NEAR Announces $800 Million in Funding Initiatives To Support Ecosystem Growth

The NEAR ecosystem is announcing a monumental $800 million in funding initiatives targeted at accelerating growth. 

The announcement, which includes the $350 million in funding announced by Proximity Labs last week – reported in Bloomberg – is designed to build on the momentum in the NEAR ecosystem over the last 12 months. 

While NEAR is giving all communities access to this record amount of funding, it will be focusing on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) teams who are actively revolutionizing and reimagining the way we interact with money. 

DeFi projects on NEAR have already hit a significant milestone of more than $150M Total Value Locked (TVL). NEAR has an ambitious goal to grow that number quickly and securely. NEAR is also actively looking for projects focused on NFTs, DAOs, and gaming. 

NEAR’s next chapter is all about fostering growth by helping developers access best-in-class support and providing users with a frictionless experience using and navigating the web3 world. New funding helps accelerate this process.

NEAR levels up 

Of the $800 million in funding, $100 million will be allocated to Startup Grant Pools. More than 20 startups will be identified and given $5M each in funding to redistribute to key stakeholders – the ecosystem ultimately decides who gets funding. 

Some $250 million will be allocated to ecosystem grants helping existing projects further develop and scale. The remaining $100M will be allocated to Regional Funds: money allocated to foster the development of NEAR’s largest community regions in Asia, Europe, and the US.  

Prior to this announcement, NEAR had already spent $45M across more than 120 projects, including Core Protocol Infrastructure Grants to the likes of: 

• Textile
• Liquality
• CronCat 
• Kurtosis 
• The Grain Programming Language 

The sleeping giant awakes 

NEAR has been building on its roadmap steadily and securely. Later this year, it will launch the next phase sharding, nicknamed Simple Nightshade. NEAR will go from one to four shards, increasing scalability while not compromising on simplicity. Developers won’t have to add any additional code to smart contracts or adjust their platforms and users will continue to experience the same great UX, but at faster speeds. 

Once complete, NEAR will be decentralizing further by lowering the barrier to entry to its validator network, increasing the number of validators first to 100, and then to a few hundred in Q1 2022. As part of this process, there will be further funding to projects helping the rollout and development of NEAR’s sharding technology. 

Stay tuned for more information.