First published 15 October 2020, two days after NEAR transfers were switched on. Expanded in October 2026 so the account names and the issuance story are not left as a launch post. NEAR is a public ledger built to split its work across shards, so more than one set of transactions can be processed at once. The coin is also called NEAR. You pay fees with it, and you stake it to validators. Holding bitcoin did not give you any.
The useful confusions are the date the coin became movable, the human-readable account, and a supply number from the genesis post. Get those three wrong and a balance, a staking screen, or a deposit address will lie to you politely.
Where it came from
Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov started the work, with the NEAR Foundation beside the software. The genesis block was 22 April 2020, but that first phase was proof of authority: the foundation ran the nodes. On 24 September 2020 the foundation turned its nodes off and independent operators ran the network. On 13 October 2020 a vote enabled transfers. Before that date, tokens could pay fees and be staked, and they could not be sent freely. A chart that starts in April 2020 is a chart of a coin you could not yet withdraw.
One billion NEAR were created at genesis. The published economics added new coins of about 5 percent a year once transfers began, mostly to validators, with a smaller share to a protocol treasury, and burned a large part of transaction fees. Burning can offset issuance when the chain is busy. It does not have to. Treat the 5 percent as the design written down at launch. A parameter can change. Read the current epoch before you quote a 2020 blog as today’s rate.
Accounts are names, and storage is a lock
A named account looks like alice.near. That string is the account, not a website, and guessing a clever name is not how you find someone’s coins. An implicit account is a long hexadecimal string, the key’s own address, used before a name is created. Neither form is an Ethereum address. The wrong network is still the wrong city.
Creating a name and storing data locks a little NEAR as storage. The lock is not a fee you spent. Deleting the data frees it. An account that tries to send its last coin and leave too little for the storage it still occupies will fail. The wallet should show the amount. Do not learn the minimum from a tutorial whose screenshots have aged.
Staking does not send the coins to a company, unless the app is a company
Validators put NEAR at stake. Delegators point their NEAR at a validator. The launch design allowed locked tokens, the ones still on a release schedule, to be staked before they could be transferred. Rewards are new NEAR, not a bank yield. A validator can miss blocks. Unbonding is a wait the protocol sets. Staking is a lock and a queue, not a savings account. If the app you are using is an exchange, you have an IOU plus a yield line, and the exchange’s terms are the product.
Shards are how the chain intends to grow capacity. A single shard being enough for the traffic of a quiet year is not a promise about the next busy one. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, delegate, or move NEAR.
