NEAR Foundation is happy to announce its newest high-level executive appointments. The Foundation has hired Mary Beth Buchanan as a Strategic Advisor, while Sheila Warren and Jason Warner have joined as participants of the NEAR Foundation Council. 

Buchanan  brings over three decades of legal and business expertise at the intersection of federal law enforcement, global interagency cooperation, corporate compliance, digital assets, and emerging regulatory frameworks. She was the first woman and youngest person to be appointed to the position of U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania and since then has served as President, Americas and Global Chief Legal Officer for Merkle Science. A member of the Board of Directors of the Cardano Foundation, Buchanan has been at the forefront of the digital assets industry since 2013 while she was a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner leading the firm’s Digital Currency Team. 

Buchanan is among the brightest minds in crypto compliance, regulatory, and legal matters. She has prosecutorial experience and conducted ethics and reputational risk assessment for the UN. Her career has also focused on internal investigations, corporate compliance, SEC enforcement matters, congressional investigations, and digital currency work in private practice. 

Sheila Warren, who you might have seen featured at NEARCON, currently serves as the inaugural CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, the premier global alliance advancing crypto innovation worldwide. She co-hosts “Money Reimagined,” a CoinDesk TV show and podcast, is an advisor to the Filecoin Foundation, serves on the Steering Committee of the DeFi Education Fund, and is an early stage investor across the Web3 ecosystem. 

Before joining the NF Council, Warren founded the blockchain and digital assets team at the World Economic Forum, where she served as a member of the Executive Committee. As the Deputy Global Head of the Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, she oversaw strategy across 16 countries to advance the adoption of new technologies in the global public interest. 

Last, but certainly not least, Jason Warner is the former CTO of GitHub and currently the Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. Before joining GitHub, Warner was Vice President of Engineering at Heroku, the world’s leading PaaS and one of the largest cloud computing providers in the world. He is an active speaker, writer, and advisor on cloud computing, technology and leadership. 

Welcoming the appointments, Marieke Flament, CEO of the NEAR Foundation, said: “Changing the world does not happen without great people working together, and we are thrilled to be welcoming this calibre of leader on board as we continue on our goals to put usability at the heart of a global shift towards Web3. Mary Beth, Sheila, and Jason have collectively spent decades creating the infrastructure necessary for society to be ready for this momentum and shift – we could not be more excited to have them join us on our mission.”
These appointments are huge wins for NEAR Foundation and the ecosystem at large. Welcome to the NEAR family, Mary Beth, Sheila, and Jason!

NEAR’s ever-growing and engaged community is one of the ecosystem’s greatest strengths. Remember the NEAR Foundation Grants team’s Refer-and-Earn Program? A number of NEAR community members participated in Refer-and-Earn in early 2022, resulting in grants for dozens of exciting projects currently building on the NEAR ecosystem.  

The Foundation has had the pleasure of seeing the community being a key contributor in providing ecosystem support and building dapps. The community does this in a number of ways, including running and sponsoring events, educating developers and entrepreneurs on the benefits of NEAR, bringing projects with active user bases from other chains, and so on.

NEAR Foundation wants to build on the community’s successes through a new incentive structure that aligns with the Grants Program (more information can be found at the Grants Program Handbook here bit.ly/Grants-Program-Handbook). 

1. The payout for each project referred will be awarded a total of 10% of the project awarded grant amount. This amount is awarded in nUSDC (wrapped USDC on NEAR) and is calculated at the end of each quarter.
2. The first half of the 5% will be awarded at the point of the contract signed.
3. The second half of the 5% will be awarded once all project milestones are completed. 

Refer-and-Earn: Q3 Qualified Projects

The NEAR ecosystem receives a number of your recommendations and referrals. A total of 12 quality projects emerged from Refer-and-Earn, each aligning with NEAR Foundation’s Grants program objectives. 

In no particular order, here are the Q3 2022 qualified projects: 

• Scene 
• Azadi Record
• Vital Carbon 
• Metavision Games 
• Murder Mystery Collective 
• MetaLordz 
• Klabrate and ClimaFi
• Meteor wallet 
• Mintmade 
• NEARKai
• EVIE Marketplace 
• Autify 

The Grants team has reached out to all Refer-and-Earn referrers. Thanks to your help and support, the Grants team is able to support innovative projects like those listed above. 

