NEAR Protocol

Sharded proof-of-stake Layer 1 blockchain with NEAR as its native token.

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Facts checked Sep 26, 2026

NEAR Protocol key facts

Category	Layer 1 blockchain
Platforms	Mainnet, RPC
Token	NEAR
Open source	Yes (nearcore)
Company	NEAR Foundation (non-profit, Switzerland)
Fees	Gas in NEAR, 30% of burned gas to contracts; storage locks 1 NEAR per 100 kB

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NEAR token

Price: $3.7 -1.1% 24h
Market cap: $4.9B
Fully diluted value: $4.9B
30-day change: -23.6%

NEAR price, last 30 days

Market data: CoinGecko, updated Nov 8, 2026. Educational content, not financial advice.

About

What is NEAR Protocol?

NEAR Protocol is a sharded proof-of-stake Layer 1 blockchain. The NEAR token pays transaction fees and storage and secures the network through staking. The NEAR Foundation, a non-profit based in Switzerland, supports the ecosystem, and the reference client nearcore is public on GitHub.

How NEAR Protocol works

NEAR splits its state into shards, and validators produce chunks for them.

The top 100 validators by stake produce blocks and chunks, each usually assigned to a single shard. Validators outside the top 100 act as chunk validators: they do not track shards and only validate and endorse chunks, with lower hardware and stake requirements. Each chunk can burn at most 1,000 Tgas, about one second of compute, which lets the network produce a block roughly every second.

Validators earn newly minted NEAR every epoch at a target of 2.5% of total supply a year, paid regardless of fee volume, while transaction fees, minus the share rebated to contracts, are burned. The seat price is set by the 300th largest staking proposal, with a floor of 25,500 NEAR. Accounts can be named, such as alice.near, implicit addresses derived from a key, or Ethereum-style accounts, and each can hold several access keys with separate permissions.

How to start with NEAR Protocol

Pick a wallet from the curated list at wallet.near.org; some let you register a named account like alice.near, and you must write down the seed phrase because it is the only way back into the account.
Account creation carries a fixed 0.007 NEAR charge that covers the first 770 bytes of storage.
To stake, choose a validator on NearBlocks, Pikespeak or Near Staking and call deposit_and_stake on its staking pool contract; rewards start after the next epoch, about 12 hours.

NEAR Protocol fees and limits

Gas is charged in NEAR, paid upfront, and computed from fixed gas units per action times the network gas price, where 1 Tgas is roughly 1 ms of compute.
Contracts receive 30% of the gas they burn.

Attaching extra gas does not speed a transaction up; the unused part is returned. Storage is paid by locking NEAR in the account at 1 NEAR per 100 kB, and deleting data unlocks it. NEP-366 meta transactions let a relayer pay gas for users.

Risks to know before using NEAR Protocol

Unstaked NEAR sits in a 4-epoch unbonding period before you can withdraw it; the staking guide gives this as about 24 hours in one place and 48 hours in another, so plan for two days.
If the validator you delegate to is caught acting maliciously, the stake on it is burned.
For contract owners, storage staking creates an attack surface: if adding data costs users little but locks the owner's NEAR, a spammer can make a contract expensive to run, and transactions fail once the account cannot cover new storage.

Layer 1 blockchainMainnetRPC