NEAR mainnet transitions to Phase 2; becomes permissionless and decentralized

The NEAR project has reached its most significant milestone since inception by completing the transition to a fully permissionless, decentralized and community-governed network. The platform is now unrestricted and open for developers to deploy apps and users to create accounts and transfer tokens in a fully permissionless manner.

“When the Genesis Block occurred in April, NEAR set a goal that developers can actually deploy production apps while the network gets more decentralized and is ultimately handed off completely to the community over the next several months. Now, only 6 months later, we are keeping our promise and moving forward, making NEAR Mainnet: Community Governed & Decentralized a reality.” said Illia Polosukhin, Co-founder and CEO of Near Inc.

During the voting phase, initial network validators independently voted to remove transfer restrictions on the tokens. The voting phase was completed successfully on October 13. The vote was orchestrated by and participated in by a decentralized set of validators who have been onboarding to MainNet over the last several months and who replaced the NEAR Foundation as the operators of the network’s operating nodes. Validators have received delegation from several accounts, many of whom participated in the recent $30M token sale on Coinlist.

In addition, beginning now all staked tokens generate returns that become transferable immediately, even if the stake will be vesting for years to come. To emphasize, it means it is now possible for anyone to transfer NEAR tokens and participate in the network. Specifically, it is now possible for anyone to send or receive tokens, to create accounts, to participate in validation, to launch applications or to otherwise use the network

What’s Next For NEAR?

In the coming months, the NEAR team will focus on the following, while acknowledging that the operation and growth of the network is not entirely in any group’s hands:

• Improving its sharding algorithm, Nightshade, and its specs.
• Completing the development and integration of the ETH-NEAR Bridge on Mainnet
• Increasing the efficiency of the NEAR Wallet and developer tools.

Developers and teams who are ready to build can get more info here or join the Open Web Collective, a platform-agnostic program that helps teams building the decentralized web to accelerate their progress and get funding.