As part of the Foundation’s commitment to transparency, each week it will publish data to help the NEAR community understand the health of the ecosystem. This will be on top of the quarterly reports, and the now monthly funding reports. 

You can find the quarterly reports here.

You can find monthly reports on funding here.  

Last week’s transparency report can be found here. 

The importance of transparency

The NEAR Foundation has always held transparency as one of its core beliefs. Being open to the community, investors, builders and creators is one of the core tenets of being a Web3 project. But it’s become apparent the Foundation needs to do more. 

The Foundation hears the frustration from the community, and it wants to be more pro-active in when and how it communicates. 

New Accounts and Active Accounts

New Accounts are new wallets being created on the NEAR blockchain. In the last days of November and the first days of December, the daily number of new accounts had been declining. This week however, activity has been trending up, with the average number of new accounts averaging 14,000 per day, with a weekly peak of 14,752 recorded on December 6.

This is down on November’s figure of 24,000 wallets per 24 hours, on average. These numbers are conducive with the overall decline in sentiment around blockchain.

Looking more broadly, the peak for account creation in Q4 was September 13 where 130,000 new wallets were created in one day. Collectively, these numbers equate to 22,551,000 total wallets on the NEAR blockchain.

The Daily Number of Active Accounts is a measure of how many wallets on NEAR are making transactions on chain. Over the last week, the number of daily active accounts has oscillated between a a low of 12,639 on December 5, to a peak of 14,752 on December 6.

Historically, this is a decline from highs of more than 100,000 active accounts on the network. The highest number of active accounts on any one day in Q4 this year was logged on September 14, where 183,000 accounts were active.

New Contracts and Active Contracts

Contracts on NEAR are simply programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. The Daily Number of New Contracts is a valuable metric for understanding the health and growth of an ecosystem.

The more active contracts there are, the more projects are actively engaging with the NEAR protocol. The chart below shows a cyclical rhythm to new contracts, with rises and falls. Over the last seven days, the number of new contracts reached a daily high of 54 on December 4, and a weekly low of 27 on December 6. This range is broader compared to the week before, with last week’s highest number of 44 on November 30, to a low of 12 new contracts on November 27.

Active contracts is a measure of contracts that execute in a 24 hour period. This number has remained consistent throughout the last week with an average of more than 600 active contracts on the NEAR network. Taking a historical perspective on these numbers, the average has declined in Q4, with previous highs in active contract activity coming in the third week of September 2022.

Used Gas and Gas Fee

Gas Fees are a catch all term for the cost of making transactions on the NEAR network. These fees are paid to validators for their services to the blockchain. Without these fees, there would be no incentive for anyone to keep the network secure.

Over the last week, the daily amount of gas, expressed here as PetaGas, which is the equivalent of 0.1 $NEAR, has maintained a fairly consistent value between 5,949 PetaGas and 6,743 PetaGas. To learn more about Gas on NEAR, there is an excellent explainer in the NEAR White Paper. Compared with last week, the Daily Amount of Used Gas has decreased, from highs of more than 8,000 PetaGas.

The Daily Amount of Gas correlates with the Daily Gas Fee used on the network. Over the last week, there has been an uptick in the amount of Gas used, which can be brought on by a number of different factors. One of the most common is increased activity among users of the network.

Daily Transactions

The daily number of transactions is a record of how many times the blockchain logged a transaction. This week’s data represents a healthy increase in the number of transactions. From lows of 328,000 transactions on December 3, to a weekly high of 388,000 transactions per day on December 6. Looking more broadly, NEAR transaction activity has been trending downwards in Q4, reflecting other on chain data presented here.

These reports will be generated each week and published on Friday.

As part of the Foundation’s commitment to transparency, each week it will publish data to help the NEAR community understand the health of the ecosystem. This will be on top of the quarterly reports, and the now monthly funding reports. 

You can find the quarterly reports here.

You can find monthly reports on funding here.  

