What is NEAR

1. Project Introduction
NEAR Protocol is a Layer-1 blockchain designed for scalability using sharding technology. It supports smart contracts and uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism for network security. NEAR was founded by Alex Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin and launched its mainnet in April 2020.
Summary: NEAR Protocol is a scalable Layer-1 blockchain platform that enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications (dApps) across a variety of use cases.
2. Team & Investment Info
Team:
Alexander Skidanov: Co-founder of NEAR, former Microsoft engineer and Director of Engineering at MemSQL.
Illia Polosukhin: Co-founder, former engineering manager at Google Research and software engineer at Salford Systems.
Funding:
April 2022: Raised $350 million led by Tiger Global with participation from Republic Capital, FTX Ventures, Hashed, Dragonfly Capital, and others.
January 2022: Raised $150 million led by Three Arrows Capital, with participation from Mechanism Capital, a16z, Jump, Alameda, and more.
May 2020: Raised $21.6 million led by a16z.
July 2019: Raised $12.1 million in a round led by Metastable and Accomplice.
3. Social Media URLs
X: https://x.com/NEARProtocol
Telegram: https://t.me/cryptonear
Discord: http://near.chat/
Blog: https://near.org/blog
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuKdIYVN8iE3fv8alyk1aMw
4. Token Info
Token Symbol: NEAR
Initial total supply: 1 billion, no maximum cap.
Issuance/Burn Mechanism: Inflationary model
Contract Address: https://nearblocks.io/
Initial Token Allocation:
Community Grants & Programs: 17%
Core Contributors: 14.5%
Community Sale: 12%
Early Ecosystem: 11.46%
Operation Grants: 11.4%
Foundation Endowment: 10%
VC Round 1: 7.57%
Private Round 1: 7.06%
Seed Round: 5.76%
Pre-seed Round: 2.16%
VC Round 3: 0.62%
Private Round: 20.25%
VC Round 2: 0.22%
5. Related Links
Official Website: https://near.org/
Docs: https://docs.near.org/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/near-protocol-project/
Other Info: https://www.rootdata.com/Projects/detail/NEAR%20Protocol?k=MjUx; https://github.com/near