With the proof-of-stake NEAR Protocol raising US$150 million in seed investments to support the adoption of Web 3 Adoption, it has since been gaining popularity among investors.
This is in addition to NEAR protocol allocating US$800 million for new incentives in 2021 to fund the acceleration of DeFi. NEAR’s ecosystem has been developing at an astonishing pace with many investors keen to bridge funds.Â
In addition, NEAR’s interesting use of Nightshade technology is used to improve transaction speed massively. This is a technology where individual sets of validators process transactions in parallel across multiple shared chains, improving the processing time of the blockchain.
This tech is very similar to ‘sharding’ but in contrast, produced a fraction of the next block. This has allowed it to achieve a TPS of 100,000 a second and near instant finality.Â
If you haven’t already, it is advised to have a hot or cold wallet. NEAR can be bought from exchanges like Binance, Mandala Exchange and FTX. The recommended wallets for holding this are NEAR wallet and Coin98 Wallet.
Also, you will need NEAR to activate your wallet. Almost all bridging has to go through Rainbow Bridge.Â
Bridging Paths
Bridging from ETH to NEAR (Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from BSC to NEAR (Terra -> Allbridge -> Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Solana to NEAR (Wormhole to Terra -> Allbridge to Aurora -> Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Terra to NEAR (Allbridge to Aurora -> Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Avalanche to NEAR (Synapse to Harmony -> Terra -> Allbridge -> Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Polygon to NEAR (Synapse to Harmony -> Terra -> Allbridge -> Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Cronos to NEAR (EvoDeFi to BSC -> Terra Bridge to Terra -> All bridge to Aurora -> Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Aurora to NEAR (Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Cosmos to NEAR (Terra -> Allbridge -> Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Fantom to NEAR (Synapse to Harmony -> Terra -> Allbridge -> Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Harmony to NEAR (Terra -> Allbridge -> Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Arbitrum to NEAR (Synapse to Harmony -> Terra -> Allbridge -> Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Optimism to NEAR (Synapse to Harmony -> Terra -> Allbridge -> Rainbow Bridge)
Bridging from Metis to NEAR (cBridge to BSC -> Terra -> Allbridge -> Rainbow Bridge)
Rainbow Bridge Guide
Rainbow Bridge is the most important bridge in the NEAR ecosystem. To bridge anything to NEAR currently, you have to use Rainbow Bridge for every single network.
Unfortunately, fees will be high as Rainbow Bridge only supports transfer between ETH, NEAR and Aurora. This means that bridging paths will be very complicated. This is not recommended for newbies as sometimes tokens will be wrapped. You will have to wrap them to receive your native tokens.Â
Rainbow Bridge can be accessed via this link: https://rainbowbridge.app/transfer
In addition, MetaMask is currently not supported for NEAR. You will have to have the official NEAR wallet to be able to bridge funds.
This is currently very troublesome but should be improved in the future as the ecosystem develops. For example we want to bridge funds from Fantom in MetaMask to NEAR in NEAR wallet. The following steps would have to be done.
- Bridge funds from Fantom to Aurora
- Bridge Funds from Aurora to NEAR
Note that in addition, you would have to transfer to NEAR wallet also. This is the shortest method but also limited funds are available to be transferred. To transfer more funds, the longer method of (Synapse to Harmony -> Terra -> Allbridge -> Rainbow Bridge).
The easier method would simply be to buy native NEAR an exchange like Binance and transfer it straight away to NEAR wallet.
Conclusion
NEAR is an interesting ecosystem that has quite a few structural flaws. This makes it difficult for many people to enter the NEAR ecosystem.
However with interesting things like Nightshade, using human-readable account names, and its consensus mechanism Doomslug, it is expected to improve overtime.
Also Read: What Is NEAR Protocol? All You Need To Know Before Investing