Last week’s transparency report can be found here. 

The importance of transparency

The NEAR Foundation has always held transparency as one of its core beliefs. Being open to the community, investors, builders and creators is one of the core tenets of being a Web3 project. But it’s become apparent the Foundation needs to do more. 

The Foundation hears the frustration from the community, and it wants to be more pro-active in when and how it communicates. 

New Accounts and Active Accounts

New Accounts are new wallets being created on the NEAR blockchain. In November the number of new accounts has been declining. This week, new account creation has averaged 16,000 new accounts per day, down from a monthly average of 24,000 wallets per 24 hours.

Looking at the quarter, the highest day for new account creation in Q3 was September 13 where 130,000 new wallets were created in one day. Collectively, these numbers equate to 22,454,000 total wallets on the NEAR blockchain.

The Daily Number of Active Accounts is a measure of how many wallets on NEAR are making transactions on chain. Over the last week, the number of daily active accounts has been on average, above 50,000, remaining consistent across the week.

Historically, as the chart below shows, this is a decline from highs of more than 100,000 active accounts on the network. The highest number of active accounts on any one day in Q3 this year was logged on September 14, where 183,000 accounts were active.

New Contracts and Active Contracts

Contracts on NEAR are simply programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. The Daily Number of New Contracts is a valuable metric for understanding the health and growth of an ecosystem.

The more active contracts there are, the more projects are actively engaging with the NEAR protocol. The chart below shows a cyclical rhythm to new contracts, with rises and falls a common occurrence. Over the last seven days, the number of new contracts has risen from a low of 12 new contracts on November 27 to a high off 44 new contracts on November 30.

Active contracts is a measure of contracts that execute in a 24 hour period. This number has remained consistent throughout the last week with an average of 500 active contracts on the NEAR network. Taking a historical perspective on these numbers, the average has declined in Q3, with previous highs in active contract activity coming in the third week of September 2022.

Used Gas and Gas Fee

Gas Fees are a catch all term for the cost of making transactions on the NEAR network. These fees are paid to validators for their services to the blockchain. Without these fees, there would be no incentive for anyone to keep the network secure.

Over the last few weeks, the daily amount of gas, expressed here as PetaGas, which is the equivalent of 0.1 $NEAR, has risen. To learn more about Gas on NEAR, there is an excellent explainer in the NEAR White Paper. The Daily Amount of Used Gas has increased, briefly topping 8,000 PetaGas, before returning to the weekly average of just over 7,000 PetaGas.

The Daily Amount of Gas correlates with the Daily Gas Fee used on the network. Over the last week, there has been an uptick in the amount of Gas used, which can be brought on by a number of different factors. One of the most common is increased activity among users of the network.

Daily Transactions

The daily number of transactions is a record of how many times the blockchain logged a transaction. The earliest data available is from the third and fourth weeks of November. The data shows that daily transactions had been trending upwards and at the end of November, were averaging more than 500,000 transactions per day. Since then, the number has declined sharply and now sits below 400,000.

These reports will be generated each week and published on Friday.

As part of the Foundation’s commitment to transparency, each week it will publish data to help the NEAR community understand the health of the ecosystem. This will be on top of the quarterly reports, and the now monthly funding reports. 

You can find the quarterly reports here.

You can find monthly reports on funding here.  

Last week’s transparency report can be found here. 

This week, the Foundation is focusing on the state of token supply in the ecosystem.

The importance of transparency

The NEAR Foundation has always held transparency as one of its core beliefs. Being open to the community, investors, builders and creators is one of the core tenets of being a Web3 project. But it’s become apparent the Foundation needs to do more. 

The Foundation hears the frustration from the community, and it wants to be more pro-active in when and how it communicates. 

Total Supply

At Genesis, the NEAR blockchain was created with one billion tokens. Since then, the number of supply has increased to 1.1 billion. This number steadily rises due to inflation. For reference, 90% of the 5% annual inflation is sent to Validators to be paid out as staking rewards, with the residual 10% returned to the NEAR Foundation Treasury.

