Overall, the company agrees that high-performance programmable blockchains will make decentralised network development much more accessible. A16Z has been joined by investors including Libertus, Blockchange, Animal Ventures, and various undisclosed Ethereum projects founders.
Furthermore, NEAR launches its ‘MainNet’ network. The move is a black-eye for the much-vaunted Ethereum 2.0 release, which has yet to appear, according to TechCrunch.
So far, the race to create a blockchain that can compete with the existing speed of the world’s financial system and gain the same amount of user adoption has so far fallen short of expectations, the publication added. The Ethereum project has proven slow, expensive, and used mostly for niche financial applications.
But NEAR claims that its platform is more performant, more usable, and less expensive than Ethereum, allowing developers to realise many of the original use cases.
The NEAR Protocol is a new public, proof-of-stake blockchain which is built using a novel consensus mechanism called ‘Nightshade’. NEAR Protocol uses a technique called ‘sharding’ that splits the network into multiple pieces so that the computation is done in parallel, meaning there is not a theoretical limit on the network’s capacity.
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