History
In 2020, NEAR closed a $21.6 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Around the same period, the project launched its mainnet, introducing a proof-of-stake architecture based on the “Nightshade” [7] design and network sharding intended to improve throughput and costs for decentralized applications. [8]
In 2022, a $350 million funding round led by Tiger Global was completed for the NEAR. [9]
In January 2024 a critical peer-to-peer networking flaw that security firm Zellic dubbed a “Web3 Ping of Death”, [10] which could have allowed a malicious peer to crash nodes and potentially halt the network. The issue stemmed from how nodes handled SECP256K1 signatures during the handshake process; Zellic privately disclosed the bug in December 2023 via the HackenProof platform, after which NEAR issued a fix and awarded a $150,000 bounty. [11] [12]
Criticism and controversies
In November 2022, Skyward Finance, an IDO/launchpad built on NEAR blockchain, was exploited for roughly $3 million after an attacker abused a flaw in the project’s treasury redemption contract. The bug, identified by security firm BlockSec, failed to check for duplicate token account IDs, enabling the attacker to redeem wrapped NEAR in a loop within a single transaction. Skyward acknowledged that its treasury had been drained and advised users to cease interacting with the contracts, noting that the incident rendered the SKYWARD token effectively worthless. [13] [14]
In June 2023, Messari's analysts have questioned validator decentralization on Avalanche, Solana, NEAR, and others blockchain platforms. Messari study found that roughly 35% of NEAR’s staked tokens were hosted on Amazon Web Services, yielding a hosting “operational Nakamoto coefficient” of 1 (i.e., more than one-third of stake concentrated on a single provider). The report also observed geographic concentration of validators and stake in the United States and Germany, limited presence in underrepresented regions, and reliance on a single validator client at the time; taken together, NEAR’s aggregated operational Nakamoto coefficient was estimated at ~1.3, indicating elevated susceptibility to correlated infrastructure or jurisdictional failures relative to a more distributed network. [15]
In September 2024, NEAR blockchain drew criticism after its official X (formerly Twitter) account abruptly changed its display name to “it’s all a lie” and posted anti-crypto messages that prompted widespread speculation the account had been hacked. NEAR later indicated the episode was a marketing tactic tied to an upcoming event, which industry commentators and developers criticized as tone-deaf given the prevalence of genuine security breaches in the sector; some argued the stunt risked harming the project’s credibility. During the period of the campaign, Bloomberg reported that NEAR’s token declined by roughly 15% over the preceding week. According to the Bloomberg , also noted that the controversy followed a real security incident in May 2023, when a compromised moderator account on NEAR’s Discord was used to promote a fraudulent airdrop. [16]
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