The total number of live accounts has been increasing rapidly, up to a total of 22 million. At present, new accounts are created on NEAR at an average rate between 35,000 and 38,000 new accounts per day. This number is down from the week before, which average 37-39,000 accounts per day.

Circulating Supply Statistics

Below is a break down of the circulating supply. The blue section represents the total number of $NEAR, and the green section represents tokens not currently locked in lockup contracts.

The number of tokens in circulating supply has been steadily increasing at a faster rate than the total circulating supply. In the past week, 3 million more $NEAR has moved from locked contracts to circulating, taking the number of circulating tokens from 827 million, to 830 million. This is typically due to further unlocks within both the NEAR Foundation Treasury and contractual vesting schedules.

Active Accounts

The most active accounts on NEAR are displayed here as the most active in the past 14 days. The most active account is relay.aurora, which is the main conduit by which Aurora moves transactions between Ethereum and NEAR. In the past two weeks, it recorded more than 900,000 transactions.

The second most active account was oracle.sweat, which is allows SWEAT users to communicate with the NEAR blockchain. The oracle.sweat account made just under 800,000 transactions in the last two weeks. The remaining accounts, collectively recorded more than a million transactions in the time period.

Daily Number of Transactions

The daily number of transactions is a record of how many times the blockchain logged a transaction. The earliest data available is from the second week of November. The data shows that daily transactions have been trending upwards and sit just under one million transactions per day. This is significant growth from the previous average of 400,000 per day.

These reports will be generated each week and published on Friday.

Welcome to our Funding Team Report that captures and highlights data  for the month of October 2022. The purpose of this document is to provide transparency regarding our Funding Team’s activities last month, and is to be shared publicly to the NEAR ecosystem and our investor network.

Summary 

1. Grant data

1.1. Approved Grant program data

1.2. Grant highlights

1.3 Completed projects & Milestone data

1.4 Effectiveness of the funding program

2. External funding in the NEAR Ecosystem

3. Ecosystem highlights

1. Grant data

1.1. Approved Grant Program data

Data reflects projects that have applied for a Grant via the Grants Program and that have been signed by the NEAR Foundation during the month of October (01.10.2022 to 31.10.2022).

 *Note: all applications have been processed.

General Grant data

Grant tracks**

** For more information please have a look at our grant tracks.

Grants per category 

NFTs                                 5

Infrastructure / Wallets             3

Social Impact                        1

Institutional / Financial            1

Gaming / Metaverse                   1

DAOs                                                 1

Other                                2

Grants per country (Top 5)

United States                3

United Kingdom               3

Switzerland                  1

Singapore                     1

Thailand                      1

1.2. Grant highlights 

This section provides highlights of grants that have been signed during the month.

NFT projects 

Disrupting Hollywood by allowing retail to invest in film making, create experiences for token holders and collectives. Founded by an Executive Producer who has sold shows with Matt Damon and Jimmy Kimmel, and a 3x Tech Founder (USC Law/London School of Economics) whose last web3 startup reached over 500k holders and $500m mcap. 

The Platform allows for easy, self-certified and third-party validation of files, with the results stored securely on a blockchain, creating an irrefutable record of activity. This will increase trust and transparency in the NEAR NFT space and be a platform for existing and upcoming NFTs.

Web3 gaming launchpad and building SDKs for gaming developers. The team has plenty of experience building web3 gaming platforms with their current company called Playfix

Data base on the NEAR blockchain that acts as a repository for information relating to a property, like a passport for a house. The goal is to provide a transparent platform to make buying and selling houses simpler, safer and quicker.

NFT.HipHop is being developed to be the primary destination for all Hip Hop-centric NFT/Web3 projects. The founder is deeply rooted within the NEAR Ecosystem and aims to bring his existing large web2 community in the Hip Hop space to NEAR.

Infrastructure / Wallets projects 

NFT Analytics tool that allows tracking of held NFTs and provides updates for  upcoming mints and collections, with the focus on approaching the communities and people about NEAR. Strong connection with the TENK Bay and drives NFT growth within NEAR. 

MAP Protocol is an omnichain layer of Web3 with highly secure cross-chain communication built upon light-client and zk-SNARK technology. MAP Protocol connects both EVM & non-EVM chains, extending the EVM layer with pre-compiled smart contracts of destination chains seamlessly.

