Bison Trails To Provide Validator Support To NEAR Protocol

Infrastructure-as-a-service company Bison Trails now has support for NEAR Protocol, a smart contract platform designed to power Open Finance and the Open Web, the firm said on its website on 8 June.

According to the announcement, Bison Trails has been working closely with NEAR since early 2019, and is now ready to help host the newly launched NEAR Protocol’s validator set, which has over 150 nodes. The news comes only days after the NEAR Foundation secured $21.6 million in a token sale led by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and announced the launch of an early version of its mainnet.

The CEO of Bison Trails, Joe Lallouz, said:

“We are excited to support the NEAR team as they launch the protocol. I’ve been following the team at NEAR for some time now and am blown away by their focus on the developer experience. NEAR’s incredible technical team understands building a strong developer ecosystem will help drive success.”

While NEAR continues to execute its roadmap, Bison Trails will provide assistance with launching validators for the network. NEAR token holders from Bison Trails’ platform will also be able to run nodes for the network. Even though still not launched, Bison Trails said they will be supporting NEAR’s dynamic sharding feature, which focuses on re-shuffling data between shards depending on network activity. This feature will help Bison Trails maintain its own network, which already provides support to 11 different networks.

Illia Polosukhin, a NEAR Co-Founder, said:

“It’s been great working with the Bison Trails team, learning from their hands on experience with other PoS networks to improve our own staking experience and protocol design. Bison Trails has been on the forefront of what is now considered the professional validator industry, making participation in blockchain networks more accessible and helping to provide more high quality operators to the network. “

NEAR Foundation completed phase 1 out of 3 of its rollout plan on 22 April, when it launched its early version mainnet, which for now is under the Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm. Though currently transactions can only be approved by the foundation and its token validators, the firm is planning to transition its network to a restricted mainnet sometime in the summer of 2020. While in restricted mode, a few dozen professional validators will approve transactions, and will receive a stipend for running NEAR nodes.

The date for the final phase, transitioning the network to a community governed Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, will be decided on a later date through community voting. The decision to open up the NEAR network in phases, according to the company, will allow the NEAR team to test and address certain issues early on.