NEAR Foundation

The NEAR Foundation supports the NEAR Protocol, an open-source, sharded blockchain platform designed for scalability and usability. It provides foundational infrastructure for decentralized applications, accelerating the transition to open technologies. The Foundation fosters an ecosystem prioritizing clear onboarding and superior experiences for developers and founders, enabling impactful Open Web projects.

NEAR Protocol was founded in 2018 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov. Polosukhin, a former Google Research engineering manager, and Skidanov, a previous director at MemSQL, applied their distributed systems expertise. Their initial AI venture pivoted to solve blockchain scalability, resulting in the NEAR Protocol and the non-profit NEAR Foundation to nurture its ecosystem.

The Foundation serves global developers, creators, and entrepreneurs utilizing the NEAR Protocol. Its vision is a self-sustaining ecosystem where participants collectively innovate, establishing NEAR as a premier platform for Open Web projects. The long-term goal is widespread adoption and autonomy, ultimately rendering the Foundation's direct operational role obsolete.