10% from Figment.

The Average Size of the pool is 2,6M $NEAR but from the top 59 the amount of $NEAR is below the Average, and the Median Size of the pool with 527k correlates with the Top 94 being the last one with most $NEAR than the median.

How The Amount of Validators Pools and $NEAR Staked has improved over Time

Top Validators 6 each Month

In 2021 the total $NEAR Staked was 381M and this amount has increased over time reaching in 2023 almost 500M of $NEAR Staked, February 2021 presents the biggest growth rate with 14% more $NEAR Staked than the month before.

In the last 2 months (December 2022, January 2023) there is an increase in the total $NEAR Staked with a growth rate of 1% approx

The amount of differents Validators has increased over time with December 2021 the month with the best growth.

In January 2023 there are 204 differents Validators, although the amount of Active Validators is 188-189. Because a lot of differents Stake Pools became Validators for at least 1 epoch

For a Long Time staked.poolv1.near was the Validator with most $NEAR, with a lot of Power by the amount of $NEAR staked in comparison to the rest of the Pools.

After June 2022 this pool lost a significant amount of $NEAR and no longer make it to the Top 6 Validators, but the Top validators started to have almost the same power (Amount of $NEAR).
July 2022 was the last month where the Total Staked $NEAR suffered a significant drop.
In November 2022 Figment reached the top 6 and became the Validator with most staked $NEAR.

Methodology

Using FlipsideCrypto Tables of Near:

Validators: To get the best value of $NEAR Staked i used the help from Jacktheguy SQL to decode the JSON data from near.core.fact_transactions, because using the near.core.dim_staking_actions table to get the $NEAR staked from the Validators doesn’t correlate well with the real values of stake showed in this website, Although there are still some differences the values are close to the real values.
- To get the TX & User Activity i used near.core.dim_staking_actions and for the blocks i used near.core.fact_blocks.
- I Used near.core.dim_staking_actions to get the $NEAR Stakes and Unstakes in the last months for the parameter validator.
Stake & Unstakes: With near.core.dim_staking_actions i get all the data relevant to stakes with tx_signer for the Users, tx_hash for the Transactions and stake_amount/pow(10,24) for the $NEAR Volume.
Decentralization Metrics: Because these Metrics involved Mathematical Concepts i decided to reuse the SQL with some minor changes only, all the credits are for kasadegh and Jacktheguy Dashboards.

Summary

Today I explored Near in differents areas to show their Decentralization and here are my key points to prove it.

Validators: Validators in Near are improving over time, if we look at their Docs initially the plan was having 100 validators, nowadays there are 188-189 Active Validators in Near.
- In 2021 there was a single validator with more than 30M of staked $NEAR and the 6th place with less than 10M of staked $NEAR, in 2023 there is a single validator with more than 30M of staked $NEAR, but the amount for the rest of validators increased too with the 6th place having more than 10M of staked $NEAR.
Stake: The Stake Activity is lower in the last months in comparison with the best months of 2022/2021, but the amount of $NEAR being Staked is higher than before, and Overall the Stake Activity is always higher than Unstake Activity.
Decentralization: Most of the Metrics show us a positive improve of Near regarding Decentralization, the validators necessary to reach the 33% of total Power have increase over time, and the Ecosystem is really fair and random for the Validators.

Near is becoming more decentralized over time, and will be more decentralized in the future.

Made By Popex404, Twitter Link Here

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