ETH Competitor NEAR Hits ATH After $800M Growth Fund Launch

ETH competitor NEAR hits a new all-time high as it launched an $800 million fund to support its ecosystem growth so let’s read more about it in our latest altcoin news today.

The team behind the NEAR protocol called NEAR Collective, got into the DeFi space by announcing $800 million in funding for the developers and startup grants of the ecosystem. The platform is a globally distributed group of teams and invidious that contribute to teh research and development of the protocol. Boosted by the announcement, NEAR and its native token surged to a new high of $12.62 in the early hours on Tuesday before dropping to $12.17 at press time.

📣 Early #NEARCON Announcement! 💥

Learn more about @NEARProtocol's $800M Global Ecosystem Fund. 🔽https://t.co/00UaiA3jC1

— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) October 25, 2021

ETH competitor NEAR is still up 17% over the past day which makes it one of the biggest gainers according to CoinGEcko. Backed by high-profile investors like Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, a16z, and more, NEAR is a proof of stake blockchain platform for decentralized applications. The blockchain uses a technique called sharding that splits the network into a few pieces so that the computation is done in parallel and improves the network’s scalability which is the same technique that is being utilized for Ethereum 2.0

Projects building on NEAR include Mintbase which is an NFT minting platform and FLUX that is a protocol allowing developers to create markets based on assets, commodities, real-world events, and more. The announcement read:

“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.”

The collective added that the Defi projects on NEAR already reached a huge milestone of more than $150 million and that they have a much bigger goal to grow the number securely and quickly. The new funding includes another $350 million in grants announced by Proximity Labs a week ago. Also, NEAR is looking for projects focused on DAOS and NFTs with about $250 million to spare for grants and existing ecosystem projects with another $100 million reserved for startup grants. The remaining $100M in funding will be allocated to funds across Europe, Asia, and the US.