NEAR Protocol Raised $350 Million In Latest Funding Round

NEAR protocol raised $350 million in the latest funding round which was led by Tiger Global and participations from Dragonfly Capital and FTX Ventures so let’s read more in today’s latest altcoin news.

NEAR protocol raised $350 million today in new funding round and it announced that its ecosystem has seen a huge increase in venture capital investment since late 2021. As it seeks to compete with ETH as a go-to blockchain for a decentralzied application, NEAR announced that it raised $350 million in a new funding round that was led by Tiger Global, FTX Ventures, and Hashed, Republic Capital, ParaFi capital, Block change Ventures and MetaWeb.

NEAR said that the latest funding round will accelerate the decentralization of the NEAR ecosystem and the previous raised included a $21.6 million round in 2020 with another one of $150 million in January this year. The Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital Haseeb Qureshi said:

“We are strong believers in NEAR’s sharding approach to scale blockchains. In the long run, all blockchains will need to horizontally scale to support the massive scale that’s coming with mainstream adoption. ETH 2.0 sees this same outcome, but NEAR delivers that actual experience right now.”

Founded in 2018, NEAR is a platform that allowed for the build of decentralized applications using smart contracts, and automated programs which can execute once the specific criteria are met. The project Is focused on helping developers to get their projects off ground by offering development tools. It also aims to be a user-friendly and scalable PoS blockchain, NEAR launched the mainnet in October 2020. The 19-th biggest crypto by market cap is valued at $10.9 billion and its coin can be used to pay for transaction fees and staking on the network.

According to the data from DappRadar, the projects building on the NEAR protocol include Near Crowd which includes services that allow users to earn tokens by completing tasks, Paras 2.0 which focuses on high-quality forks by artists, Ref finance which is a DEFI platform, and Mintbase for issuing and selling NFTS. NEAR said that its ecosystem saw a huge increase in venture capital investment since late 2021 which includes investments in Aurora, the ETH Virtual Machine on the NEAR protocol while in February, Ref Fiannce announced that it raised $4.8 million to build the one-stop-shop for DEFI services in the NEAR protocol Ecosystem.

Tiger Global partner John Curtius said that the company was glad to lead the latest round:

 “NEAR is poised to be a leading smart contract blockchain platform, combining first-rate technology with a fast-growing developer ecosystem. We’re excited to support NEAR as we ramp up our investments in the digital asset space.”