NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol is present on the following networks: Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Near Protocol.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC) uses a hybrid consensus mechanism called Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA), which combines elements of Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) and Proof of Authority (PoA). This method ensures fast block times and low fees while maintaining a level of decentralization and security. Core Components 1. Validators (so-called “Cabinet Members”): Validators on BSC are responsible for producing new blocks, validating transactions, and maintaining the network’s security. To become a validator, an entity must stake a significant amount of BNB (Binance Coin). Validators are selected through staking and voting by token holders. There are 21 active validators at any given time, rotating to ensure decentralization and security. 2. Delegators: Token holders who do not wish to run validator nodes can delegate their BNB tokens to validators. This delegation helps validators increase their stake and improves their chances of being selected to produce blocks. Delegators earn a share of the rewards that validators receive, incentivizing broad participation in network security. 3. Candidates: Candidates are nodes that have staked the required amount of BNB and are in the pool waiting to become validators. They are essentially potential validators who are not currently active but can be elected to the validator set through community voting. Candidates play a crucial role in ensuring there is always a sufficient pool of nodes ready to take on validation tasks, thus maintaining network resilience and decentralization. Consensus Process 4. Validator Selection: Validators are chosen based on the amount of BNB staked and votes received from delegators. The more BNB staked and votes received, the higher the chance of being selected to validate transactions and produce new blocks. The selection process involves both the current validators and the pool of candidates, ensuring a dynamic and secure rotation of nodes. 5. Block Production: The selected validators take turns producing blocks in a PoA-like manner, ensuring that blocks are generated quickly and efficiently. Validators validate transactions, add them to new blocks, and broadcast these blocks to the network. 6. Transaction Finality: BSC achieves fast block times of around 3 seconds and quick transaction finality. This is achieved through the efficient PoSA mechanism that allows validators to rapidly reach consensus. Security and Economic Incentives 7. Staking: Validators are required to stake a substantial amount of BNB, which acts as collateral to ensure their honest behavior. This staked amount can be slashed if validators act maliciously. Staking incentivizes validators to act in the network's best interest to avoid losing their staked BNB. 8. Delegation and Rewards: Delegators earn rewards proportional to their stake in validators. This incentivizes them to choose reliable validators and participate in the network’s security. Validators and delegators share transaction fees as rewards, which provides continuous economic incentives to maintain network security and performance. 9. Transaction Fees: BSC employs low transaction fees, paid in BNB, making it cost-effective for users. These fees are collected by validators as part of their rewards, further incentivizing them to validate transactions accurately and efficiently.
The crypto-asset's Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, introduced with The Merge in 2022, replaces mining with validator staking. Validators must stake at least 32 ETH every block a validator is randomly chosen to propose the next block. Once proposed the other validators verify the blocks integrity. The network operates on a slot and epoch system, where a new block is proposed every 12 seconds, and finalization occurs after two epochs (~12.8 minutes) using Casper-FFG. The Beacon Chain coordinates validators, while the fork-choice rule (LMD-GHOST) ensures the chain follows the heaviest accumulated validator votes. Validators earn rewards for proposing and verifying blocks, but face slashing for malicious behavior or inactivity. PoS aims to improve energy efficiency, security, and scalability, with future upgrades like Proto-Danksharding enhancing transaction efficiency.
