NEAR Protocol NEAR Price, MarketCap And How To Buy NEAR Protocol Token: NEAR Protocol NEAR is an open source platform that accelerates the development of decentralized applications.

The current NEAR Protocol price as of writing is $15.02 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $373,070,773 USD, And the current CoinMarketCap ranking is #24 as of this write up, with a live market cap of $9,031,096,647 USD. It has a circulating supply of 601,159,644 NEAR coins and a max. supply of 1,000,000,000 NEAR coins.

What Is NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?

NEAR Protocol is a layer-one blockchain that was designed as a community-run cloud computing platform and that eliminates some of the limitations that have been bogging competing blockchains, such as low transaction speeds, low throughput and poor interoperability. This provides the ideal environment for DApps and creates a developer and user-friendly platform. For instance, NEAR uses human-readable account names, unlike the cryptographic wallet addresses common to Ethereum. NEAR also introduces unique solutions to scaling problems and has its own consensus mechanism called “Doomslug.”

NEAR Protocol is being built by the NEAR Collective, its community that is updating the initial code and releasing updates to the ecosystem. Its declared goal is to build a platform that is “secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people.”

Flux, a protocol that allows developers to create markets based on assets, commodities, real-world events, and Mintbase, an NFT minting platform are examples of projects being built on NEAR Protocol.

Who Are the Founders of NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?

NEAR Protocol was founded by Erik Trautman, an entrepreneur with experience on Wall Street and founder of Viking Education. His co-founders were Illia Polosukhin, who has more than ten years of industry experience, including three years at Google, and Alexander Skidanov, a computer scientist that worked at Microsoft and went on to join memSQL, where he became the director of engineering. NEAR Protocol has an extensive team of experienced developers that includes several International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) gold medalists and winners. The team claims to have people with experience of building some of the only real-world sharded systems at scale, a solution the protocol is pursuing to improve blockchain scalability.

What Makes NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Unique?

NEAR uses its Nightshade technology to improve transaction throughput massively. Nightshade is a variation of sharding, in which individual sets of validators process transactions in parallel across multiple sharded chains, improving the overall capacity of the blockchain. In contrast to “regular” sharding, shards in Nightshade produce a fraction of the next block, called “chunks.” In doing so, NEAR Protocol is able to achieve up to 100,000 transactions per second and achieve near-instant transaction finality thanks to a one-second block cadence while simultaneously keeping transaction fees at virtually zero.

NEAR Protocol also improves upon the convoluted onboarding process of other blockchains by having human-readable addresses and building decentralized applications with similar registration flow to what users have already experienced. Moreover, it provides developers with modular components, helping them start projects like token contracts or NFTs more quickly.

How Many NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Coins Are There in Circulation?

The total supply of NEAR is 1 billion tokens, according to the following token distribution:

• 17.2% – Community Grants
• 11.4% – Operation Grants
• 10% – Foundation Endowment
• 11.7% – Early Ecosystem
• 14% – Core Contributors
• 17.6% – Backers
• 6.1% – Small Backers
• 12% – Community Sale

NEAR Protocol launched its mainnet on April 22, 2020 with 1 billion NEAR tokens created at genesis. 5% of additional supply is issued each year to support the network as epoch rewards, of which 90% goes to validators (4.5% total) and 10% to the protocol treasury (0.5% total). 30% of transaction fees are paid out as rebates to contracts that interact with a transaction, while the remaining 70% are burned. The NEAR token is used for:

• Fees for processing transactions and storing data.
• Running validator nodes on the network via staking NEAR tokens.
• Used for governance votes to determine how network resources are allocated.

How Is the NEAR Protocol Network Secured?

NEAR uses a variation of the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism called Doomslug. Doomslug is based on two rounds of consensus, where a block is considered finalized as soon as it has received the first communication round. This allows for near-instant finality by having validators take turns producing blocks rather than competing directly based on their stake.

The NEAR Foundation is a Swiss-based non-profit dedicated to protocol maintenance, ecosystem funding, and guiding the protocol’s governance. The protocol has also built a bridge to Ethereum, allowing users to transfer ERC-20 tokens from the Ethereum blockchain to NEAR.

Where Can You Buy NEAR Protocol (NEAR)?

NEAR is available on Binance, Huobi Global, Mandala Exchange, FTX and OKEx.

How To Buy NEAR Protocol (NEAR Token).

Follow the steps below to start buying NEAR Protocol on Supported Crypto Exchanges

• Sign up for an account .
  First, enter a valid email address, create a new username and set a strong password to protect your account.
• Verify your account. 
  After providing your name, date of birth, country of residence and phone number, you can buy NEAR Protocol on supported platforms.
• Deposit cash.
  You can fund your account in a number of ways. How you do so will depend upon your location and preferences.
• Purchase NEAR Protocol!
  Once your account is funded with cash, you’re ready to purchase NEAR Protocol.

With the recent hike in the price of NEAR Protocol, there has been a high demand from potential investors who wish to buy and own NEAR Protocol, A lot of crypto investors are searching the internet to get the right information on how & where to get their Token as well as storing them in a secured wallet.

Current Price Of NEAR Protocol, Market Cap, And How To Buy NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol is a freely-tradable token, with the majority of volume on major exchanges occurring on  Huobi, Coinbase, Uniswap (V2) and OKEx Gate.io. Pairs against other cryptocurrencies and stablecoins are active, as well as with fiat currency, including on Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange

NOTE THAT: NEAR Protocol cannot be directly purchased with fiats currency. However, You can easily purchase  this token by purchasing USDT or any major Crypto Currencies like BITCOIN from any fiat-to-crypto exchanges and then transfer to the exchange that offers to trade NEAR Protocol, in this guide article we will walk you through in detail the steps to buy and own your first NEAR Protocol.

