What is NEAR protocol?

NEAR is a decentralized application platform designed to offer a high-performing and secure infrastructure to support the development of scalable dApps. The network can handle up to 100,000 transactions per second besides offering instant block creation in 1 second. It further eliminates the downwards of the systems in competition, including low throughout and issues related to cross-compatibility.

NEAR Protocol aims to incentivize a blockchain network to build and launch dApps on the DeFi platform and yield profit through approaches such as staking and sharding. The nucleus of the NEAR Protocol’s design is the concept of sharding.

Sharding is splitting the network’s infrastructure into several segments known as nodes to handle a fraction of the network’s transactions. The distribution of blockchain nodes instead of distributing the complete blockchain across network participants. It helps pave the path for a more efficient way to retrieve data and scale the decentralized platform.

The NEAR protocol blockchain is secure and permissionless. The network’s technology consists of a new block generation scheme called ‘Doomslug.’ NEAR Protocol can be utilized to pay fees for storing data and processing transactions and is also used to run validator nodes on the network by staking currency tokens.

How does NEAR protocol work?

NEAR Protocol is a Proof of Stake (PoS) that helps startups and enterprises with sharding solutions for their scaling.

Let’s have a look at the sharding solutions that NEAR Protocol provides and how NEAR Protocols work:

Nightshade:

Sharding is a blockchain structure that allows each participating node to store a small subset of the platform’s data. It allows a blockchain to scale more fluently and enables higher transactions throughput per second while reducing the transaction cost. Nightshade allows NEAR to maintain a singular chain of data. The nodes handle the computing required to maintain these data into ‘chunks.’ The nodes process the data and additional information to the main blockchain network. One of the benefits of Nightshade is that its architecture provides fewer chances of failures when it comes to security, as the participating nodes are only responsible for maintaining smaller segments of the blockchain.

Rainbow Bridge:

NEAR Protocol has an application called the Rainbow bridge that allows the network participants to transfer Ethereum tokens back and forth between Ethereum and NEAR. To move tokens from Ethereum to NEAR, a participant must deposit Ethereum tokens in the Ethereum smart contract. These tokens are then locked on the Ethereum ecosystem, and new tokens are minted on NEAR’s platform, representing the original Ethereum tokens. Since the original funds are stored through the smart contract, we can reverse this procedure if users wish to retrieve their original tokens.

Aurora:

Aurora is a layer 2 scaling solution built on a NEAR protocol for developers to help them launch their Ethereum decentralized applications on NEAR’s ecosystem. Aurora is built using the idea of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that enables developers to link their Ethereum Smart contracts and assets seamlessly.

Methodology

I used the following metrics to answer this bounty

• Total, maximum and daily New Users

• Total, maximum and daily account creation

• Top actions by new users and all users

• Daily Top Actions by new users

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To find most common actions taken by new users first I found transactions which had create_account as method name or users with first transaction in the past 3 months in the near.core.fact_actions_events table then found new user addresses by using these transaction hashes through

near.core.fact_actions_events_function_call table.

Daily new users

This chart shows the daily new users over the past 3months .

According to the chart:

• The total number of new users over past 3 months grew to about 208K.
• the significant growth was from July 8 to July 13, which The total number of new users increased to about 103K.
• The number of new users decreased after days to about 1088 on July 14.
• The second increase in number of the new users was from August 20 to August 23, and after that, the total number of new users was about 173K.

Daily account creation

New account creation increased significantly on July 8 with 3427 new created accounts and continued to increase till July 13, after then the daily number of account creation dropped suddenly to about 221 new account in a single day on July 14.

Daily account creation has a direct relation with daily new users chart.

Also, the total number of accounts created over the past 3 months was about 84.8K and the maximum number of created account in a single day was about 10.12K on July 12.

Top actions by new users

During the last 90 days, the most action that new users performed for the first time was submit. Users made about 918k submit transactions, which means more than 70% of new user transactions. FT Transfer Call was in the second place with the most actions and users made more than 110k transactions.

Also we checked the top actions by all users over the past 90 days and still, submit has the first rank with about 12M transactions that means about 50% of all user transactions, followed by swap with more than 3.5M transactions.

In the daily top action chart, we can find that most number of the transactions of new users are submitted over time.

Conclusion

In this dashboard we tried to define new users over the past 90 days and find the most popular actions among new users:

The following results were accomplished:

During the last 90 days, the Near network faced many new users and account creations.

Over time, new users had the most transactions related to submit, followed by Transfer call.