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Is NEAR the most qualified to pick up the baton in the Web3.0 rally?

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While the Web3.0 revolution is still in its early stages, NEAR is constantly carving out its own territory and extending it to different frontiers of cryptocurrency innovation.

作者：EDZ，律动 BlockBeats

NEAR's at a new high. OCT's at a new high. On the road to Web3.0, infrastructure evangelists are coming into view.

How NEAR fought his way through the fierce public chain competition against equally good Avalanche and Solana, his recent new moves provide a powerful answer.

Recently, NEAR has launched Aurora and Rainbow Bridges, and Octopus, an app-linked network, to provide a glimpse into the new world of public links it is trying to create. Where the etheric fang high fees, transfer time is long, the network congestion problems have been solved, can not only achieve encryption assets between different block chain seamless transfer, security, also can ensure that state synchronization between each block chain, promote the development of the creator of community and ecosystem to thrive, the block chain technology into the mainstream.

Previously, God V publicly stated, "NEAR Protocol is an Ethereum competitor that makes me anxious." It now seems that NEAR's killer may have made V's fears come true.

NEAR's native runtime environment addresses the biggest pain points of Web3.0 applications

Permission-free, censorship-resistant, single-point of failure resistant, no superpermissions, and so on, people have a certain understanding of the advantages of Web3.0 applications. However, what is the biggest pain point of Web3.0 applications? What is holding Web3.0 applications back from widespread adoption? That's the user experience. If on-chain apps don't match the user experience of Web2.0 apps, mass migration will be difficult.

The key to the high threshold and poor user experience of on-chain applications lies in the design of on-chain account model. An account, as a "must have" for on-chain interaction, represents the user's identity within the domain. While there are many problems in the account design of most on-chain systems today, NEAR's solution is to implement each account in the form of a highly customizable smart contract.

First, the most obvious problem is the poor readability of public key addresses in existing systems. As veteran users of encryption know, most addresses today are made up of a long string of hash characters that don't mean anything by themselves. Since on-chain operations are irreversible, people often check the address over and over again when transferring money. Each account in the NEAR network has a customizable account ID, which is similar to bank transfer. Users only need to input user ID and amount to complete the transfer, which greatly optimizes the complexity of user transfer and solves different problems that may occur in daily transfer.

In addition, NEAR's account can do many things that other on-chain accounts cannot. Often, people need authorization for each step of an on-chain application, which has a significant impact on the user experience. And NEAR's account can authorize front-end network applications without trusting contract code or network applications. In simple terms, for example, when a user wants to interact with a linked game, they only need to log in once, and then they don't need to log in as often.

What if the user doesn't have a wallet? What if users don't want to pay transaction fees? These issues have also become a major barrier between Web2.0 applications and Web3.0. NEAR fully takes this pain point into account.

NEAR offers developers the flexibility to enjoy the silkiness of a Web2.0 application without compromising the nature of the on-chain application. The protocol allows users to advance transaction fees without having to worry about interacting with each other, and can even use on-chain applications without holding any cryptographic assets. Secondly, payment modes that users are accustomed to, such as monthly fee and annual fee, can also be perfectly realized on NEAR. As a result, the barrier to use for on-chain applications has once again been greatly lowered.

In the ethereum ecosystem, the address of a new user is a long string of characters, which is difficult to identify, while in the NEAR ecosystem, the address of a new user is very similar to an Internet user name, and users can customize their account ID, which greatly lowers the threshold for Web2.0 users. Similarly, in the process of interaction with the contract, NEAR ecology can basically be blockchain-free compared with Ethereum. In the process of interaction with the Ethereum contract, the gas fee must be borne by the user. However, in NEAR ecology, due to the particularity of the NEAR account, new users do not need to pay gas, which is completely the same as the Interactive experience on the Internet.

Such "blockchainless" applications are already in place.

Recently, Web3Games cooperated with NEAR to launch "Dulifu" series of NFT art works for Domestic avant-garde artist Huang Heshan in 2021 Taobao Creation Festival, and also made his own NFT art exhibition website for Huang Heshan. Ordinary users can view NFT works of art stored on the blockchain by holding the URL of Huang Heshan's works.

