Introduction

NEAR Protocol is a decentralized platform that seeks to facilitate the development and deployment of dApps on its blockchain technology. More precisely, NEAR Protocol is a decentralized smart contract platform that focuses on creating a developer and user-friendly experience. Its consensus mechanism is Proof-of-Stake and it uses sharding technology to achieve speed and scalability. NEAR also provides a bridge and scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain.

NEAR Protocol uses Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus to secure and validate transactions on 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.

Token holders not interested in being a Validator can stake to a Validator’s staking pool and earn a portion of Token rewards too. This incentivizes Token holders to stay involved with the community and support Validators who are keeping the network running smoothly.

One of the main aspects to be aware about the blockchains that use proof of stake is the decentralization. Decentralization is by far one of the most important factors in a crypto ecosystem. As you probably already figured out, the validation system in place might fail to honor this by progressively moving towards a more traditional centralized environment. Why and how could this happen?

• As it was briefly mentioned previously, validators are incentivized to hold more and more NEAR to guarantee a spot in the network for themselves.
• Users look at the voting power (= total staked NEAR) of a validator as a good indicator of who to trust and delegate their funds to. This is understandable and that's why there's a need to constantly educate the user base and promote smaller validators.

Methodology

This dashboard is created with the intention to provide important information about Near citizens. Are citizens of NEAR staking their holdings in their city? Or are they leveraging the city’s liquidity pool services? Or are they simply just passing by as a tourist to purchase some NFTs or collectibles?

For this bounty, breakdown the percentages of users staking, LPing, or otherwise doing some activity on NEAR, and take it one step further.Choose a sub-category among these users for a deep dive - how many individual users are staking, and how is that contributing to the overall decentralization of the network? Perhaps you choose to analyze those staking under the Aurora validator - what percentage of users are staking under Aurora via NEAR, and how do the rewards differ? If you’re choosing to analyze the LPs - what are the most common pools they are engaging in, and what type of user is involved in this activity?

USER USAGE

Looking at the first chart above, it can be seen how the major of the users visit Near basically as a Tourists or weekly passengers (transacting between 2 and 7 times). In comparison, there are few users that have used the platform for 180 times or above. But the numbers are so high as well passing the 10k users.

Considering the purpose for what users are using the Near platform, we can see at the other above chart how the activity depend on the group of users. While the Tourists are using the platform for other purposes different from staking, transfering, looping, swapping or using NFTs. However, the percentages increase when users use more frequently the platform. In fact, for users that are using more than 30 times, the percentage of transferring and staking actions are the highest one with almost 20%. NFTs and LPs represents 12% of users each and swaps around 8%.

In the left image, it can be seen the general percentages as explained above.

In the images above, we can see information about user staking actions. On the right side, we can see the weekly number of users staking and unstaking on Near platform. As seen, the major of the activity was registered during September and November 2021. From the beginning until the end, more users have been staking than unstaking. If we take a look at the left image, we can see how the percentage has been similar week by week around 60% for staking and 40% of unstaking. There are also some users updating validators and redelegating.

In this above charts, we can see how users have been staking and unstaking in different validators. The two first charts are about the weekly stakers vs unstakers per validators. Again, the major activity was on Sep-November 2021. Looking at the net stakers, we can see how the major numbers were registered as weel during that months. In the major of the cases, the stakers have been positive, being more users staking than unstaking.

The last charts is about the cumulative net stakers per validator over time, where we can see how some of the validators have been increasing in terms of stakers over time, while others remained lower and others increased during the big activity registered in the initial months but then corrected a little bit.

This final chart looks the current percentage of Near staked on each validator. Because of the threshold for the Nakamoto coefficient is 33%, I have represented on the chart only the validators’ name related to the top validators that sums 33%.

Currently, there is needed 8 validators to cover more than 33% of the total Near staked on the network, representing then a Nakamoto coefficient of 8.

The main stakers are:

• Bzam…
• Astro stakers
• Bisontrails
• Dragonfly
• Zavodil
• Foundry
• Aurora
• Binance Node

Key insights

• The major of the users visit Near basically as a Tourists or weekly passengers (transacting between 2 and 7 times). In comparison, there are few users that have used the platform for 180 times or above.
• While the Tourists are using the platform for other purposes different from staking, transfering, looping, swapping or using NFTs. However, the percentages increase when users use more frequently the platform. In fact, for users that are using more than 30 times, the percentage of transferring and staking actions are the highest one with almost 20%. NFTs and LPs represents 12% of users each and swaps around 8%.
• From the beginning until the end, more users have been staking than unstaking.
• The stakers have been positive, being more users staking than unstaking.
• Currently, there is needed 8 validators to cover more than 33% of the total Near staked on the network, representing then a Nakamoto coefficient of 8.

USER STAKING ACTIONS

USER STAKING TO VALIDATORS