What is NEAR cryptocurrency? – Forbes Australia Advisor

The price of the $NEAR token has increased by over 60% since the start of the year and is currently valued at around $6. Its all-time high occurred in early 2022, when the crypto's value peaked just above $20. It has a market capitalization of $6.9 billion and over a billion tokens in circulation.

Co-founder Illia Polosukhin has experience in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning research at Google. He initially launched NEAR in 2017 as an AI company that involved machines learning to code. Polosukhin said he first studied blockchain technology as a solution to the difficulties he was having in making micropayments to AI project collaborators located around the world – and discovered that transaction fees on Bitcoin and Ethereum were too high.

He and his co-founder Alexander Skidanov ended up focusing their efforts on how to solve the problem: “How can we build something that is truly scalable (can actually scale to a billion or more users), that is easy to use… and optimized for developers in development? able to get started using traditional programming languages.

In 2018, they launched the NEAR protocol, a public proof-of-stake blockchain designed to make it simpler and cheaper for developers to create scalable decentralized applications (Dapps).

The network managed to gain support. In its early days, NEAR raised more than $20 million in venture capital from companies including Andreessen Horowitz and Pantera Capital. In 2022, it successfully completed two funding rounds to strengthen its network, raising $150 million and $350 million, which helped drive up the price of its token.