The NEAR Protocol uses a unique consensus mechanism combining Proof of Stake (PoS) and a novel approach called Doomslug, which enables high efficiency, fast transaction processing, and secure finality in its operations. Here's an overview of how it works: Core Concepts 1. Doomslug and Proof of Stake: - NEAR's consensus mechanism primarily revolves around PoS, where validators stake NEAR tokens to participate in securing the network. However, NEAR's implementation is enhanced with the Doomslug protocol. - Doomslug allows the network to achieve fast block finality by requiring blocks to be confirmed in two stages. Validators propose blocks in the first step, and finalization occurs when two-thirds of validators approve the block, ensuring rapid transaction confirmation. 2. Sharding with Nightshade: - NEAR uses a dynamic sharding technique called Nightshade. This method splits the network into multiple shards, enabling parallel processing of transactions across the network, thus significantly increasing throughput. Each shard processes a portion of transactions, and the outcomes are merged into a single "snapshot" block. - This sharding approach ensures scalability, allowing the network to grow and handle increasing demand efficiently. Consensus Process 1. Validator Selection: - Validators are selected to propose and validate blocks based on the amount of NEAR tokens staked. This selection process is designed to ensure that only validators with significant stakes and community trust participate in securing the network. 2. Transaction Finality: - NEAR achieves transaction finality through its PoS-based system, where validators vote on blocks. Once two-thirds of validators approve a block, it reaches finality under Doomslug, meaning that no forks can alter the confirmed state. 3. Epochs and Rotation: - Validators are rotated in epochs to ensure fairness and decentralization. Epochs are intervals in which validators are reshuffled, and new block proposers are selected, ensuring a balance between performance and decentralization.

NEAR Protocol is present on the following networks: Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Near Protocol.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC) uses the Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA) consensus mechanism to ensure network security and incentivize participation from validators and delegators. Incentive Mechanisms 1. Validators: Staking Rewards: Validators must stake a significant amount of BNB to participate in the consensus process. They earn rewards in the form of transaction fees and block rewards. Selection Process: Validators are selected based on the amount of BNB staked and the votes received from delegators. The more BNB staked and votes received, the higher the chances of being selected to validate transactions and produce new blocks. 2. Delegators: Delegated Staking: Token holders can delegate their BNB to validators. This delegation increases the validator's total stake and improves their chances of being selected to produce blocks. Shared Rewards: Delegators earn a portion of the rewards that validators receive. This incentivizes token holders to participate in the network’s security and decentralization by choosing reliable validators. 3. Candidates: Pool of Potential Validators: Candidates are nodes that have staked the required amount of BNB and are waiting to become active validators. They ensure that there is always a sufficient pool of nodes ready to take on validation tasks, maintaining network resilience. 4. Economic Security: Slashing: Validators can be penalized for malicious behavior or failure to perform their duties. Penalties include slashing a portion of their staked tokens, ensuring that validators act in the best interest of the network. Opportunity Cost: Staking requires validators and delegators to lock up their BNB tokens, providing an economic incentive to act honestly to avoid losing their staked assets. Fees on the Binance Smart Chain 5. Transaction Fees: Low Fees: BSC is known for its low transaction fees compared to other blockchain networks. These fees are paid in BNB and are essential for maintaining network operations and compensating validators. Dynamic Fee Structure: Transaction fees can vary based on network congestion and the complexity of the transactions. However, BSC ensures that fees remain significantly lower than those on the Ethereum mainnet. 6. Block Rewards: Incentivizing Validators: Validators earn block rewards in addition to transaction fees. These rewards are distributed to validators for their role in maintaining the network and processing transactions. 7. Cross-Chain Fees: Interoperability Costs: BSC supports cross-chain compatibility, allowing assets to be transferred between Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain. These cross-chain operations incur minimal fees, facilitating seamless asset transfers and improving user experience. 8. Smart Contract Fees: Deployment and Execution Costs: Deploying and interacting with smart contracts on BSC involves paying fees based on the computational resources required. These fees are also paid in BNB and are designed to be cost-effective, encouraging developers to build on the BSC platform.
The crypto-asset's PoS system secures transactions through validator incentives and economic penalties. Validators stake at least 32 ETH and earn rewards for proposing blocks, attesting to valid ones, and participating in sync committees. Rewards are paid in newly issued ETH and transaction fees. Under EIP-1559, transaction fees consist of a base fee, which is burned to reduce supply, and an optional priority fee (tip) paid to validators. Validators face slashing if they act maliciously and incur penalties for inactivity. This system aims to increase security by aligning incentives while making the crypto-asset's fee structure more predictable and deflationary during high network activity.