In doing so, the user does not need any knowledge of linking to the blockchain, but is exposed to it. This is NEAR's great advantage in getting out of laps.

If Ethereum is the financial metropolis of the on-chain world, NEAR is the leisure and entertainment resort that caters to the needs of its users.

Aurora + Rainbow Bridge brings the ultimate Layer 2 experience

In a Web3.0 world, developers are definitely a scarce resource, and ecosystems should share resources rather than let developers choose communities. This is why NEAR chose to be EVM-compatible. NEAR doesn't want developers to choose between ethereum and the NEAR ecosystem, but rather to be able to continue development in a familiar development environment and be able to leverage and extend the value of various protocols across different systems. At the same time, apps that have been tested with ethereum ecology can be seamlessly migrated to NEAR to avoid unnecessary duplication of work.

This is what NEAR recently launched. Aurora, the EVM compatible chain, is a virtual machine that provides the Ethereum Layer-2 experience for users and developers alike. Specifically, Aurora's overall throughput is up to 10 times that of ethereum's main network thanks to NEAR's sharding capacity expansion technology, which means users don't have to pay high transaction fees or face long confirmation waits.

So what does Aurora's full ethereum compatibility mean? The answer is that Aurora is common to all Ethereum infrastructure (wallets, developer tools, etc.) and the underlying Token of Aurora is ETH, so users and developers don't need to purchase other tokens to use it. This is also the key to Aurora's Ethereum Layer-2 experience.

Aurora currently runs on NEAR, taking advantage of many of NEAR's unique features such as sharding and developer gas fee rewards. Aurora includes two core components: Aurora Engine Runtime, which allows developers to deploy Solidity and Vyper smart contracts almost seamlessly; Aurora Bridge, based on Rainbow Bridge technology, provides permissionless token transfers and data transfers between Ethereum and Aurora.

Aurora currently offers a number of improvements to developers, according to the NEAR team:

1. Aurora fees are 1000 times lower than Ethereum. An erc-20 token, for example, costs less than $0.01 for Aurora and $5.40 for ethereum at 50Gwei and $3000 /ETH.

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

3. Aurora transaction finality is derived from the underlying NEAR protocol, which is two blocks or about two seconds, which is much lower than the 13 seconds confirmation time for one ethereum block (and not long enough to achieve transaction finality at this point). In addition, the fast finality of NEAR blockchain greatly reduces the risk of a frontrunning attack.

4. Aurora ecological growth will continue to flourish over time: The shard approach of the underlying NEAR protocol provides horizontal EVM capacity expansion and asynchronous communication between multiple Aurora shards.

Aurora offers more green options for Ethereum users: Aurora is based on NEAR Protocol , a decentralized, environmentally friendly L1 protocol that uses PoS consensus; Scaffolding, with full, uncompromised Ethereum compatibility.

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

· Homogeneous and non-homogeneous Token transfer between Ethereum and NEAR;

· Contracts written on Ethereum can use the status of contracts and validation nodes in the NEAR system;

· Contracts in Ethereum and NEAR systems can be called to each other.

"Rainbow Bridge" not only completes the interoperability between the two systems, but also achieves the minimization of trust. Users only need to trust the nodes of the source chain and the target chain, and do not need to trust the cross-chain bridge. Of course, there is a cost to removing trust, and that is the delay in transactions. When interacting with NEAR from Ethereum, it takes about 6 minutes to wait, which is 25 pieces on Ethereum. Interaction with Ethereum from NEAR takes 4 hours, but only 14 seconds when EIP665 is executed. This is highly efficient compared to interacting with other capacity expansion solutions (with a maximum delay of 7 days).

Ethereum, as the best incubator for on-chain assets, provides unique developer and user resources for projects and assets. After the underlying consensus of the asset is successfully formed, the asset can be shuttled through ethereum and NEAR systems in a minimal way through the Rainbow Bridge trust and further explore other application values.

