What Is Near Protocol and How Does It Work?

• Near Protocol is a layer 1 blockchain network. It provides a platform on which developers can build decentralized applications (dapps). The most successful layer 1 blockchain is Ethereum, so protocols like Near are seen as challengers.
• The key yardsticks for layer 1 networks are transaction costs, speed and the ability to maintain those features as transaction volumes grow. These factors are the focus for layer 1s like Near to improve upon Ethereum, which has encountered issues with costs and speed over the last few years.
• Near Protocol is faster and cheaper than Ethereum. More importantly, it promises to be faster than some of the other largest challengers. When fully implemented, Near is expected to be able to process up to around 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). Ethereum’s largest rival, Solana, averages less than 3,000 transactions per second, according to its own blockchain explorer. Ethereum averages double-digit transactions per second. Bitcoin does less than 10.
• Outside the crypto sphere, an important comparison is Visa’s (V) capacity. The global payments giant processes around 7,000-8,000 TPS, based on its claim of 232.5 billion transactions over a 12-month period. Near Protocol could eclipse that, though it has not yet realized its theoretical potential as of July 2022.
• “Near has built technology to enable transactions that are fast (~1 second), quick to finality (~1-2 seconds), cheap (less than a penny), and secure,” crypto research firm Messari noted in March 2022.[1]

Overview

• This analysis looks at the near.core.fact_actions_events for action_name = 'DeployContract' to find all the newly deployed contracts.
  • This metric tells us how much active the protocol actually is from Development perspective, if we are seeing new DApps or not.
• We also look at near.beta.github_activity for all the developer level activity like:
  • Number of PRs opened.
  • Number of PRs closed.
  • New Developers joining the ecosystem repos.
  • Active developers over time.
  • Top Contributors by number of repos or number of PRs (Pull Requests)

Note: A pull request is when a developer want to make a code change and they then create a pull request(PR) for someone else to review the code before merging it to the main code.

Dev Metrics

• These metrics look at the Github activity across opened and closed PR
• If we look at the new developers(First PR), we certainly see a huge spike in starting Aug 2021 where was have consistently seen 100 devs joining every month.
• Till date 2.48K new devs have joined.
• The number of devs creating and closing PRs have gone up significantly as well with around 250 active devs creating and closing PRs monthly.

PR Metrics

• These metrics look at the Github activity across opened and closed PR as well from a PR perspective.
• If we look at the PRs opened we certainly see a huge spike in starting Jun 2021 and see an upward trend of around 1.5K new PRs created each month.
• If we look at the PRs closed we certainly see a huge spike in starting Jun 2021 and see an upward trend of around 1K PRs closed each month.
• The number of repositories across which PRs are created and closed have seen a rise as well with PRs being created in 150 Repos monthly and PRs being closed in 100 Repos monthly.

Conclusion

• Till date there have been 2.48K developers contributing to the NEAR Github Repos
• They have opened 52.4K PRs and closed 45.8K of them, which is a good sign devs are active.
• bowenwang1996 leads the pack for the most number of open PRs with 992 and is the most active developer.
• We saw spikes in Dec 2021, Apr 2022 and Jul 2022 with around 4K new contract deployments.
• We certainly see a huge spike in starting Aug 2021 where was have consistently seen 100 devs joining every month.
• Overall NEAR seems to be alive and kicking, the devs seem to be heads down and building hard.

Contract Metrics

• Contract metrics are important end-metric to see with developers pushing code how many new features/dApps are being deployed.
• Sep and Oct 2020 saw combined 7K contract deployed, this number fell down significantly.
• We saw spikes in Dec 2021, Apr 2022 and Jul 2022 with around 4K new contract deployments.
• Till date 58.5K contracts have been deployed.
• The contract activity has gone down since the LUNA crash for sure.

Top Level Metrics

• Till date there have been 2.48K developers contributing to the NEAR Github Repos
• They have opened 52.4K PRs and closed 45.8K of them, which is a good sign devs are active.
• On average a Dev opens 15 PRs and closes 16 PRs.
• The maximum is 930 PRs closed and 992 opened.
• On average a PR remains open for 27 Days.

Top Authors

• PRs:
  • bowenwang1996 leads the pack for the most number of open PRs with 992 and is the most active developer.
    • Followed by ilblackdragon and nearmax with 966 and 834 respectively.
  • bowenwang1996 leads the pack for the most number of closed PRs with 930 and is the most active developer.
    • Followed by ilblackdragon and pmnoxx with 804 and 766 respectively.
• Repositories:
  • mikedotexe leads the pack for the most number of open PRs across repos with 69.
    • Followed by willemneal and chadoh with 66 and 56 respectively.
  • willemneal leads the pack for the most number of closed PRs across repos with 61.
    • Followed by mikedotexe and evgenykuzyakov with 60 and 50 respectively.