An overview of NEAR protocol’s Ethereum bridge

The NEAR protocol is a relative newcomer to the competition space among next-generation blockchain projects, with the team raising their first major funding round of $12.1 million in July 2019 from Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and MetaStable among others. In May 2020, NEAR raised another $21.6 million in a token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz, and in August sold $30 million in NEAR tokens via CoinList.

Unlike other sharded blockchains with a shared security model (e.g. Ethereum 2.0 and Polkadot), wherein transactions are processed in shards that communicate via a beacon (or relay) chain, NEAR protocol has a dynamic sharding approach. This means smart contracts are not deployed on a single shard and can synchronously call each other, instead of having to wait for communication to be relayed via a main chain that passes messages between shards.