For the second time this year, Near protocol, a layer 1 blockchain network, has raised massive funding from investors who are in the traditional financial and crypto industries.
According to Bloomberg, the platform raised $350 million, more than double what it raised ($150 million) in January.
“We are delighted to have such a fantastic list of sponsors supporting NEAR’s mission,” says Marieke Flament, Executive Director of the NEAR Foundation. “We look forward to leveraging the funds to improve access to blockchain technology in a growing list of countries around the world.”
This latest round of funding was led by Tiger Global, an investment firm that caters to more traditional technology and innovation startups. Other investors who participated in the round include Republic Capital, FTX Ventures, Hashed, and Dragonfly Capital. The massive injection of capital that the Near protocol received has outlined how deeply entrenched the platform’s solutions are projected to be integrated into the growing decentralized ecosystem.
Unlike this current funding round, previous rounds were primarily funded by native crypto investors such as Three Arrows Capital, Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Jump, Alameda, Zee Prime, Folius, and Amber Group, among others. Despite the diversity of its backers who may have different motives for investing in the protocol, Near has also been quite assertive about its goals, one of which is to push the decentralization of its growing ecosystem.
NEAR Protocol is a layer one blockchain that was designed as a community-managed cloud computing platform. That removes some of the limitations that have been bogging down competing blockchains, such as slow transaction speeds, poor performance, and poor interoperability. The protocol was designed to serve as one of the solutions to Ethereum and its congestion problems.
While the protocol has active communities in Europe, Africa, and Asia, it plans to spread to Latin America, Turkey, and India. Its goals go hand in hand with other growing blockchain protocols like Avalanche and Binance Smart Chain (BSC), both of which have also launched dedicated funds to grow their ecosystem.
