Is NEAR the most qualified successor in the Web3.0 relay race?

Author: EDZ

NEAR has reached a new high, and OCT has also reached a new high. As we move towards Web3.0, the infrastructure evangelists are gradually coming into the public eye.

Faced with equally excellent competitors like Avalanche and Solana, how has NEAR managed to break through in the fierce public chain competition? Its recent actions provide a strong answer.

Recently, NEAR launched Aurora and the Rainbow Bridge, and built the application chain network Octopus, allowing everyone to glimpse the new public chain world it aims to establish.

In this world, issues such as high Ethereum transaction fees, long transfer times, and network congestion are resolved. It not only enables seamless and secure transfer of crypto assets across different blockchains but also ensures state synchronization between various blockchains, promoting the development of creator communities and the prosperity of ecosystems, bringing blockchain technology into the mainstream.

Previously, Vitalik Buterin publicly stated, "NEAR Protocol, this Ethereum competitor, makes me anxious." It now seems that this "killer" NEAR may have turned Vitalik's concerns into reality.

NEAR's Native Runtime Environment Solves the Biggest Pain Point of Web3.0 Applications

Permissionless, censorship-resistant, resistant to single points of failure, no superuser privileges, etc., people have a certain understanding of the advantages of Web3.0 applications. However, what is the biggest pain point of Web3.0 applications? What hinders the widespread adoption of Web3.0 applications by the public? That is user experience. If on-chain applications cannot match the user experience of Web2.0 applications, it will be very difficult for a large number of users to migrate.

The reason why on-chain applications have high barriers to entry and poor user experience lies primarily in the design of the on-chain account model. Accounts, as the "essentials" for interacting with the chain, represent users' identities within the domain. However, most existing on-chain systems have numerous issues with their account designs. NEAR's solution is to implement each account as a highly customizable smart contract.

First, the most significant problem is the poor readability of public key addresses in existing systems. Experienced crypto users know that most addresses today consist of a long string of hash characters, which have no intrinsic meaning. Since on-chain operations are irreversible, people usually check the address repeatedly when making transfers to ensure there are no mistakes.

In the NEAR network, each account has a customizable account ID, similar to bank transfers. Users only need to enter the user ID and amount to complete the transfer, greatly optimizing the complexity of user transfers and resolving various issues that may arise during daily transactions.

In addition, NEAR accounts can perform many other tasks that on-chain accounts cannot. Typically, every operation in on-chain applications requires authorization, which significantly impacts user experience.

NEAR accounts can authorize front-end web applications without needing to trust contract code or network applications. In simple terms, for example, when a user wants to interact with a blockchain game, they only need to log in once and do not have to log in frequently afterward.

What if users do not have a wallet? What if users are unwilling to pay transaction fees? These issues also create a significant gap preventing Web2.0 applications from transitioning to Web3.0. NEAR has fully considered this pain point.

NEAR provides developers with various flexible options, allowing users to enjoy a smooth operational experience similar to Web2.0 applications without affecting the essence of on-chain applications. The protocol can cover transaction fees for users, so they no longer have to worry about the costs incurred during interactions, and they can even use on-chain applications without holding any crypto assets.

Moreover, user-friendly payment models like monthly or annual fees can also be perfectly implemented on NEAR. Thus, the barriers to using on-chain applications are significantly lowered again.

In the Ethereum ecosystem, new users' addresses are long strings of characters, which are not conducive to recognition. In the NEAR ecosystem, new user addresses are very similar to internet usernames, and users can customize their account IDs, greatly lowering the entry barrier for Web2.0 users.

Similarly, during interactions with contracts, the NEAR ecosystem can achieve a blockchain-agnostic experience compared to Ethereum. In Ethereum, gas fees must be borne by users during contract interactions, while in the NEAR ecosystem, due to the uniqueness of NEAR accounts, new users can interact without paying gas fees, completely mirroring the internet interaction experience.

Such "blockchain-agnostic" applications have already been implemented.

Recently, Web3Games collaborated with NEAR to launch the "Bald Rich" series of NFT artworks for domestic avant-garde artist Huang Heshan at the 2021 Taobao Creation Festival. They also created a dedicated NFT art display website for Huang Heshan. Ordinary users can view the NFT artworks stored on the blockchain simply by holding the URL of Huang Heshan's works.

