What is the issuance and circulation of NEAR coins?

Issuance and Circulation of NEAR Coins

1. Initial Coin Offering (ICO)

NEAR conducted an ICO in October 2019, raising approximately $15 million from investors. The ICO tokens were priced at $0.50 each.

2. Token Distribution

The total supply of NEAR coins is capped at 1 billion. The initial token distribution was as follows:

• Seed investors and early adopters: 30%
• Founding team and advisors: 20%
• Ecosystem incentives and rewards: 25%
• NEAR Governance Council: 15%
• Community reserves: 10%

3. Circulation

NEAR coins are currently in circulation on several major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase, and FTX. As of October 2023, the circulating supply of NEAR coins is approximately 770 million, with a market capitalization of over $4 billion.

4. Coin Burning

NEAR employs a coin-burning mechanism to reduce the total supply of coins and increase their scarcity. The NEAR Treasury burns a portion of the transaction fees collected on the NEAR network.

5. Staking and Reward Distribution

NEAR coins can be staked to earn rewards. Stakers receive a share of the transaction fees collected on the network, as well as newly minted NEAR coins. The staking reward rate is determined by the network's inflation rate, which is currently around 5%.

6. Network Capacity

The NEAR network is designed to support high transaction volumes. The use of sharding and other scalability solutions ensures that the network can process thousands of transactions per second. NEAR's scalability allows for the growth of decentralized applications (dApps) and use cases built on the network.