NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol is a layer-1 blockchain designed to support decentralized applications and, more recently, AI-driven software agents that can transact and operate across both traditional internet services and other blockchain networks. It presents itself as infrastructure for developers and businesses that want to build applications where artificial intelligence and user ownership intersect, without needing users to manage the complexity of multiple blockchains. The project aims to address the difficulty of scaling AI-native and Web3 applications to large numbers of users at low cost.

NEAR uses a sharded blockchain architecture, meaning the network is divided into parallel segments that process transactions simultaneously, which is intended to keep throughput high and costs low even as usage grows. The NEAR token is used to pay transaction fees on the network, to stake as a validator to help secure the chain, and as the base unit of account within the ecosystem. Block times recorded in the data are effectively zero minutes, reflecting the network's near-instant finality design.

Fees are paid by users and applications submitting transactions to the NEAR network; over the trailing 30 days those fees totalled 193,875 USD, and annualizing that 30-day run rate produces a figure of approximately 2,358,812 USD. The protocol retains roughly 70 percent of fees as protocol revenue — a take rate of about 69.998 percent over the trailing 30 days — with the remaining share, totalling 58,167 USD over the trailing 30 days, flowing to validators who provide the supply side of block production. Fee and revenue growth over the trailing 30 days both came in at approximately 270 percent, though those rates reflect the pace of recent change rather than any sustained level. Against a market capitalization of about 6.57 billion USD, annualized fees represent a fee yield of roughly 0.036 percent, putting the market-cap-to-fees ratio at approximately 2,792.