Draft:NEAR Protocol2

NEAR Protocol is a highly performant developer-friendly proof-of-stake layer-one public blockchain founded by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov and designed to make it easier for developers to create and deploy decentralized applications.

Several International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) gold medalists and winners have contributed to the NEAR ecosystem.

Unlike the cryptographic wallet addresses common to Ethereum (example: `0x61EDCDf5bb737ADffE5043706e7C5bb1f1a56eEA`), NEAR uses human-readable account names, such as `alice.near`.

“NEAR” Token
NEAR Protocol defines a native token which goes by the ticker "NEAR". Users of the network must pay fees in NEAR tokens, applications must pay storage fees in NEAR tokens, developers earn NEAR tokens based on the transaction fees that their contracts generate, and validators receive a reward in NEAR tokens for securing the platform.

In April 2024, the NEAR token had a market cap of US$7.8 billion.

Governance
NEAR Foundation is a Switzerland-based nonprofit foundation (Stiftung) whose mission is to promote the NEAR ecosystem.

The NEAR Foundation Council is the governing body of NEAR Foundation (similar to a board of directors) and is responsible for making significant decisions about the organization.