Near Protocol Ecosystem (NEAR) – An ecosystem ready to take off

Let’s analyze & evaluate the whole puzzle pieces on the NEAR ecosystem, to help you “skin in the game” more effectively.

In the race of ecosystems, NEAR Protocol is definitely a good candidate platform. To help you have an overview of this potential ecosystem and help you find investment opportunities, I send you an article in the Ecosystem Digest series about Near Protocol.

Let’s take a look at the overall picture of the NEAR platform together!

NEAR Ecosystem Overview

What is the NEAR blockchain?

Definition of NEAR Protocol: NEAR Protocol is a decentralized application platform designed to serve the development of the Open Web, to create an open online world.

Token NEAR: (updated January 21, 2022)

• MCap & Full Cap: $8.88B & $14.36B.
• Rank: 22.
• Price ATH, ATL: $0.52 / $20.44.
• Circulating & Total Supply: 618,406,798 / 1,000,000,000 NEAR.
• List of major exchanges listed: Binance, Huobi, OKEx, Gate,…
• Blockchain NEAR: (updated January 21, 2022)
  • TPS: 100,000 TPS in terms of 1 million nodes.
  • Number of nodes: 59.
  • Blocktime: 1.01s.
  • Total Tx: 77 million.
  • Avg. Tx fee ($):0.1$.

Backers/Investors: Three Arrows Capital, Jump Capital, Alameda Research, Zee Prime, Amber Group, Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, a16z, Multicoin Capital, Pantera, Arrington XRP Capital, IOSG Venture, Libertus Capital,…

Development process:

• Formation of Near Protocol (August 2018): The stage of ideation and development of Near Protocol.
• Mainnet Phase 0 – PoA Genesis (4/2020): The first phase of the Mainnet took place at the end of April 2020, using the Proof of Authority mechanism developed by the NEAR Foundation. During this phase, the nodes are still operated by validators belonging to the Near Foundation.
• Mainnet Phase 1 – Restricted (9/2020): The second phase of the Mainnet allows third-party validators to participate in network operation.
• Mainnet Phase 2 – Community Governed (October 2020): This phase allows the community to become the administrator of Near Protocol’s network through on-chain operations. Users were able to transfer tokens and trade.
• Rainbow Bridge (April 2021): The bridge between Near Protocol and the Ethereum network has been launched.
• Simple Nightshade (9/2021): Implementing Simple Nightshade – a step towards full sharding.
• Nightshade Sharding (11/2021): Deploying Nightshade Sharding – a step towards full sharding.

Highlights of the Near ecosystem

Near Foundation’s fundraising history is quite impressive, with 4 rounds of funding, reaching $35 million in two rounds and 1 unannounced round before 2021. Investors in Near Foundation include many large funds, for example. such as Coinbase Ventures, a16z, Multicoin Capital, Pantera, Arrington XRP Capital, IOSG Venture, Libertus Capital,…

In early January 2022, many new investment funds in Near including: Three Arrows Capital, Jump Capital, Alameda Research, Zee Prime, Amber Group, Dragonfly Capital, with $150 million were announced.

Currently, the transaction fees and transaction speed of the NEAR network are quite impressive, with an average fee of only $ 0.1 (compared to $ 0.5 of Avalanche, $ 0.3 of Tron, …)

Full support and compatibility with EVM makes it easy for developers to move dApps from Ethereum to NEAR Protocol via Aurora.

Current situation and roadmap

The project has completed the design phase of the network structure, and is starting to work on the development of the DeFi network.

The Layer 2 pieces of infrastructure have passed the focus phase, with Aurora and Octopus Network already deployed and in the process of attracting developers, builders, and users.

The DeFi ecosystem on NEAR is still slowly forming the fundamentals, and has not yet attracted the cash flow and investors’ attention.

However, the cash flow has come to Aurora because of the rapid number of applications on the ecosystem (as it is easy to fork applications from other EVM-chains), with TVL reaching over $700 million in October. January 2022.

Pieces of the NEAR ecosystem

Stablecoins

The Stablecoin project that has been brought to NEAR includes USDT, USDC, DAI and TUSD. As of January 2022, the stablecoins on the system are around $400 million, mostly focused on USDT and USDC, and mostly on Aurora and not on Near.

In addition, on Near there is also the implementation of Oin Finance’s stablecoin nUSDO – born when staking stNEAR (when using Metapool). However, this application has not been widely used, as evidenced by the small amount of TVL 5 million USD.

AMM DEX

Currently, the first AMM DEX working on NEAR Protocol only has Ref Finance.

On Aurora, there are more DEXs such as Trisolaris, Wannaswap, Auroraswap and the leader is Trisolaris with more than 500 million TVL as of January 2022 (accounting for 70% of all Aurora’s TVL).

Trisolaris is the first DEX, receiving a grant from the Near Foundation and has a relatively agile development team in implementing new models for the project (such as veTRI), as well as integrating new token pairs extremely quickly.

Oracle

The Oracle array in NEAR Protocol in particular has not yet made much progress.

Although Band Protocol and Chainlink have agreed to partner with NEAR Protocol for a long time, they have not released a testnet or mainnet product yet.

Flux Protocol is also an oracle on NEAR, used to serve the Flux prediction market, but it is not known whether Flux Protocol will serve Oracle services for other projects like Band Protocol and Chainlink.

