NEAR Foundation Closes $21.6M Token Sale, Launches Mainnet

The NEAR Foundation has been able to secure $21.6 million in a token sale led by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, the firm said on 4 May on Twitter.

The Monday token sale was led by Andreessen Horowitz, and saw the participation of around 40 investment firms, among which were Pantera Capital, Libertus, Blockchange, Animal Ventures, Distributed Global and Notation Capital. This is the second token sale that the company has held, with the first raising $12.1 million in July 2019.

The NEAR team has been building a public proof-of-stake network focused on usability and scalability, which according to the company’s CEO, Erki Trautman, will be similar to the Ethereum 2.0 network. Using sharding, a method to break down blockchain storage into multiple servers or shards, NEAR aims to become more scalable.

The company also revealed, in a blog post on 4 May, that it had already launched an early version of the NEAR mainnet on 22 April. Though the plan for the network is to be community governed, for now it will operate under a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm, which will be administered by the NEAR Foundation and the validators who already purchased tokens from it.

According to the current roadmap, the foundation will oversee token address creation and transactions until Phase 2 goes into effect later this year, which will come with fewer restrictions. After general testing of the blockchain is completed, it will transition to a community goverened PoS system with Phase 2 and Phase 3. The release date for the permissionless version of the blockchain is yet to be decided, but according to the firm that decision will be up to the community.