NEAR is a blockchain protocol designed to bridge the adoption gap for mainstream commercial DApps. With NEAR, you can build a blockchain application within minutes, and you will have a better development experience due to tooling (IDE) & use of modern languages like WASM, Typescript and Rust. We have also completely re-imagined how end-user usability will be done, which will tremendously help with user acquisition, which developers care a lot about. To build it, we have assembled a dream team of engineers who implemented sharded distributed systems at scale including 3 early MemSQL engineers, 4 ex-Googlers, 4 gold medals at ACM ICPC and more.