Question:

The NEAR Foundation is running an "Insight of the Week" series. Keeping your analysis short and focused on excellent-quality visualization - provide the most fascinating or illuminating fact or insight that you can about the NEAR ecosystem, or any of the projects building on NEAR, over the past 7 to 14 days.

Overview of essay:

In this essay, we are going to study the NEAR during the past 7 to 14 days. For this purpose various sectors have been analyzed to assess the performance of NEAR.

This analysis divided into the following parts:

• Network performance
• Decentralization of NEAR
• Trade analysis on NEAR
• Summary and references

NEAR blockchain and how does it works:

Near is a public, sharded, extensible blockchain network based on the proof-of-stake (POS) paradigm. Developers can use this platform to launch their own decentralized applications (similar to the Ethereum network). The token of this network is called NEAR, which is the functional token of this network. The main goal of the NEAR network is to create an infrastructure for creating a new Internet. In the new internet, it will be harder for big companies to access people's personal information. Countries cannot ban some programs and destroy their business in this system. A world of freedom where everyone can act freely.

This platform uses sharding technology to solve the problem of scalability. In this model, a transaction does not need to be checked by all network nodes. With sharding, a network is turned into several parallel networks that check transactions simultaneously, so that each transaction is checked in a shard. As a result, only nodes present in a shard will check and confirm this transaction, and other nodes present in other shards of the network will not check this transaction. This idea makes the capacity of the network increase significantly.

The NEAR protocol has provided the NightShade solution. Nightshade is the main technology of Nair blockchain. In the NightShade solution, sharding is applied to all blocks individually instead of the main chain. In this method and because all the blocks are divided between the nodes of the NIR network, the scalability of this network increases significantly. The mechanism of NightShade is that instead of sending transactions individually to each of the network nodes, they are divided among all nodes and run in parallel.

Currently, NEAR has improved its sharding capability in partnership with Octopus Network. Octopus allows developers to build their own blockchains. The chains created by Octopus are known as App Chains and are connected to the NEAR network through the Octopus Bridge, which is deployed as a smart contract.

Methodology:

To handle this investigation, the Data provided by Flipside community has been adopted, accordingly.

The data related to NEAR network have been shown by NEAR tables on Flipside. The sub-parts of this mentioned table have been utilized by its application:

• The network performance has been investigated through various metrics like: Count of transactions, active wallets, new users, transaction per minute(TPM) and transaction per wallet.
• Decentralization on NEAR
  • Users, transactions, volume of $NEAR, Average and median of volume for each action
  • Average volume of action per day and average user per day for each action
• Trade analysis
  • Swaps, traders, volume in USD, average and median of volume, average trader and volume of trade per day
  • Most popular assets on NEAR
  • The most popular asset pairs and their statistics

Part 1: Network performance

The important part of each network is the performance of each blockchain. The first part of this investigation is used to determine the activity of NEAR on the past 7 to 14 days (Set by user).

This part contains the various aspects and the most important ones are described as below:

• Transaction and paid fee are the first metrics should be analyzed to evaluate the performance of NEAR.
• Active and new users is used to identify the interaction of crypto people with NEAR blockchain.
• NEAR known as of the leading networks with high speed of transaction. To test this statement, the transaction per minute (TPM) of NEAR has been examined through the selected time period.
• Its good to find the utilization of NEAR with status of transactions on it. The failed or succeeded transactions depend on many factors and in this analysis the status of transactions on NEAR analyzed to point out the health of NEAR protocol.
• The average transactions per wallet is useful metric that used to identify the loyalty of users on NEAR and determine how sticky are NEAR users in the selected time period.

Part 3: Trade analysis on NEAR

Decentralized exchanges rely on smart contracts to allow traders to execute buy and sell orders without any intermediaries. They also allow users to trade directly from their wallets by interacting with smart contracts on the trading platform. One of the important parts of evaluation of each network is activity of DEXs on it. For this purpose various metrics on related to the trades on NEAR have been introduced and estimated as below:

• General metrics like: Total and average volume of trades, Count of trades and unique traders.
• Trend of general metrics over time.
• Average volume of trades and count of unique traders per day.
• Popular assets and swap pairs on NEAR over the selected time period.

