NEAR Wallet
NEAR Wallet is the official wallet for NEAR token. It can securely store and stake your NEAR tokens. Founded by Roketo Labs LTD.
Advantages of NEAR
The main advantages of NEAR are all related to its scalability. The NEAR network is able to process upwards of 100,000 transactions per second, which is double what Solana, another newcomer, is able to do. Not only that, transactions on NEAR are finalized in about 1 second and with a transaction fee that is fractions of a cent. NEAR is able to do this thanks to its Nightshade sharding system, and Doomslug block production technique. Nightshade allows the network to improve efficiency by only adding snapshots of a shard to a block, while Doomslug allows for validators to take turns to produce and validate blocks. Both of these combine to reduce load on the network and increase throughput
NEAR is also interoperable with other blockchains. Their Rainbow Bridge allows users to bring tokens over from Ethereum, and their Aurora Ethereum Virtual Machine allows projects on Ethereum to easily begin building on NEAR. NEAR Wallet is also working with Cosmos and the Binance Smart Chain.
Disadvantages of NEAR
The main disadvantages of NEAR are all related to governance. The initial token distribution allocated over 36% of the total supply to the core team and backers. This gives them control of a large portion of the asset, even if released on a 5-year vested schedule, as that started 4 years ago. When combined with the inability to vote on governance proposals unless you are staking enough NEAR Wallet to be a validator it becomes clear that there are some issues of centralization within the network.
In order to be a validator on NEAR you must be able to stake enough to get a “seat”. The price of a seat depends on how much other validators are already staking, and it is currently over 60k NEAR tokens, which at current prices means you would need to spend over $1 million USD to become a validator. This may explain why there are only 73 validators on the network. Since only validators are able to vote (and delegates have no control over how their validators vote), it means that currently there are only 73 votes taken into account when deciding on governance changes. That is not exactly decentralized and will need to change sooner than later.