NEAR Protocol History: From Machine Learning to AI
2018: From Machine Learning to Blockchain
NEAR was founded by Illia Polosukhin (a former Google engineer) and Alexander Skidanov (a former director of engineering at the database company MemSQL). They met through the Y Combinator startup accelerator. Their company originally worked on machine learning research, but in 2018 the team pivoted to building its own blockchain.
2020: Mainnet Launch
NEAR's mainnet (Phase II) went live in April 2020. In March 2021, the "Rainbow Bridge" launched, connecting NEAR to Ethereum and allowing assets to move between the two networks.
Technology: Dynamic Nightshade Sharding
NEAR's core technology is "Nightshade," a form of sharding (splitting the network into parts that run in parallel) that dynamically adapts to current network load, theoretically allowing it to scale without sacrificing decentralization.
2022: An All-Time High
Amid the broader bull market, the NEAR token reached an all-time high of roughly $20.37 in mid-January 2022.
2023–2024: A Pivot Toward Artificial Intelligence
Starting in 2023–2024, the NEAR team shifted the project's public focus toward a "blockchain for AI" concept — the idea of using decentralized infrastructure to store data and train open AI models, as a counterweight to control over AI by a handful of large tech corporations.