Lending & Borrowing

This is the most important piece for the DeFi ecosystem across all platforms, but on NEAR Protocol, only Oin Finance (Stablecoin over-collateralized) is the first dApp in this segment.

In addition, upcoming Lending projects in the near future (January 2022) include: Burrow Cash (lending on Near), Aurigami (lending on Aurora). This is an important segment in any ecosystem to help improve capital utilization in the system, as well as bring NEAR’s large marketcap to TVL in the system.

Let’s wait for the launch of the Lending & Borrowing dApp in the future on NEAR!

IDO Platform

Below are the current ROI and ATH ROI of IDO projects on Near. You can see that the ROI of projects on Smartpad and Bocachica as well as Nearpad have quite impressive ATH ROI, while IDO on Skyward Finance offers a relatively modest ROI.

In the coming time, when the Near and Aurora ecosystems grow, the number of projects may increase and IDO on launchpad will be the first choice for projects when launching tokens.

NFT Marketplace

This is the category on NEAR with the most projects, with two prominent names being Paras and Mintbase. The investor community on NEAR also pays the most attention to NFT projects, so this is also a key development area on NEAR Protocol for a long time. The number of NFT projects on NEAR is increasing rapidly.

However, the majority of NFT projects on Near and Aurora are collectibles projects, and NFT cannot be used for specific applications such as interacting with Dapps, using in games,… In the future, if you want promoting NFT on Near, the field of Interactive NFT on Near needs attention.

Future projections and investment opportunities on the NEAR ecosystem

Projecting the future of the NEAR system

The NEAR platform is focused on developing basic DeFi arrays, and is in the process of being finalized.

Especially, the lending segment is about to launch in the near future on both Near (Burrow Cash) and Aurora (Aurigami Finance), which will then become the basis for many other applications to develop such as yield farm leverage, derivatives, etc. .

With the bridges completed, the Near ecosystem will gradually take shape and attract cash flow if steps are taken to stimulate the ecosystem properly.

Thus, in the future, you will join us in waiting for the following developments on NEAR Protocol to perfect the DeFi world:

• Lending on Aurora and Near launched, to become the basis for many other applications to develop such as yield farm leverage, derivatives,…
• Farming keeps APY level to retain TVL, or applies models to combat token inflation and still keep a high yield like veNomics, or wait and apply new models in the market (like game ve(3,3) recently on Fantom);
• Continue to attract developers and builders to the ecosystem.

In addition, to attract cash flow to this ecosystem, we will wait for information such as:

• The support to transfer money, especially stablecoins to NEAR Protocol from top CEXs like Binance, Huobi,…
• USDC, USDT issue their stablecoins on Near and Aurora;
• List Coinbase – this is one of Coinbase Ventures’ investments but has not been listed on Coinbase for trading.
• The projects in the system are invested by large funds in the market.
• dApps with high APY continue to appear to attract users.

Investment opportunity in the NEAR ecosystem

Current brothers have also begun to have investment opportunities in the Near system, including:

• Invest in tokens: If you believe in the NEAR Protocol platform, you can hold NEAR and wait for the increase in the price of the platform token, as well as the projects on this platform – which is certain to happen if the NEAR ecosystem exploded.
• Join IDO:
  • Project teams working on missing pieces on NEAR will be able to launch and IDO tokens in the future.
  • Buy and hold coins of the IDO platform: currently, there are 4 launchpad projects on the ecosystem that you can pay attention to consider.
• Participating in farming and staking in the ecosystem: Currently, DEXs, yield aggregators have sprung up and lending is about to spring up in the near future, which has been and will bring an abundant yield farm for the systems to develop. develop.

Idolmeta.net will update more investment opportunities for you in the NEAR ecosystem in the next time.

Thesis for the NEAR Ecosystem

I also have my own thesis when investing in the Near ecosystem. At the moment, cash flow is mainly concentrated on Aurora, making the valuation of projects on Aurora much higher than projects on Near native.

But when looking at the overall relationship, Aurora is just a piece of the puzzle to bring cash flow to Near and the purpose is to bring this money flow to Near to stimulate the ecosystem.

Therefore, I personally bet on the next time cash flow will flow from Aurora to Near by investing in leading projects on Near like Ref Finance when the market starts to realize this, and projects on Near has a solid foundation to take on the cash flow.

Note that this is just my opinion and not investment advice. You need to be careful and make your own decisions in the investment process!

Conclude

Hopefully my above article has given you an overview of the NEAR ecosystem to effectively “skin in the game”, and here are the main ideas in the article to help you summarize:

• DeFi on NEAR is in the development stage, completing the first basic pieces with bridge, DEX, yield aggregator but still missing many pieces such as yield farm leverage, lending,… , Cash flow into Aurora quickly because EVM-chain projects can fork to Aurora very quickly;
• Cash flow has not been poured into Near and the Octopus Network ecosystem because the above projects are not ready to be eligible to attract and receive cash flow;
• Some of the directions for Near in the near future will be to focus on perfecting basic DeFi pieces such as lending, and then focus on choosing to develop a higher blockchain economy such as Social, Metaverse, Gaming, .. .;
• Money flow is likely to flow to Near in the future if Aurora’s positioning is a layer-2 to attract cash flow to the platform.