Key Findings:

• According to the outcomes, about 70% of transactions on decentralization belong to Stake action.
• The average volume of staked $NEAR in the selected time frame is more than Unstake action. Also, the average count of users Stake on NEAR is higher than Unstakers per day.
• In the chosen time period, the highest volume of Staked $NEAR occurred on February 1st with over 1.81 million tokens. However on January 30, the highest volume of Unstaked $NEAR registered in the decentralization of NEAR.
• On February 2nd, the largest group of Stakers captured on network and 168 unique users Unstake their $NEAR on January 23 and its the highest count of Unstakers in the chosen time period.
• The Median of Unstaked $NEAR was higher than Stake action most of the times and February 2 with 157 $NEAR tokens has the highest Median of Unstake.
• The average volume of $NEAR for each action is demonstrated through Scatter plot. Based on this content, January 27 with over 5184 tokens has the highest average volume of Stake action. Also, the January 30 with 6705 $NEAR tokens has the largest average amount of Unstake action in this period.

Key Findings:

• On the second day of February, the highest volume of paid fee happened. Also, the highest count of transactions occurred in the first days of investigation.
• The active wallets on NEAR (Who made at least one transaction) has reached its highest count on February 2nd but from the point of newcomers, the January 23 has the largest group of newcomers. This shown that most of the active wallets on February 2nd are experienced ones.
• The average paid fee per transactions increased since last day of January and start of February as can be seen.
• The share of succeeded transactions on NEAR has been followed the increasing pattern in the selected time frame.
• The highest TPM was registered on January 31 with 4381 transactions in single minute.

Part 2: Decentralization of NEAR

Like all PoS networks, in this network, you can put your assets in a staking pool to increase the probability of receiving rewards. The profit of investing in this platform depends on the amount of tokens staked in this network. 4.5% of new tokens are produced every year, all of which are awarded to nodes as rewards. Various metrics have been utilized to determine the decentralization of NEAR over the selected time period:

• The NET volume of Staked $NEAR is estimated to present the status of decentralization.
• The average volume and user per day for staking actions are important metrics to utilize the behavior of users with NEAR decentralization.
• The count of actions and users are major part of analyzing decentralization.
• The average and Median volume of $NEAR for each action represent the pattern of decentralization in the selected time frame.

Useful links:

• NEAR blockchain
• Decentralization on NEAR
• Medium article about NEAR decentralization

Key Findings:

• The average volume of swaps per day is 1.75 million USD and traded by 208 unique swapper on NEAR per day.
• The average swap volume (in USD) has been increased over the selected time period specially after start of Februray.
• The count of swaps is decreased. However number of unique traders on NEAR network have been enhanced over time and reached on considerable level.
• The significant part of this investigation belong to the swap volume in USD. According to the results, the swap volume decreased after January 26 but sudden jump occurred on February 1st with over 2.76 million USD.
• The most popular assets on NEAR are wNEAR, USDT and USDC. Also, USDT-wNEAR and wNEAR-USDT are popular swap pairs from the volume in USD perspective.

Part 4: Summary and references

The time frame of this investigation can be changed between (7 to 14 days) by logging into the Flipside crypto website.

Also, the time basis of this investigation can be changed between Day and Hour.

By default the time period is considered for the past 14 days on the daily basis.

Author:

Credited by MZG

Discord handle: m.zamani#0361

Twitter handle: @GargariZamani

Conclusion:

By considering the outcomes of this analysis the following statements could be concluded:

• The NEAR blockchain is an open-source, decentralized platform that is becoming increasingly popular due to its progress and development. It is a platform that enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications (DApps). It also allows users to store data securely, access digital assets and transfer value without the need for third-party intermediaries.
• The NEAR blockchain has seen an increasing pattern in its progress and development over the selected time period. This has been made possible due to its ability to be more decentralized than other blockchains, which allows it to scale better while providing more secure transactions. With the help of this technology, developers can create innovative applications that can benefit both users and businesses alike.
• NEAR blockchain has been gaining traction in recent years due to its scalability, low cost of transactions, and high performance. It has been adopted by many businesses as it allows them to build dApps faster than ever before. Moreover, the number of active users on NEAR blockchain is growing steadily as more people are taking advantage of its features. This article will provide insights into the enhancement of NEAR blockchain as well as its various applications and active user base.