Quick Steps

Register on Fiat_to_Crypto Exchange

Since you can’t buy NEAR Protocol directly with Fiat Currency, You will have to buy one of the major cryptocurrencies (BTC, USDT, ETH). But in this case let’s consider USDT (USDT). You can perform this transaction on fiat-to-crypto exchanges, like Coinbase.com, Coinbase is one of the largest crypto exchanges that accept fiat deposits.

All you need to do, create account with them ( ensure you keep your password safely) after creating an account then move to the next step which is to buy USDT.

Buy USDT with fiat Currency

Once you finished with account creation and KYC process. You will be asked to add a payment method. Here you can either choose to provide a credit/debit card or use a direct bank transfer.

PLEASE NOTE: You will be charged higher fees when using cards but you will make an instant purchase. While a bank transfer attract lower charges but slower purchases, Though it sometimes depends on the country of your residence, some countries will offer instant cash deposit with low fees.

Now that you have successfully added your card to coinbase, you have to trade USDT, click the ‘Trade’ button right at the top left, choose USDT and confirm your transaction.

Transfer USDT to an Altcoin Exchange

After buying your USDT, it’s worthy of note that since NEAR Protocol is an altcoin that can’t be traded in all Crypto exchange, we need to transfer our USDT to an exchange that NEAR Protocol can be traded, Let say Gate.io. Many exchanges has their own policies as some has restrictions to some countries, for example Binance does not allow investors from USA as customers. So you have to choose an exchange that suit your location and create an account with them before proceeding to the next steps.

PLEASE NOTE: It is always advisable to set up 2FA authentication as it adds extra security to your account, It will protect you against crypto theft.

Deposit USDT to Your Preferred exchange

Depends on the policies of the exchange, you might be required to go through another KYC process, this usually takes minimum 0f 30 minutes and a maximum of a day, After the whole verification process you are now good to go.

Since we are now transferring our previously bought USDT from Coinbase to the exchange where NEAR Protocol can be traded (Gate.io), click on ‘Copy Address’ or right-click on the full address and click copy to grab this address to your clipboard. Now head back to Coinbase, go to Portfolio page and click on the USDT on your asset list, then click on ‘Send’ on the right.

Under the Recipient field, paste the wallet address from your clipboard (from the exchange you want to send your USDT to), for security and accuracy reason, you should always check if both addresses are matching and Click ‘Send’ to proceed, you should receive a confirmation email instantly, click on the confirmation link on the email and your coins are on the way to your preferred exchange.

Now go to your exchange to confirm your USDT arrival, don’t worry if you haven’t seen your deposit almost immediately, It might be undergoing some network verification on blockchain network and this should take a few minutes for your coins to arrive. Depending on the network traffic condition of the USDT network, during busy hour it may take even longer.

You should receive a confirmation notification from your exchange once your USDT has arrived. guess what? You are now finally ready to purchase your Coin

 Trade NEAR Protocol

At this stage which is the final of your purchase, held to your exchanging platform, then go to ‘Exchange’. make sure “USDT” is selected to be able to trade USDT to altcoin pair of your choice, in this case NEAR. You should see NEAR/USDT, select that pair and you should see a price chart of NEAR/USDT in the middle of the page. All you need to do is to execute your order and you are done getting your NEAR Protocol.

Some Top Exchanges You Might Love Base On Your Location

BitMart

BitMart – Is one of the most trusted cryptocurrency trading platform which provides real-time trading services including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and other Altcoins. It accept American customers unlike BINANCE that doesn’t  support American customers.

Binance

Binance is a popular cryptocurrency exchange which was started in China but then moved their headquarters to the crypto-friendly Island of Malta in the EU. Binance is popular for its crypto to crypto exchange services.

Gate.io

Gate.io is an American cryptocurrency exchange that launched 2017. As the exchange is American, US-investors can of course trade here.

 Conclusion.

After Purchasing your NEAR Protocol, and your plan is to hold it for long. You will have to open a secure wallet online or you make use of appropriate “Cold Wallet” as there had been too many hacking incidents associated with online and funds had lost severally.

How to safeguard your crypto from theft

• The likelihood of theft can be reduced in various ways. You can prevent theft of your cryptocurrency and coins by storing them on offline hardware.
• Hardware wallets and paper wallets must be locked in a safe when not in use. Put your private keys in a place like a bank safe deposit box or a remote safe location, far away from where your wallet is kept.
• Exchanges should only hold crypto that is needed for trading and exchange.
• Whenever you access your exchanges, wallets, or other online crypto service providers through your web browser, be sure to use a secure and trusted bookmark. The 5-dollar wrench attack can result in losses if you do not utilize multiple passphrases on your hardware wallet.
• Multifactor authentication can be improved by using an offline token generator like Google Authenticator.
• Multiple signatures can be applied to wallet funds.
• You should limit your exposure to the public in regard to crypto holdings and avoid discussing them in public.
• Make sure your wallet address is double-checked after pasting it, and provide an image of the wallet address when emailed, chatted, or otherwise sent via digital means.

Thank you for your time, note that this page is open for update and corrections. Please Note That, buying of crypto currencies is at your own risk, all our post is for education purpose and it’s advisable that you buy according to the dollars you can afford to lose. You can check out how you can buy Polygon.