Although currently only supports ethereum and NEAR cross-chains, Rainbow Bridge will support Tendermint Consensus Foundation (Cosmos) and Grandpa Consensus Foundation (Polkadot) blockchains in the NEAR future. Due to its high performance, NEAR may be the most efficient universal bridge for Cosmos and Polkadot ecology to interact with Ethereum in the future.

While many once thought that NEAR was an Ethereum killer or a competitor to Ethereum, in fact there is no competition in the open source world and mutual progress is the only way forward.

With Aurora and Rainbow Bridge, developers and users can see that public chains can have mechanisms to synchronize blockchain state and move assets across the chain while simultaneously being scalable and efficient. Aurora+ Rainbow Bridge provides a forward-looking model of NEAR's ability to provide robust underlying architecture support for a new generation of DeFi platforms and DApps, thanks to a fully trust mechanism.

You can now see that top DeFi applications including 1Inch, Aave, Balancer, Maker, Ampleforth and others have sought to join the NEAR ecosystem and with the help of Aurora, Users can use the Ethereum wallet directly to mine and participate in NEAR network activities, and the existing problems of Ethereum do not exist on NEAR.

We can imagine that in the future, more and more DeFi protocols and others deployed in the NEAR ecosystem, both native assets in the NEAR ecosystem and those that cross the chain from the Ethereum ecosystem to NEAR can participate in various activities of the protocol. Ultimately, the value created by NEAR feeds back into the Ethereum ecosystem.

Octopus Network protects app chains

After the basic performance is guaranteed, the prosperity and development of ecology cannot be separated from a safe and reliable environment.

As a decentralized application chain Network, Octopus Network, as an important part of NEAR ecology, will build application chain ecology for NEAR. This means that NEAR will become the first "mother chain" for Octopus Network, providing the underlying security infrastructure for the application-chain Network.

As an efficient implementation form of Web3 application innovation, application chain is famous for its all-round customization, seamless interoperation between chains, and full autonomy within the chain. Octopus Network endods application chain with on-demand rental and out-of-the-box flexible security, further reducing the cost and threshold of application chain construction.

Specifically, if an app chain team wants to join The Poca Ecosystem to enjoy security and interoperability, the slot auction cost (rent) can be up to millions of dollars. However, Octopus Network can reduce this cost to tens of thousands of dollars per year based on the application chain security needs, which makes the startup team no longer have such a heavy upfront capital burden. This also means that all Substrate application chains that cannot be tapped for parallel chain slots can be directly connected to Octopus Network for safe cold start.

Octopus app chains fall between Layer-2 and side chains and enjoy the best of both. Highly customized application chains can be configured with any consensus protocol to match business requirements, yet enjoy any level of security protection (based on protocol requirements). This avoids the centralization of layer-2 consensus and the risks of insufficient side chain security.

With Octopus publishing app protocols on NEAR, any developer, project owner, or entrepreneur can create their own app chains quickly and efficiently in NEAR at a low cost. "Octopus Network provides out-of-the-box security and services such as interoperability and on-chain governance for projects that want to create custom blockchains for their open Network applications," explained Octopus Network founder Louis Liu.

With Audius, a blockchain streaming media platform, having 4 million monthly active users, it also signals the arrival of the Era of Web3.0 applications. In the world of Web3.0, there are not only DeFi applications that give people financial freedom, but also all entertainment and service applications that people are using now. These applications need to get rid of the shadow of the Web2.0 era, and users need to find their own rights and interests of data autonomy and privacy. And the application chain is the best choice to realize Web3.0 applications, rhythm Research Institute in "Should start to imagine, a multi-chain era with application chain" has been discussed in detail.

The local operating environment of NEAR provides the underlying infrastructure for the optimization of user experience for Web3.0 applications based on smart contracts. With the help of Rainbow Bridge, assets in various systems can interact seamlessly and with minimal trust through NEAR, while Aurora takes over various excellent protocols of ethereum ecological spillover.

While the Web3.0 revolution is still in its early stages, NEAR is constantly carving out its own territory and extending it to different frontiers of cryptocurrency innovation. Can NEAR, once known as the Ethereum killer, now take over ethereum and co-create Web3.0 with the ecosystem? We'll see.