Use Flipside's new fact_staking_balances and fact_staking_pool_daily_balances tables to explore the decentralization of NEARs ecosystem. Have we seen the ecosystem become more or less decentralized over time?

Use metrics such as the Nakamoto coefficient to measure the network's decentralization. Use more simplified metrics like count of validators and % of staked supply to illustrate how the narrative of NEARs decentralization has evolved.

The decentralization of NEAR blockchain has been investigated through this analysis. This analysis contains 3 parts as below:

• Stats of Decentralization on NEAR (General and over time)

• Validators and detailed analysis on selected Validator

• Conclusion and final statements about NEAR decentralization

  The first two parts are investigated across NEAR blockchain and contain information for all time. But, the second part refers to the performance of selected Validator over the chosen time Frame. By default, the time period is chosen over the past 30 days and on the daily basis. Also, the Aurora.pool.near is selected as a test Validator. You can easily logged in the Flipside crypto and change these metrics to underestimate the outcomes related to various Validators on desire time period.

The data provided by Flipside has been used to handle this analysis.

• Used table:

  near.core.fact_staking_pool_daily_balances provided by Flipside has been utilized to handle this analysis

• Used Metrics:

  • Total Staked volume and Share of Staked volume on total supply
  • Users, average and 7-day moving average amount for each action overtime
  • Nakamoto and GINI indicators

• Validator

  • Find out top 50 Validators by volume, count of active validators, Share of top 10 Validators on Staked NEAR
  • Selected Validator-> Count of stake and unique stakers, Balance of Validator over time and average stake volume per staker

• Conclusion: By aggregating the outcomes of the previous parts and deep dive into the decentralization on NEAR draw a conclusion about the Blockchain.

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.