Why integrate NEAR?

NEAR is an L1 blockchain that is very different from Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, and the rest of EVM chains you’re used to. Thanks to its sharded architecture, NEAR’s L1 is extremely scalable and can deliver up to 100,000 TPS while keeping transaction fees below $0.01. At the same time, NEAR does support L2s like Aurora, which provides EVM compatibility.

Another thing that we at XP.NETWORK love about NEAR is its NFT ecosystem. It does have its punks and apes, sure, but there is also a lot of unique art, such as Mr. Brown, Freaky Elves, and Bonehedz.  And even in the middle of the bear market, new interesting collections keep launching.

The leading marketplace on NEAR, Paras.id, has great UI and its own token, which can be staked to earn 10-11% APY. You can even earn PARAS by staking NFTs.

For creators, NEAR offers perpetual royalties that are automatically enforced across marketplaces and even wallet-to-wallet transactions. Royalties can be customized – for example, split between several artists or DAO members. 

Apart from Paras, we should mention Mintbase – a marketplace where you can build your own programmable NFTs, minters, and modules. 

You might ask: if NEAR is so fast and cheap and has great NFTs, why aren’t more people familiar with it? The answer, as it often is with non-EVM chains, is having to try something different, to exit one’s comfort zone. NEAR doesn’t support MetaMask, so you need to register a brand-new NEAR wallet and – preferably – create a subaccount with an easy-to-remember name.  

As developers, we also have to go beyond our comfort zone sometimes. Below we’ll tell you about some of the challenges we had to overcome to connect NEAR to XP.NETWORK – our powerful multichain NFT bridge.

XP.NETWORK and NEAR: meeting the challenge of block-level sharding

Rephrasing Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, all EVM chains are alike, but every non-EVM chain is innovative in its own way. This fully applies to NEAR with its many ingenious structural solutions.

A few months ago, XP.NETWORK integrated Aurora, the EVM-compatible Layer-2 blockchain that is part of the NEAR ecosystem. Following the success of that integration, we received a second grant from the NEAR foundation to add the Layer-1 to our NFT bridge. It turned out to be an exciting and complicated task, primarily due to block sharding and how it affects gas.

Sharding is most commonly understood splitting the main chain into several subchains that can process transactions in parallel. MultiversX (former Elrond) uses sharding, together with Polkadot and Kusama; Ethereum will eventually switch to it. 

However, NEAR’s approach is different, and its sharding technology has its own name, Nightshade. Instead of sharding the blockchain, it shards the blockchain state and transaction processing itself. It keeps the chain intact, so there’s no need for a beacon chain, like in Ethereum. 

Since sharding happens at the level of each block, a single transaction can be split across several blocks. Cross-shard communication is very fast, so a split transaction is finalized within 1-2 seconds. 

The complication from the bridging standpoint is that the gas for that transaction has to be supplied separately for each part. This is quite a challenge when you need to allow bridge users to send NFTs to NEAR and pay for gas in the currency of the departure chain. We also have to make sure that the storage or reverting logic for each part of the transaction is handled properly.

Introducing the fee oracle

The core of our solution is the new XP.NETWORK fee oracle. It delivers correct information about the gas fees on the destination chain, so that we can make sure that the bridging transaction succeeds. 

On top of that, the oracle further secures user assets and makes the bridge more robust - all that in an efficient and cheap way.

Here’s what XP.NETWORK CTO Dima Brook has to say about it: