The company revealed at Web3 and innovation festival ETHDenver 2023 that decentralized application (DApp) Near Protocol is releasing a new blockchain operating system focused on improving User Experience on Web3. Turner Wright During the event, Near co-founder Illia Polosukhin spoke about how the ecosystem is getting closer to user needs and the launch of the Blockchain Operating System (BOS).
According to the Near team, the system works with any blockchain or Web2 backend, giving users the experience of using a single application even when switching between applications or chains. For developers, these solutions promise a decentralized and composable front end, with support for forking of fragments and components, and built-in features like payments, profiles, and notifications, all without any hosting.
The protocol, an ethereum competitor that offers smart contract capabilities and a proof-of-stake blockchain, has sought a 10-fold increase in key metrics over the last year, including the number of transactions, monthly active wallets, onboarding programs, developers and the ecosystem of funds investing in the space System, claims co-founder. "A lot of projects just migrated to Near," Polosukhin noted of last year's growth, and struggled to find existing apps with user bases: “They came to us, some of them because they saw you can write in JavaScript smart contracts. That’s like three times cheaper to hire developers. This is just more usable not just for users, but for developers as well.”
Polosukhin is also one of the developers behind the Unchain Fund, a fundraising effort launched last year to help Ukrainians affected by the war. As of early 2023, the fund has raised more than $9 million in donations, almost all in crypto assets.
According to him, the money raised was crucial to supporting the Ukrainian people in the first weeks of the war, while international aid was still coming in at a lower pace: "The Red Cross, UNICEF, when something happens, they take months to get all their systems going, and that's what they do. They're slow [...] but when they get there, they There's the program, they set it up, they set up the supply chain, the logistics, and then they can start delivering. So, in a way, crypto funds are covered at the beginning, like the launch time of something like government aid .”
Some of the money raised went to a program specifically targeting women with runaway children, paying around 6,000 Ukrainian women 25 euros a week. The funds were also used to purchase ambulances through the global initiative United24.
