NEAR is an open-source platform that enables creators, communities, and markets to drive a more open, interconnected and consumer-empowered world. It is the suitable infrastructure for innovation.

Developers can build community owned apps, secure financial components, operate at consumer speed, harness the internet of value.  Wallets, DAOs, validators, education, Defi, NFTs and applications, gaming, utilities and other infrastructure, dev platforms and tools, oracles, Rails/Fiat onboarding, IDO platform, stables coins, education, utilities and other infrastructure is getting built on Near Protocol.

For any business privacy is very important.  This can be about the communication of confidential information to partners or protecting the customer data. Blockchain is a buzz word because privacy is backed in to its existence.  However, several attempts which are focused on bringing enterprises and blockchain together have been suffering.

Traditionally, when they establish partnership with the company, companies were invited to build in a particular ecosystem, but with time, problems related to access and control emerged.  Further moving the data of one company to another company on a proprietary legacy software came with associated costs and problems related to throughput.

To solve these issues, Near Protocol makes use of private shards. They make use of this model to blend the public and private blockchains seamlessly and in a secure manner.

The ability to partition shards to suit different use cases is a part of NEAR Protocol’s design.

Illia Polosukhin expressed:  Not all data should live on public chain. Encrypted data can’t be reasoned about. Private shard methodology allows each company to maintain their data while still participate in the global consensus and able to prove to other parties various facts.

There are now multiple decentralized storage options on @NEARProtocol for different use cases and with different focus.  Check out @CrustNetwork storage providing free decentralized storage and IPFS pinning for @NEARProtocol users.

Crust Network is ready to facilitate Web3.0 style, decentralized storage experiences for NEAR users and developers with its 6,000+ IPFS nodes and approx. 2,000 Petabytes of storage capacity available.

Further expressed, Today have been stuck on the question that if we are building Community as a product, what is the definition of Product/Market fit for it?

Community response:  I think the broader ecosystem is slowly coming to grips with that =). Protocols that understand and embrace this, then create a resilient community will win. I think with Kem you have a great mind leading the charge. What concretely made you think this way?

Community requires: 1. A reason to assemble 2. A reason to continue to assemble.

Near enables the community to own and value their initiatives, tools & voice. Near is not a community, but a network of communities that can autonomously interact and become a core societal infrastructure. Croncat is trying to help make that happen.