Near Foundation
Near is a sharded proof-of-stake L1 designed for consumer applications, capable of parallelizing transaction execution across 100+ shards. The two founders previously shipped the Transformer paper at Google, and brought engineering-first culture to a protocol space dominated by researchers.
The chain now anchors a chain-abstraction stack (BOS, Fastauth, Meta Transactions) that lets consumer apps hide crypto UX entirely — enabling Web2-style onboarding for 10M+ monthly actives across the ecosystem.
The 2026 roadmap centers on chain abstraction as a settlement primitive for cross-chain user flows, with the aim of becoming the invisible base layer for consumer applications that also run on Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin.
Sharded L1 with a genuinely different execution model and a team that previously shipped the Transformer paper. We were the first check in the seed round.
Illia Polosukhin
Co-FounderAlex Skidanov
Co-FounderChris Donovan
CEO, FoundationMarieke Flament
Board Chair- 2018Founded by Illia Polosukhin and Alex Skidanov
- Q3 2019Oryon leads seed round
- 2020Mainnet launch
- Q1 2026Chain abstraction ships across major wallets
Chain abstraction rollout landing across major wallets in H1 2026. Consumer app pipeline crossing 10M MAUs.
“Near's chain abstraction is the most credible attempt to make crypto invisible to end users.”
— Bankless, Jan 2026
“The team that shipped the Transformer paper is now shipping the closest thing crypto has to a consumer OS.”
— The Defiant, Mar 2026
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