NEAR wallet Evolution

NEAR Foundation and Pagoda, along with the Wallets Working Group, have conducted extensive community discussions over the last several months about the evolution of wallets in the NEAR ecosystem. In keeping with the Foundation’s goal to empower the community and continue to decentralize the ecosystem over time, the focus since NEARCON has been to expand the wallet offerings to NEAR users and to decentralize the NEAR Wallet.
MyNearWallet is now open source and under the stewardship of Developer DAO to maintain as a public good. (Pagoda took over MNW after Kikimora ceased operations in December due to funding issues.) DevDAO announced this week that they are accepting applications for teams to take over maintenance of MyNearWallet to evolve the product while keeping it open source for the benefit of the developer community. For more information about how to apply, visit the Developer DAO gigs board on NEAR Social.
If you have been using MyNearWallet or wallet.near.org, you don’t need to take any action. MyNearWallet service will not be interrupted in this transition and, in fact, users can expect product improvements over time from the chosen maintainer team. The goal is to offer more wallet options to users across the NEAR ecosystem and to decentralize the development of wallet products across the developer community.
Pagoda will continue maintaining wallet.near.org. Over time, the NEAR wallet will integrate into the forthcoming NEAR Discovery product. But for now, no action is needed from users. Legacy wallet users may consider migrating to another wallet now that an expanded range of options is available via Wallet Selector, which will soon live on wallet.near.org. Numerous wallets optimizing for a variety of user types, security requirements, and use cases are already available, with more on the way in Q1.
NEAR’s commitment to serving as the de facto entry point to Web3 remains intact. Building without limits is about continuously improving on industry standards and delivering the best possible experiences to developers and users alike.

A Guide To NEAR Wallets  

In the current crypto market, Ethereum is the platform of choice for decentralized applications, smart contracts, and decentralized finance. However, Ethereum has several problems that are a hindrance, such as high gas fees and significant issues relating to scalability. So while Ethereum may be Numero Uno, several other protocols are emerging to challenge Ethereum in the market. 
NEAR protocol is one of the blockchains that has emerged as a true challenger to Ethereum’s dominance in the space. The team at NEAR looked at Ethereum’s shortcomings and created a protocol that goes straight for its most glaring shortcoming, its lack of scalability and high gas fees. NEAR uses a process called sharding, allowing the protocol to scale exponentially. NEAR has also managed to raise significant funding from some of the biggest venture capitalists, including a16z, Coinbase Ventures, Scalar Capital, Dragonfly Capital, and several more. In this guide, we will look at NEAR, and in particular, the NEAR wallet. 

The NEAR Protocol 

Founded in 2018, the NEAR Protocol is a decentralized development platform designed to create a seamless and near-perfect environment for decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts. NEAR was created after analyzing the shortcomings of existing protocols, particularly Ethereum. The protocol focuses on addressing these issues and is looking to become the go-to platform for Decentralized Applications and Decentralized Finance. NEAR’s use of sharding allows the protocol to scale up exponentially, addressing scalability issues prevalent in the space. 
NEAR’s Proof-of-Stake blockchain is extremely developer-friendly, thanks to it being low-cost and highly scalable, and developers can seamlessly create decentralized applications. The NEAR protocol also has several other features, such as the NEAR wallet and other components. Our focus in this article will be on the NEAR wallet, but more on that a little later. NEAR also utilizes Doomslug, allowing blocks to achieve finality in seconds. Other blockchains usually centralize processing, limiting its usability to very high-end hardware. While this approach increases throughput, it does so only temporarily. NEAR is capable of scaling linearly, supporting billions of transactions in a decentralized manner. 
NEAR has been created by the NEAR Collective, a community of researchers and developers. NEAR collective’s focus is the continuous development and improvement of the protocol. The collective has also worked on the initial code of the NEAR Protocol and implementation of the NEAR Network. While the NEAR Collective is behind the development of the NEAR Protocol, the latter operates entirely independently and is entirely decentralized, with even the NEAR Collective unable to shut it down. 

Advantages Of The NEAR Protocol 

• NEAR users do not require any complicated browser extensions or keys to register. A simple email and password is sufficient to register. 
• NEAR smart contracts are compatible with WebAssembly Virtual Machine (WASM). 
• The protocol allows developers to deploy scalable and high-performance blockchain applications. 
• A fraction of the gas fees compared to others such as Ethereum.