In this process, users do not need any knowledge of blockchain but still engage with it. This is NEAR's greatest advantage in reaching out to the public.

If Ethereum is the financial metropolis of the on-chain world, then NEAR is the leisure and entertainment resort that meets various user needs.

Aurora + Rainbow Bridge Brings an Ultimate Layer 2 Experience

In the Web3.0 world, developers are undoubtedly a scarce resource, and ecosystems should share resources rather than forcing developers to choose a development community. This is also the reason NEAR chose to be EVM-compatible; NEAR does not want developers to choose between the Ethereum and NEAR ecosystems.

Instead, it wants developers to continue developing in a familiar environment and allow various protocols to play and expand their value across different systems. At the same time, applications that have already undergone testing in the Ethereum ecosystem can seamlessly migrate to NEAR, avoiding unnecessary duplication of effort.

This is the EVM-compatible chain Aurora recently launched by NEAR, providing users and developers with an Ethereum Layer-2 experience virtual machine. Specifically, thanks to NEAR's sharding scalability technology, Aurora's overall throughput can reach 10 times that of the Ethereum mainnet, which not only means users no longer have to pay high transaction fees but also do not have to endure long confirmation waiting times.

So, what does Aurora's complete compatibility with Ethereum mean? The answer is that all Ethereum infrastructure (wallets, developer tools, etc.) is universal for Aurora, and the underlying token of Aurora is ETH, meaning users and developers do not need to purchase other tokens when using it. This is also key to Aurora achieving an Ethereum Layer-2 experience.

Currently, Aurora runs on NEAR, leveraging many unique features of NEAR, such as sharding and developer gas fee rewards. Aurora consists of two core components: the Aurora Engine runtime, which allows developers to seamlessly deploy Solidity and Vyper smart contracts; and the Aurora Bridge, built on Rainbow Bridge technology, which provides permissionless token transfers and data transfer services between Ethereum and Aurora.

According to the NEAR team, Aurora currently offers developers a wealth of improved services:

1. Aurora's transaction fees are 1000 times lower than Ethereum. For example, for transferring an ERC-20 token, calculated at 50 Gwei and $3000/ETH, Aurora's cost is less than $0.01, while Ethereum's is as high as $5.40.

2. Aurora can process thousands of transactions per second, which is 50 times higher than Ethereum 1.0.

3. Aurora's transaction finality comes from the underlying NEAR protocol, which is about two seconds for two blocks, much lower than Ethereum's 13-second confirmation time (which is not long enough to achieve transaction finality). Additionally, NEAR's fast finality significantly reduces the risk of frontrunning attacks.

4. The growth of the Aurora ecosystem will continue to prosper over time: the underlying NEAR protocol's sharding method provides horizontal EVM scalability, allowing for asynchronous communication between multiple Aurora shards.

5. Aurora offers Ethereum users a more environmentally friendly option: Aurora is built on a decentralized, eco-friendly, PoS consensus L1 protocol—NEAR Protocol—while maintaining complete, uncompromised compatibility with Ethereum.

In addition to Aurora, NEAR has also officially launched the Rainbow Bridge, a cross-chain communication protocol implemented by a set of smart contracts. More specifically, the Rainbow Bridge can achieve:

• Transfer of fungible and non-fungible tokens between Ethereum and NEAR;
• Contracts written on Ethereum can utilize the state of contracts and validation nodes in the NEAR system;
• Contracts in both Ethereum and NEAR systems can call each other.

The "Rainbow Bridge" not only enables interoperability between the two systems but also minimizes trust; users only need to trust the nodes of the source and target chains without needing to trust the cross-chain bridge. Of course, minimizing trust also comes with costs, namely transaction delays. When interacting between Ethereum and NEAR, it takes about six minutes, which is the time to produce 25 blocks on Ethereum.

The delay when interacting from NEAR to Ethereum is four hours, but after the execution of EIP665, it only requires a 14-second delay. Compared to interactions with other scaling solutions (which can have delays of up to seven days), this is already very efficient.

Ethereum, as the best incubator for on-chain assets, provides projects and assets with unparalleled developer and user resources. Once a base consensus on the asset is successfully formed, the asset can traverse between the Ethereum and NEAR systems through the Rainbow Bridge with minimized trust, further exploring other application values.

