NEAR Protocol is one of the most talked about PoS blockchains in the industry. It is an open source, high bandwidth smart contract platform working on the basis of its own Proof-Of-Stake algorithm. It seeks to solve the problem of scaling by providing the work of resource-intensive decentralized applications (dapps).
NEAR Protocol was created by a former Microsoft employee Alexander Skidanov and a developer Ilya Polosukhin. Work on the project began at the end of 2018. Since then, the team has grown to fifty people and includes developers from Facebook, Google and Niantic, as well as many medalists and finalists of international sports programming competitions. Two team members have won the programming world championship twice (there are nine such people in the world). Almost all team members are from the Russian Federation and the countries of the former USSR.
According to Alexander Skidanov, co-founder of NEAR, his goal is to create an Internet where all applications are decentralized and managed by a community, where no one is spied on. Blockchain is an important component there, but not the most important one. The main thing is that there should be decentralization and corresponding values.
We started working with NEAR Protocol in 2020 and partnered on numerous projects.
First, we helped them with their bug bounty program. They posted on their GitHub information about what was not working for them, and anyone who wants to can contact us with suggestions to fix these flaws for a fee. That is, it is a grant program to support people who want to help develop the protocol. We were part of this program and made our suggestions.
Then, in the summer of 2021, they asked us if we could put together a team that would be able to create a desktop crypto wallet. We did that, and then we created a blockchain explorer for them. There is a web-site Etherscan, where you can enter the number of the crypto wallet, crypto transactions, or any identification data in the Ethereum blockchain, and they provide information about the contents of the wallet, transactions, the number of certain tokens. Blockchain explorer is an important component of any project with its own blockchain, since without it the user cannot navigate the world of crypto transactions. Therefore, it was a very important project in which we took part.
Next, we were testing their products – in particular, the wallet. The project turned to us for help in improving their previously created crypto wallet. Nobody knew how to use it. The wallet's most serious problem was that it was not sufficiently tested, and there was a risk of some vulnerabilities. We have tested the wallet (QA Testing Services) and established support for it.
