Near Protocol

The NEAR Protocol is a software application that seeks to incentivize a network of computers to operate a platform that allows developers to create and deploy decentralized applications.

The concept of sharding, which aims to split the network's infrastructure into many sections so that computers, also known as nodes, only have to handle a fraction of the network's transactions, is central to the NEAR Protocol's design.

Sharding is expected to create a more effective way to obtain network data and grow the platform by distributing fragments of the blockchain rather than the entire blockchain across network participants.