NEARBlocks features optimisations being provided by Invoker Labs.

Institutional / Financial projects 

Datality brings trust and safety to connect researchers with research data providers. A two-sided data marketplace with blockchain as the transparent layer of trust.

Social Impact projects 

AIDONIC offers digital cash and voucher assistance, powered by NEAR and by ensuring end-to-end transparency, cost- and speed efficiency and accountability for social fundraising and last-mile aid distribution.

DAO’s

Provide insights for the Near Ecosystem that improves its ability to collaborate effectively and operate thriving communities thanks to predictive indicators of viability as well as diagnostic tools for DAO Communities. 

Gaming / Metaverse projects 

Pixudi is an NFT based blockchain project where a traditional race board game meets Heroes of Magic mechanics. It is more than a game, it’s bridge from the real world of board games to the blockchain world of NFT based on DAO mechanics.

Other projects 

Modular collection of social and identity protocols. Developers can use part of all of the stack for anything from adding social features to deploying a fully decentralized, token-aware web3 social network. decent.land is built using Arweave for permanent storage and NEAR for user-facing contracts.

EV charging network in the Americas with a web3 value creation mechanism for the drivers. Team has installed over 100 charging slots in the last six months and plans to integrate NEAR for settlements while increasing the installation of charging stations.

1.3 Completed projects & Milestone data 

Grant agreements are structured with milestones. Depending on the selected grant track, a grant can have from 1 to 5 milestones. For more information the funding team invites you to explore our milestone guide. 

Projects completed per category 

Infrastructure / Wallets             3

Gaming / Metaverse                   3

DAOs                   1

Other                                2

Infrastructure / Wallets projects 

An inheritor of the official NEAR wallet. The most well-known and feature filled web wallet for the NEAR Ecosystem.

Coding to earn, sell open-source product as NFT. BytePay is a platform that supports paid tasks to complete open-source projects on Github. Not only can you  code to earn but also sell open-source product as NFT.

The development of an MVP for a NEAR blockchain event push notification service. DApp developers would be able to subscribe to their contract events in their backend without having to implement their own indexer, instead implementing webhook endpoints to which this service would push updates.

Gaming / Metaverse projects

Reality Near is a multi-metaverse that will combine Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies so that users can experience their different enhanced realities like never before.

MeowRush is a PVP multiplayer game on the NEAR blockchain with different tournament modes: Race, Battle Royale, Obstacles, and Arcade. MeowRush is going to be integrated into the Meowverse metaverse with a Multi-chain ecosystem.

GameFi for the masses, built on their own native Unreal game engine  with Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality engine.

DAO’s

Mute is building a safe and secure community that focuses on protecting members of the crypto community by providing accurate and up-to-date information on projects, risk assessments, and education. 

Other projects

SharpShark is a WEB3 copyright protection service that helps businesses protect and monetize their textual, visual, and other copyrightable content.

A decentralized co-op platform for AMM liquidity providing that will double LP investors’ return on invested capital while at the same time boost liquidity for projects’ tokens.

1.4 Effectiveness of the funding program  

Total external funding (overall amount) came from projects that have received a grant (around 40%).

2. External funding in the NEAR Ecosystem

This section provides information about external funding in the NEAR ecosystem

• 2 closed projects in Q4 ‘22 – ($6.2M)
• 2 finalizing rounds
• 20 new fundraising processes kicked off 
• 22 VC intros made

Closed Rounds (Quarter-to-Date)

• EmpireDAO – Raised a $2.8m seed round with participation from NEAR Foundation to build a global community starting with a flagship location in NYC. Please stop by the NEAR space at EmpireDAO if you are ever in NYC! 

• t2.world – Raised a $3.4m seed round led by Inflection and Archetype to empower readers and writers to grow their communities in the Web3 space.

3. Ecosystem highlights  

NEARWEEK is the one-stop-shop for all NEAR related news. Each weekly newsletter and edition is made possible via news contributions from the NEARWEEK community to the NEWS DAO. Subscribe or visit NEARWEEK.com to get your weekly dose of news from the NEARverse!