Although the Rainbow Bridge currently only supports cross-chain interactions between Ethereum and NEAR, it will soon support blockchains based on Tendermint consensus (Cosmos) and Grandpa consensus (Polkadot). Thanks to NEAR's high performance, NEAR may become the most efficient universal bridge for interactions between the Cosmos and Polkadot ecosystems and Ethereum in the future.

While many once thought NEAR was an Ethereum killer or in competition with Ethereum, in fact, there is no competition in the open-source world; only mutual benefit and progress together is the only way forward.

With the advent of Aurora and the Rainbow Bridge, developers and users can see that public chains can indeed achieve synchronization of blockchain states and transfer assets across the entire chain while balancing scalability and efficiency through mechanisms.

Aurora + Rainbow Bridge provides a forward-looking model, showing us that, thanks to a completely trustless mechanism, NEAR has the capability to provide robust underlying architectural support for the next generation of DeFi platforms and dApps.

We can now see that top DeFi applications, including 1inch, Aave, Balancer, Maker, and Ampleforth, are seeking to join the NEAR ecosystem. With the help of Aurora, users can directly use Ethereum wallets to mine and participate in activities on the NEAR network, and the various issues existing on Ethereum no longer exist on NEAR.

We can imagine that in the future, there will be more and more DeFi protocols and other applications deployed in the NEAR ecosystem, whether they are native assets within the NEAR ecosystem or assets that cross-chain from the Ethereum ecosystem, all of which can participate in various activities of the protocols. Ultimately, the value created by NEAR will also feed back into the Ethereum ecosystem.

Octopus Network Safeguards Application Chains

With the basic performance guaranteed, the prosperous development of the ecosystem relies on a secure and trustworthy environment.

As a decentralized application chain network, Octopus Network is an important part of the NEAR ecosystem and will build the application chain ecosystem for NEAR. This means that NEAR will become the first "parent chain" of Octopus Network, providing underlying security infrastructure for the application chain network.

Application chains, as an efficient implementation form of Web3 application innovation, are known for their comprehensive customization, seamless interoperability between chains, and full autonomy within the chain. Octopus Network grants application chains flexible security on-demand, further reducing the cost and barriers to building application chains.

Specifically, if an application chain team wants to join the Polkadot ecosystem to enjoy security and interoperability, the cost of slot auctions (rent) can reach millions of dollars. However, Octopus Network can reduce this cost to tens of thousands of dollars per year based on the security needs of the application chain, alleviating the heavy upfront financial burden on startup teams.

At the same time, this also means that all Substrate application chains that fail to secure parallel chain slots can directly connect to Octopus Network for a secure cold start.

Octopus application chains lie between Layer-2 and sidechains, enjoying the advantages of both. Highly customized application chains can configure any consensus protocol according to business needs while enjoying any level of security protection (based on protocol requirements). This avoids the risks of centralized consensus in Layer-2 and insufficient security in sidechains.

With Octopus launching application protocols on NEAR, any developer, project team, or entrepreneur can quickly and efficiently create their own application chain on NEAR at a lower cost.

Louis Liu, founder of Octopus Network, explains: "Octopus provides projects that wish to create customized blockchains for their open network applications with immediate security, interoperability, and on-chain governance services."

As the blockchain streaming platform Audius surpasses 4 million monthly active users, this also signals the arrival of the Web3.0 application era. In the Web3.0 world, there should not only be DeFi applications that provide financial freedom but also more entertainment and service applications that people currently use. These applications need to break free from the shadows of the Web2.0 era, allowing users to reclaim their data autonomy and privacy rights.

Application chains are the best choice for realizing Web3.0 applications, as discussed in detail in the report "We Should Start Imagining a Multi-Chain Era with Application Chains" by the Rhythm Research Institute.

NEAR's native runtime environment provides optimized underlying infrastructure for Web3.0 applications realized through smart contracts. With the help of the Rainbow Bridge, assets within various systems can interact seamlessly and with minimized trust through NEAR, while Aurora accommodates various excellent protocols overflowing from the Ethereum ecosystem.

Although the Web3.0 revolution is still in its early stages, NEAR is continuously expanding its domain, extending into the forefront of various cryptocurrency innovations. The NEAR that was once called an Ethereum killer—can it now take the baton from Ethereum and co-create Web3.0 with various ecosystems? We shall see.