News
What is NEAR cryptocurrency? – Forbes Australia Consultant
The price of the $NEAR token has increased by over 60% since the beginning of the year and is currently valued at around $6. Its all-time high was reached in early 2022, when the cryptocurrency’s value peaked just above $20. It has a market capitalization of $6.9 billion and more than one billion tokens in circulation.
Co-founder Illia Polosukhin’s background is in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning research at Google, and she initially launched NEAR in 2017 as an artificial intelligence company that involved teaching machines programming. Polosukhin said initially looked into blockchain technology as a solution to the difficulties he was having in making micro-payments to AI project collaborators around the world, and found that transaction fees on Bitcoin and Ethereum were too high.
He and 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 reach a billion users or more – that is easy to use… and optimized for working developers?” able to hit the ground running using traditional programming languages.”
In 2018 they launched the NEAR protocola public, proof-of-stake blockchain designed to make it easier and cheaper for developers to create scalable decentralized applications (Dapps).
The network managed to gain supporters. In its early days, NEAR raised more than $20 million in venture capital from firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Pantera Capital. In 2022 it was completed two successful financing rounds to boost its network, raising $150 million and $350 million, which helped boost the price of its token.