For the month of October we invite you to read through the following newsletters : 

Newsletter 78 

Newsletter 79 

Newsletter 80

Newsletter 81 

If you are interested in getting funded : 

• explore the NEAR Funding  linktree
• visit NF’s website : https://pages.near.org/
• contact NF Grants : [email protected] 

NEAR Foundation is publishing a series of blogs on the state of funding, including updates from the Grants Team and an upcoming Transparency Report for Q3. This is part of our continued commitment to transparency, as well as more frequent and open communication with the NEAR community. 

NEAR Foundation’s role is to support the NEAR ecosystem and community. This means that the Foundation can deploy capital to help promote growth, alongside its efforts to grow awareness of NEAR and onboard a billion users to Web3. 

Among Layer 1 protocols, NEAR is in an excellent position to thrive despite the very difficult market conditions. Our 5+ years of runway will help the NEAR ecosystem weather the bear market, which is likely to last for some time. The Treasury Team’s careful spending and responsible Treasury management has equipped the ecosystem to emerge from this crypto winter with NEAR as the protocol of choice for people and projects building on Web3. 

While the market has created a new reality for the entire Web3 ecosystem, NEAR sees this as a moment of great opportunity and a time to stick to our convictions. We’ve outlined the Foundation’s new strategy around facilitating Web2.5 and making NEAR the de facto bridge from Web2 to Web3. 

Staying true to NEAR’s decentralized vision, the NEAR Digital Collective (NDC) was recently launched and led by the Governance Working Group (GWG). We’ve also delegated some decision-making to the community through grassroots DAOs: the DeveloperDAO, MarketingDAO, and CreativesDAO. 

NEAR Foundation has provided capital to many projects over the last two-plus years, with clear milestones and goals designed to maximize potential value added to the ecosystem. Grants have been a major part of that capital allocation strategy since the program was first announced in 2021. Although the Foundation has a substantial amount of runway to support the ecosystem for several years to come, we need to ensure that we are stewarding NEAR’s Treasury as responsibly and sustainably as possible.

With these long-term views in mind, NEAR Foundation is looking critically at all of its capital allocation in the last few years in order to determine what has had the most impact and where we should consider revising our approach. We will also be heavily scrutinizing upcoming capital deployments. The Foundation must focus on supporting the highest quality projects with the most potential and alignment with our vision for NEAR.

What does this mean for the community? To make NEAR the leading Web2.5 bridge, NEAR Foundation will back those projects and initiatives that help best grow and support the ecosystem for years to come. This also means that some tough decisions are coming about where not to deploy funding. 

However, in the areas where funding or granting is pared back, the Foundation will do its absolute best to support those affected by upcoming funding decisions. We will make our best efforts to help these community members find new homes with other ecosystem projects. 

NEAR Foundation will also ensure that we are as transparent as possible about the new Funding strategy as it rolls out. The Foundation will communicate as often and as much as possible, and encourage the community to continue giving feedback so we can iterate more quickly as we build the NEAR Ecosystem together.

NEAR Foundation has already made significant steps to make NEAR’s funding more transparent. Through the NEAR Digital Collective (NDC), we are empowering the community to evolve governance and coordinate together through the ecosystem DAOs. (Read more and get involved at the NDC gov.nearpages.wpengine.com page.) In September, NEAR formed a working group to set standards for this on-chain style of self-governance. The Foundation has been calling this the “bottom-up” approach to supporting the community, encouraging grassroots coordination and decentralized decision-making that works in parallel with the Foundation’s more “top-down” stewardship and funding strategy.  

The Foundation also started publishing a regular Transparency Report in the spirit of accountability to the ecosystem. The first Transparency report, which came out just before NEARCON, was an important start—but we want to make it even better for the community. The next report will be coming out in a couple of weeks and will include more granularity where possible. You can also check out a recent update from the NEAR Grants team titled “Funding Beyond Grants”. 