NEAR Protocol employs several economic mechanisms to secure the network and incentivize participation: Incentive Mechanisms to Secure Transactions: 1. Staking Rewards: Validators and delegators secure the network by staking NEAR tokens. Validators earn around 5% annual inflation, with 90% of newly minted tokens distributed as staking rewards. Validators propose blocks, validate transactions, and receive a share of these rewards based on their staked tokens. Delegators earn rewards proportional to their delegation, encouraging broad participation. 2. Delegation: Token holders can delegate their NEAR tokens to validators to increase the validator's stake and improve the chances of being selected to validate transactions. Delegators share in the validator's rewards based on their delegated tokens, incentivizing users to support reliable validators. 3. Slashing and Economic Penalties: Validators face penalties for malicious behavior, such as failing to validate correctly or acting dishonestly. The slashing mechanism enforces security by deducting a portion of their staked tokens, ensuring validators follow the network's best interests. 4. Epoch Rotation and Validator Selection: Validators are rotated regularly during epochs to ensure fairness and prevent centralization. Each epoch reshuffles validators, allowing the protocol to balance decentralization with performance. Fees on the NEAR Blockchain: 1. Transaction Fees: Users pay fees in NEAR tokens for transaction processing, which are burned to reduce the total circulating supply, introducing a potential deflationary effect over time. Validators also receive a portion of transaction fees as additional rewards, providing an ongoing incentive for network maintenance. 2. Storage Fees: NEAR Protocol charges storage fees based on the amount of blockchain storage consumed by accounts, contracts, and data. This requires users to hold NEAR tokens as a deposit proportional to their storage usage, ensuring the efficient use of network resources. 3. Redistribution and Burning: A portion of the transaction fees (burned NEAR tokens) reduces the overall supply, while the rest is distributed to validators as compensation for their work. The burning mechanism helps maintain long-term economic sustainability and potential value appreciation for NEAR holders. 4. Reserve Requirement: Users must maintain a minimum account balance and reserves for data storage, encouraging efficient use of resources and preventing spam attacks.

The energy consumption of this asset is aggregated across multiple components:
For the calculation of energy consumptions, the so called “bottom-up” approach is being used. The nodes are considered to be the central factor for the energy consumption of the network. These assumptions are made on the basis of empirical findings through the use of public information sites, open-source crawlers and crawlers developed in-house. The main determinants for estimating the hardware used within the network are the requirements for operating the client software. The energy consumption of the hardware devices was measured in certified test laboratories. When calculating the energy consumption, we used - if available - the Functionally Fungible Group Digital Token Identifier (FFG DTI) to determine all implementations of the asset of question in scope and we update the mappings regulary, based on data of the Digital Token Identifier Foundation.
To determine the energy consumption of a token, the energy consumption of the network(s) binance_smart_chain, ethereum is calculated first. Based on the crypto asset's gas consumption per network, the share of the total consumption of the respective network that is assigned to this asset is defined. When calculating the energy consumption, we used - if available - the Functionally Fungible Group Digital Token Identifier (FFG DTI) to determine all implementations of the asset of question in scope and we update the mappings regulary, based on data of the Digital Token Identifier Foundation.

To determine the proportion of renewable energy usage, the locations of the nodes are to be determined using public information sites, open-source crawlers and crawlers developed in-house. If no information is available on the geographic distribution of the nodes, reference networks are used which are comparable in terms of their incentivization structure and consensus mechanism. This geo-information is merged with public information from the European Environment Agency (EEA) and thus determined. The intensity is calculated as the marginal energy cost wrt. one more transaction.

To determine the proportion of renewable energy usage, the locations of the nodes are to be determined using public information sites, open-source crawlers and crawlers developed in-house. If no information is available on the geographic distribution of the nodes, reference networks are used which are comparable in terms of their incentivization structure and consensus mechanism. This geo-information is merged with public information from the European Environment Agency (EEA) and thus determined. The intensity is calculated as the marginal emission wrt. one more transaction.