Tiger Global Leads $350 Million Investment in Near Protocol Blockchain
Tiger Global is leading a $350 million investment in the Near Protocol blockchain with participation from Republic Capital, Hashed, FTX Ventures, Dragonfly Capital and other investors. According to a statement released by the company, the newly acquired funding will help NEAR increase the number of regional hubs and country positions located in significant community centers worldwide.
By combining high-caliber technology with a rapidly growing community of software developers, the NEAR platform is well positioned to become the industry standard for smart contract applications. John Curtius, a partner at Tiger Global, said in a statement that they are excited to support NEAR with a $350 million investment in the Near Protocol blockchain, as it will allow them to scale up their investments in the broader crypto space. It was announced in response to NEAR’s announcement that they will be expanding their crypto business.
In 2018, the NEAR Protocol was established as an open source framework for distributing decentralized applications (dApps). A funding round that raised $150 million was led by Three Arrows Capital, Alameda and Jump in January. This round was part of the NEAR Foundation’s efforts to manage the development of the NEAR network. Marieke Flament, CEO of the foundation, stated in an interview in January that one of NEAR’s overarching missions is to be the best destination for building Web3 applications and making the ecosystem as a whole more accessible.
Increasing risk investments in projects based on the NEAR protocol
While Tiger Global is leading a $350 million investment in the Near Protocol blockchain, this investment round comes on the heels of a very active year for NEAR as it raised millions in funding. Rainbow Bridge was first introduced by NEAR in April 2021 with the purpose of facilitating the exchange of ERC-20 tokens between the Ethereum and NEAR networks. In June, NEAR became a participant in ICON’s Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP), which makes it possible to transfer data to partners such as Polkadot and Harmony. With the $350 million investment in the Near Protocol blockchain, NEAR’s market cap is growing at $10 billion.
Additionally, in November NEAR formed a partnership with Ardana to build a bridge that will enable the transfer of assets from Cardano to NEAR. According to the business, the next few weeks will see the announcement of additional venture capital investments in projects that build on the NEAR platform. The emphasis of these investments will be on NEAR and Aurora-based DeFi products and applications. There are around 300 applications running and being built on NEAR, and there are more than 200,000 community members located worldwide.
In a statement, Republic Capital CEO Boris Revsin said the company conducted an in-depth study of the NEAR ecosystem and concluded that builders in the industry consider the protocol essential to their distribution strategy. He stated that having a community, having good tools, having good documentation, and having good support are essential to developing successful applications, and they believe that NEAR is best in class when it comes to these key aspects of crypto. NEAR’s $10 billion market cap is growing thanks to its $350 million investment in the Near Protocol blockchain.
Offers unique solutions to scaling problems
As Tiger Global leads a $350 million investment in the Near Protocol blockchain, let’s find the essentials of the network. As a layer one blockchain capable of hosting dApps, NEAR is a potential alternative to Ethereum scaling projects. Validators are able to take turns producing blocks thanks to NEAR’s proprietary consensus method, which is called “Doomslug.” NEAR presents innovative solutions to scalability challenges and has its own consensus system.
NEAR also uses Nightshade, a form of sharding that is unique to NEAR and involves distinct sets of validators that process transactions in parallel across many sharding chains to increase the capacity of the network as a whole. NEAR is able to perform up to 100,000 transactions per second thanks to the combination of several different techniques, and the almost instantaneous execution of transactions is made possible by the block cadence that occurs every second.
This is achieved with transaction fees that cost fractions of a cent. The interoperability of the Near network with layer one networks such as Cosmos is currently developing rapidly. Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin are responsible for starting NEAR in 2017 as a machine learning project originally referred to as NEAR.ai. Before joining MEMSQL as Director of Engineering, Skidanov worked as a software developer for Microsoft. Polosukhin, on the other hand, managed engineering projects for Google. Also, Amos Zhang and the head of Sharp-Darts joined the 4NTs Guild recently discussed the growth and trajectory of the NEAR Ecosystem in an article.
They researched blockchains for their AI apps and found that none met their requirements. As a result, in August 2018 they started working with NEAR. They were successful and raised funding and immediately began developing the NEAR platform as a platform with the goal of providing developers with an easy method to create dApps that are also able to scale to accommodate widespread use.
They merged the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism with a new sharding strategy known as Nightshade and a new block creation strategy known as Doomslug. The NEAR network went public on October 13, 2020, and its user base has steadily expanded since then. Now, with Tiger Global leading a $350 million investment in the Near Protocol blockchain, it’s clear there’s growing interest in the project, and more investment rounds could be on the cards in the future.
