What is NEAR
NEAR is an open source decentralized application (DApp) and smart contract development platform built on top of the NEAR Protocol- a public, sharded, developer-friendly, proof-of-stake blockchain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The goal of NEAR is to accelerate the development of DApps while providing a permissionless Bridge to migrate existing ERC-20 and Solidity contracts to NEAR protocol. Platform native NEAR token enables token holders to use applications on NEAR, participate in network governance, and earn token rewards by staking NEAR to the network. NEAR Platform also contains a variety of utilities including explorers, CLI tools, wallet apps and interoperability components allowing developers to build more efficiently and the ecosystem to scale effectively.