Crypto exchange Coinbase has announced it added blockchain NEAR Protocol ’s native token to its listings. NEAR Protocol’s native token soared by 11% on the 10 August in response to Coinbase’s announcement on Twitter that it would feature on Coinbase’s listings.

The US-based company, launched in 2020, has a proof-of-stake blockchain network which provides a platform on which decentralised apps can be built, and uses sharding to realise scalability. Coinbase has been facing difficulties in recent times. This week, the company announced its staking products and crypto yields are the subject of an SEC probe.

Also this week, it revealed losses to the tune of USD 1. 1 bln in the second quarter. NEAR Protocol previously revealed that it had discovered in June 2022 a security breach which could have allowed third parties access to sensitive data.

NEAR Protocol’s competitor, Ethereum, attracted a rush of investment when it announced its intention to merge its mainnet with the Ethereum 2. 0 Beacon Chai in September 2022, and move from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. The company hopes to thus improve network efficiency and reduce its carbon footprint.

The final dress rehearsal for the event, due to take place in September, was completed this week. What is the NEAR protocol? As explained by CoinTelegraph, NEAR Protocol is a decentralised application (DApp) platform, which operates as a competitor of Ethereum, NearProtocol is also smart-contract capable and a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain. The native token, NEAR, is used for transaction fees and storage on the Near crypto platform.

These tokens can also be used for staking by NEAR tokenholders who wish and have the ability to become transaction validators and help achieve network consensus. According to CoinTelegraph, Near was built by the NeaCollective as a community-run cloud computing platform designed to host decentralised applications. NEAR, along with similar projects aim to contribute to building a new blockchain with a different architecture through sharding technology - a database partitioning technique used by blockchain companies with the purpose of scalability, enabling them to process more transactions per second.

This way, NEAR can break up the blockchain into smaller more manageable segments, an action that reduces the burden on the network. The computational load is thusly also reduces, resulting in an increased throughput of transactions. .