NEAR will release a simplified Version of the Night Shadow protocol in November, entering Sharding Phase 0: According to NEAR, over the next year, NEAR will undergo several major upgrades and add many new features, and once sharding is complete, NEAR will be exponentially faster, safer and able to seamlessly host millions of users. According to NEAR, phase 0 is the initial stage. NEAR will fragment the state, but not the processing. NEAR will divide the current state into four fragments, while still allowing all validation nodes to track all fragments.

NEAR announced the launch of a $800 million endowment for ecological development, of which $250 million in ecological funds will be distributed over 4 years; $100 million will go to regional funds; $100 million will be earmarked for startups. In addition, DeFi will be a key focus of the initiative, with Proximity Labs providing a $350 million earmarked fund that will be managed by a newly created "DeFi DAO" through which the agreement will be able to apply for liquidity mining project funding. Proximity is an early group of NEAR contributors who were separated from their parent company as independent entities and received funding from the NEAR Foundation. According to NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, the program has allocated $45 million in funding this year, focusing on early ecosystem building.

Octopus Network, A multi-chain cryptographic network built based on NEAR, recently completed $5 million series A financing. Continue, Youbi, DCG, GFSVentures, Vestigium, Autonomous Capital, LCG Ventures, Bluehelix, Finance Ventures, Jubi Lab, GTA Venture, Gains Associates, Aussie Capital, K300 Ventures, Mayor Capital, NetZero Capital, ELEVATE, Chainridge, Mega Ventures, VIC Group, Jigsaw, OIG Ventures, Bigcoin Capital, Meridian Capital, Westorm, Move Capital (Angel DAO), Gate. Debio, Myriad Social and Discovol also participated in the round.

NEAR plans to establish a DAO of 200 million ecological funds to accelerate the decentralized ecological construction: NEAR founder Yilong put forward the proposal of building Ecosystem Treasury DAO (Ecosystem Treasury DAO) at the NEAR Governance Forum on June 17. The proposal includes options for DAO members, the NEAR Foundation will provide up to 200 million NEAR and potential funding distribution directions. The proposal is now being solicited from the community, and if there are no significant problems by June 30, a ballot will be opened for the initial members of the Ecological Funding DAO.

NEAR release introduces the future development and work plan roadmap, 1 ~ 2 years is a simplified version of the content contains needs to be completed within this year the night shadow shard uplines, increase the number of node provids validation protocol, improve the performance of a single shard, and the next few years deliveries of Gas price auction, the night shadow protocol, improvement, such as planning for the development contract.

NEAR confirmed the opening of Rainbow Bridge on the main net at the end of March; NEAR releases EVM roadmap, expected to be released on testnet in Q2.

NEAR has partnered with The Graph to introduce its indexing and query services; NEAR joins Chinese blockchain services network BSN.

Dragonfly Capital has long invested in NEAR and joined the Validation Node Advisory Board. The NFT collectible card project Paras is published on NEAR Mainnet

OWC incubator 1Inch has raised $12 million in funding led by Pantera Capital.

Mintbase, the NFT trading platform, will be deployed on the NEAR platform and receive million-dollar funding. TUSD, an old compliance stablesoin project, has entered into cooperation with NEAR, which is the first stablesoin to enter NEAR. Berry Club is NEAR's first DeFi+NFT game app. NEAR works with 1Inch to introduce the next generation of AMM tools.

The NEAR main network smoothly transitioned to the second stage with the transfer function enabled. NEAR has partnered with decentralized exchange Balancer.

The NEAR mainnet enters its first phase to achieve decentralization. NEAR partnered with Flux to introduce the first DeFi protocol.

NEAR has crowdfunded over $30 million through Coinlist; NEAR announces the list of validation node advisory committees, and Bison Trails, Hashquark, Spark Mine Pools and other well-known institutions are on the list. NEAR on-line the first DeFi protocol and decentralized application Flux.

NEAR announces its International Accelerator Open Network Collection (OWC) for start-up blockchain companies.

NEAR received $21.6 million in funding led by A16z.

NEAR main network creation block is generated and enters POA stage.

NEAR has raised a $12 million funding round led by Metastable Capital and Leave Ice.

Yilong and Alex co-founded NEAR Protocol.