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NEAR Protocol has announced the “early” launch of its MainNet: enabling interested developers to create and release dApps on the platform with immediate effect. Such developers have additionally been invited to sign up for a MainNet over at the NEAR webpage (near.org/developer-program) to get started as a developer on the NEAR Protocol platform.

This news coincides with the conclusion by NEAR of a funding round which was led by Andreessen Horowitz (and its cryptocurrency fund) - as well as additional participants: Pantera Capital, Libertus Capital, Blockchange, Electric Capital, and Distributed Global. The round resulted in $21.6M funds successfully being raised.

Andreessen Horowitz (AKA ‘a16z’) is a Silicon Valley, California based venture capital firm founded by namesakes: Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz. The firm reportedly concluded its second crypto fund on April 30, 2020 comprising a total $515 million worth of “capital commitments”.

“Genesis occurred at 2020-04-22 18:00:00 UTC and, while there’s still lots of work to do, this means that developers can actually deploy production apps while the network gets more decentralized and is ultimately handed off completely to the community over the next several months” - Illia Polosukhin (Near Inc, Cofounder and CEO)

3rd Generation of Blockchain

NEAR Protocol is an open-source, decentralized blockchain platform (built on a public, sharted, proof-of-stake blockchain) for the full lifecycle of dApp development, with an advertised cost-effective, high level of scalability.

It advertises itself as a platform which specialises in providing “the scale and programmability to allow *any* data -- whether digital currency, karma, gaming items or stock certificates -- to become a fully portable, programmable and tradable asset.”.

NEAR sets itself out as a proponent of a so-called ‘third generation’ of blockchain technology which it specifically names ‘Open Web’. This generation comes after what it calls ‘Open Money’ (the first generation, as pioneered by Bitcoin) and ‘Open Finance’ (the second generation, as pioneered by Ethereum).

NEAR depicts the ‘Open Web’ generation as an era of blockchain-based technologies which enable data to be shared and composed between applications just like the financial primitives of Open Finance, the set of possible new business models and applications expands exponentially.

NEAR Protocol’s MainNet POA

The recently released version of the NEAR Protocol MainNet is stated to be just the first part of a multi-stage rollout strategy, and is called ‘MainNet POA’. This, according to NEAR, is “the first major release on the path to NEAR being the first fully sharded, fully operational proof-of-stake blockchain platform to run an open MainNet”.

MainNet POA enables the development of “production end-user-facing applications atop the smart contract platform running on the NEAR Protocol blockchain”, although the possible functionalities of such products are said to be limited in the current version.

Future stages include…

• MainNet: Restricted -> Similar on the surface to stage one, as most of the changes occurring during this stage are under the hood. 
• MainNet: Open -> “puts everything in place” - no restrictions on app functionality; NEAR tokens free to be transferred; “Developers can permissionlessy create accounts and deploy applications.”

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