NEAR Protocol is a highly scalable base protocol that ensures that DApps are supported quickly enough to run on mobile devices. NEAR Protocol allows developers to build mobile blockchain DApps and run them locally on the user's machine, while providing developers with important information about the DApps. Stateful sharding allows the blockchain to scale linearly with the number of nodes in the network, with a goal of 100k TPS based on 1 million mobile nodes. NEAR Protocol aims to create a fully sharded, scalable PoS blockchain. The team has already released some of the world's only implementations of large-scale sharding systems. At the same time, the team is redesigning every component of the protocol, from network to consensus, breaking down state and execution to work in a client-friendly way. NEAR was founded in 2018 in San Francisco by Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin. The mainnet launched in April 2020, while the official version was launched in October 2020, alongside the NEAR token launch.