Market cap
$6.95B
-1.28 %
Volume (24h)
$486.75M
-1.28 %
Circulating supply
1,249,836,992 NEAR
Total supply
1,249,836,992 NEAR
Max. supply
1,249,836,992 NEAR
NEAR Protocol (NEAR)
$ 5.34
-1.28 %
Main info
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Key data
updated $0Market cap$6.95B
Volume 24h$486.75M
Circulating supply1.25B100% of max 1.25B
All-time high$20.44-74% from peak · 2022-01-16
NEAR Protocol (NEAR) is a layer-1 blockchain built to make decentralized apps fast, cheap, and genuinely easy to use — for developers and regular people alike. Its signature features are human-readable account names like 'yourname.near' and a sharding design that keeps the network quick as it grows. The NEAR token is the fuel of the system: it pays for transactions, secures the network through staking, and lets holders take part in governance.
Frequently asked questions
What is NEAR Protocol and how is it different from other blockchains?
NEAR is a smart contract platform in the same league as Ethereum or Solana, but it puts usability first: readable account names instead of hex addresses, low fees, and a developer experience designed to feel familiar to anyone coming from regular web development. Its key technical differentiator is sharding, which lets the network scale by processing work in parallel rather than making every node do everything.
How does NEAR's consensus and sharding work?
NEAR runs on Proof-of-Stake: validators lock up NEAR tokens to produce and verify blocks, and if they misbehave, they lose part of their stake. On top of that sits Nightshade, NEAR's sharding technology, which splits the network's transactions into chunks processed in parallel — that's how the chain combines fast finality with growing throughput instead of choking under load.
How is the NEAR token issued?
NEAR has no hard cap on supply — new tokens are continuously minted to pay staking rewards, so the total supply grows over time. On the other side of the ledger, transaction fees are burned, permanently removing tokens from circulation and partially offsetting that issuance. The exact inflation rate is a protocol parameter that the network can adjust.
How do you store and use NEAR?
NEAR is supported by a range of web, mobile, and browser-extension wallets built around its named-account system, as well as hardware wallets like Ledger. In practice, you'll use the token to pay transaction fees, interact with dApps, and stake with a validator to earn rewards — and thanks to readable addresses, sending NEAR is a lot less nerve-wracking than on most chains.