It’s also important for the community to understand that while transparency and open communication are an essential part of NEAR Foundation’s commitment to all of you, we cannot be entirely transparent about every funding decision or commercial agreement we make. This is primarily due to legal restrictions that can be imposed on NEAR Foundation in its dealings with third parties. The Foundation will share as much as possible  about the exciting collaborations being made in the months ahead.

NEAR Foundation highly encourages people to get involved with the NEAR community. By becoming more participatory, community members can take ownership in the new bottom-up approach to decision making we are helping foster across the ecosystem.

NEAR Foundation is keeping an eye on the long term for the entire NEAR ecosystem. By being fiscally responsible and deploying capital in a sustainable way, the Foundation can ensure that NEAR emerges from this bear market stronger than ever, and well positioned to help builders keep building the future of Web3.

As part of the Foundation’s commitment to transparency, each week it will publish data to help the NEAR community understand the health of the ecosystem. This will be on top of the quarterly report, and the now monthly funding reports. 

You can find the quarterly reports here.

You can find monthly reports on funding here.  

This week, the Foundation is focusing on the state of staking in the NEAR ecosystem. 

The state of staking, as of Friday 18th November 2022

At the time of writing, there is 469 million NEAR staked, which equates to approximately 42% of the total supply, or 56.5% of circulating supply. 

The staking total is spread across 131 validators, which is up on last month’s total validator number of 126, a four percent increase in the decentralization of the network. 

The seat price – the amount of NEAR required to be eligible for staking has fallen precipitously. From 100,000 NEAR in October to just 20,000 NEAR in November, this means securing the network has become more accessible than ever before. The Foundation expects the number of validators to grow significantly to approximately 300 by the end of this year, as NEAR Foundation starts to delegate to Stake Wars winning participants.

This will continue as the protocol deploys its roadmap. In 2023, for example, the number of validators will continue to climb to a maximum of 400. You can read more about the road map here. 

Staking Distribution 

Of the 131 validators, eight validators hold 33% of the total staked balance, representing 154 million $NEAR. A total of 15 validators, hold 50% of the total staked balance, and 116 validators hold the other 50% of the total NEAR available. A stake of 33% is the stake that can halt the network, according to Pikespeak. 

To improve decentralisation, the Foundation, along with the ecosystem is continuing to improve the breadth and depth of the validators, and actively encourages stakeholders to delegate to validators outside the top 15. 

Why are validators important? 

The NEAR network is decentralized, meaning that multiple people collaborate in order to keep it safe. We call such people validators.

In order to make sure that all the transactions in the network are valid, i.e. that nobody is trying to steal money, the validators follow a specific consensus mechanism.

Currently, there are a few well-known consensus mechanisms to keep a blockchain working correctly and resistant to attacks. NEAR Protocol uses a version of Proof-of-Stake, particularly Thresholded Proof of Stake.

In Proof-of-Stake, users show support to specific network validators by delegating NEAR tokens to them. This process is known as staking. The main idea is that, if a validator has a large amount of tokens delegated is because the community trusts them.

Validators have two main jobs. The first is to validate and execute transactions, aggregating them in the blocks that form the blockchain. Their second job is to oversee other validators, making sure no one produces an invalid block or creates an alternative chain (eg. with the goal of creating a double spend).

If a validator is caught misbehaving, then they get “slashed”, meaning that their stake (or part of it) is burned.

In the NEAR networks, an attempt to manipulate the chain would mean taking control over the majority of the validators at once, so that the malicious activity won’t be flagged. However, this would require putting a huge sum of capital at risk, since an unsuccessful attack would mean slashing your staked tokens.

Why is decentralization important? 

Staking is not only about the rewards, it is the basis for security and stability of the NEAR Protocol. To avoid centralization, split your stake between smaller staking pools instead of putting everything in the largest one.

Community members like Zavodil Validator have created excellent alternatives to NEAR’s official explorer, embedding metadata from the active staking pools to help you choose which Validators to Stake with. Also, consider joining the #staking channel on https://near.chat and ask questions!

These reports will be published each week, and cover different aspects of the ecosystem. 

Welcome to the NEAR Foundation Funding Team Report that captures and highlights data for the month of September 2022. The purpose of this document is to provide transparency regarding what happened during the last month in our Funding Team, and is to be shared publicly to the ecosystem and our investor network.

