4 Reasons Why NEAR Stands Apart

NEAR is unique from most blockchains in more ways than one.

Nightshade, Doomslug, Guilds and Human Readable addresses are a few of them.

Don’t worry if these sound like technical gibberish to you. In this blog, we’ll help you understand them quickly and with zero technical jargon.

Let’s get started.

Nightshade

Nightshade is NEAR’s proprietary sharding technology.

It allows NEAR to process 10,000 transactions and even beyond. A single transaction completes in mere 2 seconds and costs you a couple of cents in fees.

Talk about blazing speed for dirt cheap fees.

We’ve crafted a layman’s guide to how Nightshade works and why it’s one of the best sharding technologies operating today.

Feel free to check it out here.

Doomslug

Doomslug is an algorithm that prevents the NEAR protocol from stalling.

Normally, malicious actors could stop responding to validation requests sent by block producers and halt the protocol from moving forward.

Doomslug prevents this from happening.

It allows honest validators to reach consensus and produce blocks even if a few malicious block producers fail to respond or go offline.

Let’s say there are a total of 201 block producers.

A block producer proposes a block and broadcasts it to other block producers.

Then, more than 50% of these block producers must send an endorsement message for this block to the block producer of the next block.

So, the next block producer must receive endorsement messages for the previous block from at least 101 block producers before it could produce the next block.

Plus, these endorsement messages must be added to the next block.

This process continues until a malicious block producer fails to respond and doesn’t produce a block.

Normally, if one-third or more of the block producers fail to respond it stalls the entire network.

However, with Doomslug, other block producers can send a skip message for one block at a particular height to the next block producer.

So, if a block producer fails to produce a block at a particular height, the other block producers send a message to skip that block at that height to the next block producer.

Again, the next block producer must receive skip messages from at least 101 block producers before it can continue producing the next block.

And all these skip messages must be added to the next block along with the endorsement messages for the previous produced block.

This way, out of 201 block producers, even if 100 of them fail to respond, the remaining 101 of them can continue producing blocks.

In fact, a block that contains endorsement messages (and skip messages if applicable) from more than 50% of the block producers, the block will be produced.

And this holds true even if the network gets slow or messages are delayed.

Guilds

In a genius move, NEAR has turned its fantastic community into a powerful engine of growth and adoption for the NEAR ecosystem.

NEAR’s community members come together to form a guild which then goes on to accelerate NEAR’s adoption.

For instance, NEAR Malaysia brings together the Malaysian community, educates them about NEAR and drives new members from Malaysia onto the NEAR ecosystem.

There are guilds that provide support to developers who want to build their ideas on NEAR. This includes educating them, kickstarting their product, funding, troubleshooting etc.

These guilds together make up the total NEAR community. And each of them volunteers to take NEAR to new heights.

Human Readable Addresses

Do you remember the last time you shared your wallet address?

You had to log into your wallet, copy the public key hash and send it over email or text message.

This is super inconvenient, and cumbersome and prevents people from sharing wallet addresses and conducting transactions among their peers.

NEAR decided to eliminate this barrier to adoption once and for all by using Human Readable Addresses instead of public key hashes.

So, your wallet address could be alice.near or bob.near, instead of 0x71C7656EC7ab88b098defB751B7401B5f6d8976F.

It makes sharing your wallet address as easy as sharing your phone number. This encourages more people to create NEAR wallets and transact with friends, family and other members of their peers.

In conclusion

Most blockchains are trying to entice users by increasing speed and security and reducing gas fees.

While NEAR places a massive focus on these areas, it also works attentively towards removing roadblocks that others usually don’t notice or ignore (for example, human-readable language).

They are committed to making NEAR as user-friendly as possible for everyone.

And this is perhaps NEAR’s most unique quality