NEAR Protocol is a brand new proof of stake protocol that is designed to address issues of scalability and usability in blockchains. Powered by novel sharding and consensus design, it provides cheap and fast transactions for users and developers. NEAR's mission is to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world. The NEAR platform provides decentralized application hosting that is secure enough to manage high-value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of Open Finance and the Open Web in their hands. With NEAR, there isn’t a theoretical limit on the network’s capacity.