Summary 

1. Grant data

1.2. Approved Grant program data

1.2. Grant highlights

1.3 Completed Projects & Milestone data

1.4 Effectiveness of the funding program

2. External funding in the NEAR Ecosystem

3. Ecosystem highlights

1. Grant data

1.1. Approved Grant Program data

Data reflects projects that have applied for a Grant via the Grants Program and that have been signed by the NEAR Foundation during the month of September (01.09.2022 to 30.09.2022).

 *Note: all applications have been processed.

General Grant data

Grant tracks**

** Please note that our current grant tracks have been updated. For more information please have a look at our updated grant tracks.

Grants per category 

Gaming / Metaverse – 7

Infrastructure / Wallets – 6

NFTs – 4

Other – 4

Social Impact – 2

Institutional / Financial – 2

Grants per country (Top 5)

United States – 8

United Kingdom – 2

Switzerland – 2

Malaysia – 2

Ukraine – 1

1.2. Grant highlights 

This section provides highlights of grants that have been signed during the month.

Gaming / Metaverse projects 

Infrastructure / Wallets projects 

Institutional / Financial projects 

Social Impact projects 

NFT’s projects 

Other projects 

1.3 Completed Projects & Milestone data 

Grant agreements are structured with milestones. Depending on the selected grant track, a grant can have from 1 to 5 milestones. For more information the funding team invites you to explore our milestone guide. 

Projects completed per category 

Gaming / Metaverse – 1

Infrastructure / Wallets – 5

NFTs – 1

DAOs – 3

Other – 3

Gaming / Metaverse

Infrastructure / Wallets 

NFTs

DAOs

Other

1.4 Effectiveness of the funding program  

Total external funding (overall amount) came from projects that have received a grant (around 44%).

2. External funding in the NEAR Ecosystem

This section provides information about external funding in the NEAR ecosystem

• 12 closed projects in Q3 ‘22 – ($92.2M)
• 4 finalizing rounds
• 18 new fundraising processes kicked off 
• 38 VC intros made
• Closed Rounds (September data)
  • Sender Wallet – Raised a $4.5M private round led by Pantera Capital with participation from Crypto.com, Jump, Amber Group, Woo Network, SevenX Ventures, Shima Capital, and others.
  • Hillridge – Raised a $2.3M seed round to address climate protection in the agriculture industry with their Insurtech solution building on NEAR.

• Closed Rounds (Q3 data)
  • Portalverse Network – raised a multi-million $ seed round with participation from Big Brain Holdings, 2Moon Capital, and Cogitent Ventures to bring the first decentralized cloud gaming and rendering network to the NEAR ecosystem.
  • Scorefam – secured a capital commitment of up to $25M from GEM Digital to expand their gaming NFT suite of products.
  • Token Terminal – raised $6.5M to expand their crypto asset data coverage, which will soon include NEAR Protocol and NEAR ecosystem projects.
  • Mystiko.Network – raised a $10M round this past month. Mystiko received a grant from NEAR Foundation to support NEAR through their transaction privacy layer.
  • Sweat Economy – raised $13M in funding including a private token sale, to accelerate their move into Web3.
  • Niche – closed a $1.8M pre-seed to bring decentralized social media to NEAR.
  • Aurigami – raised $12M in token rounds earlier this year to continue to grow DeFi on Aurora.
  • Play Ember – just closed a $1.4M token seed round to bring mobile gaming to NEAR. The team is currently exploring an equity round at this moment as well. 

3. Ecosystem highlights  

NEARWEEK is the one-stop-shop for all NEAR related news. Each weekly newsletter and edition is made possible via news contributions from the NEARWEEK community to the NEWS DAO. Subscribe or visit NEARWEEK.com to get your weekly dose of news from the NEARverse!

For the month of September we invite you to read through the following newsletters : 

Newsletter 74 

Newsletter 75 

Newsletter 76

Newsletter 77 

If you are interested in getting funded : 

• explore the NEAR Funding  linktree
• visit NF’s website : https://pages.near.org/
• contact NF Grants : [email protected]