Near Protocol Raises $150 Million, Aims to Expand Web 3 Capabilities

Summary:
• NEAR Protocol was just attracted an additional $150 million in VC investment. How is this likely to impact the platform and its users?

The Near Protocol announced on Thursday that the project has raised $150 million from strategic investors. The latest round of financing was led by Three-Arrows Capital. The other VCs included Mechanism Capital, Amber Group, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Alameda, Jump, Zee Prime, Folius, 6th Man Ventures, Circle Ventures, and Metaweb.vc 

The latest round of funding follows an earlier one by the foundation, which raised $65.9 million. The previous VCs included Digital Currency Group (DCG),  Coinbase Ventures, Baidu Ventures, Electric Capital, Blockchain.com and Pantera Capital.

In making the announcement, the foundation revealed that the funds will be dedicated to accelerating mass adoption of Web3.0.

We are excited to support the NEAR team and ecosystem as they scale blockchain applications.”

Kyle Davies, co-founder and chairman of Three Arrows Capital.

The announcement certainly seems to have stirred the market. At the time of writing, the NEAR coin was up by 2.43% in 24 hours. It had a market capitalization of approximately $11 billion and was the 16^th most valuable crypto asset, according to CoinMarketCap.

About NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol is a layer-one blockchain, designed as a community-run cloud computing platform. It provides solutions to some of the challenges facing the digital world today. This includes helping overcome barriers such as low throughput, low transaction speeds, and poor interoperability. 

Ultimately, NEAR aims to create the ideal environment for launching and operation of decentralized applications (DApps). In addition, it targets to stand out as the most developer and user-friendly platform. For instance, NEAR uses human-readable account names, unlike the cryptographic wallet addresses.

NEAR uses a variation of the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism called Doomslug. The mechanism considers a blockchain finalized as soon as it receives the first communication round. In addition, the protocol has built a bridge to Ethereum. This has ensured compatibility between the platform and Ethereum’s ERC-20 tokens.