ZUG, Switzerland–(BUSINESS WIRE)–NEAR Protocol, a scalable blockchain-based, developer-friendly platform for decentralized applications, announced the launch of the Ethereum <> NEAR Bridge, a trustless, universal protocol that unlocks communication and interoperability between smart contract chains. This launch also signifies the first bridge that doesn’t rely on external authorities, only consensus security.
Innovation within the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) spaces has increased demand on the Ethereum network and pushed transaction fees to record levels.
“With the launch of the Ethereum <> NEAR Bridge, we are bridging the application and developer ecosystems between NEAR and Ethereum and allowing developers to leverage Ethereum assets and smart contracts within NEAR’s fast, scalable, and low-cost environment,” said Illia Polosukhin, Co-founder of NEAR Protocol. “By allowing Ethereum users immediate access to apps built on NEAR, we can facilitate and accelerate community development. We see the Bridge as a huge step toward our vision of an interoperable, multichain future, and our goal is to create the same open access to other chains and amplify the opportunities for continued development.”
The Bridge does not require special permission to deploy, maintain, or use. Anyone can deploy a new bridge, use an existing bridge, or join the maintenance of an existing bridge without getting approval from anyone else. The Bridge is also generic in that it allows any information that is cryptographically provable on NEAR to be usable in Ethereum contracts and vice versa. The nature of the Bridge also remains fully decentralized and adaptable to any future protocol changes on either side.
Released in a series of phases, the Bridge will connect to various chains within the decentralized finance ecosystem by year-end. To begin transferring tokens between Ethereum and NEAR using the Bridge, please visit https://ethereum.bridgetonear.org/.
About NEAR Protocol
NEAR Protocol is a blockchain-based, ultra-scalable, developer-friendly platform for decentralized applications. NEAR’s platform provides decentralized storage and compute that is secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of the Open Web in their hands.
NEAR Protocol uses a technique called “sharding” which splits the network into multiple pieces so that the computation is done in parallel. Parallelism radically increases throughput and allows the network to scale up as the number of nodes on it increases. With NEAR, there isn’t a theoretical limit on the network’s capacity.
Core contributors of NEAR have won multiple world championships in competitive programming and worked at major tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Niantic. To learn more about the NEAR Protocol, please visit https://near.org/.