How I choose a Blockchain

How do you pick a blockchain?
Does it matter , Won’t we all be going cross-chain anyway?

These are all reasonable questions. When you start to delve into Web 3.0 and all of the associated blockchains, layer 1s, layer 2s and, dare I say, layer 0s, it can become a touch overwhelming. Just as you start to get your head around Ethereum, Polygon, or Near, you find yourself in a conversation with a friend or fellow builder and they start talking about Binance, Solana, or Tezos. All of a sudden you feel like a beginner again desperately trying to keep up.

More relevant questions might be:

What does our business need? Who are our users? What experience do we want our users to have? What do we stand for as a company?

We didn’t rush the decision and we thought about it entirely from the point of view of the needs of the company, and by that I mean the needs of our users, both clients (venues) and customers (audiences). So, what does NEAR offer and why does it suit The Round, the live entertainment industry, and the Metaverse?

Certified Carbon Neutral
For the entertainment industry, particularly the live entertainment industry this is huge. For a long time, bad press about the environmental impact of Blockchain tech has made people think that it is the most damaging thing for the environment since the burning of fossil fuels. Quite rightly this bad press has made the live entertainment industry very hesitant to engage, most top tier companies have targets they have to hit to ensure they are carbon neutral or even carbon negative. NEAR proves you can work on the blockchain and not cause the end of the world as we know it, which is not only very important to The Round from a moral standpoint but it is also good for business.

Consistently low gas fees and very fast transaction times
Yes, we are building a Web 3.0 platform, but it is vital for our users that the experience is accessible and familiar. Massively fluctuating gas fees on, say, Ethereum are a real issue. Either it makes it impossible to build a sensible business model if you absorb the fees into your costs, or if you ask your users to pay the fees they have an awful experience when they don’t know the final price of purchase, making them have to wait and guess when the fees will drop when there is less demand of the network. We have decided that we will absorb gas fees hiding the ‘Blockchain’ behind our UI, therefore consistently low gas fees are vital.

The need for very fast transaction times is self-evident. A mainstream user will simply not wait 30 minutes for a transaction to be validated, and if you ask them to, they will feel like they are being scammed, simple as that!

Scalability through Nightshade, NEAR’s sharding mechanism
Sharding involves splitting a blockchain into multiple pieces, or shards, and storing them in different places. By storing the data across different computers, the computational burden on each can be reduced.

NEAR’s Nightshade Sharding allows NEAR Protocol to scale linearly with the number of shards, thereby having the ability to satisfy the demand for transactions as more and more users are join the NEAR ecosystem.

When you are dealing with the entertainment industry you have got to be thinking of an audience not of a few thousand, not of tens of thousands, not even of hundreds of thousands but of millions. Millions of simultaneous users coming together for a live event in the Metaverse. If you aren’t in that mindset then you will not succeed. We believe that AR has the potential to be the TV of the future: a mainstream platform for live entertainment in every corner of the world. NEAR’s sharding technology makes this possible on the blockchain without any impact on the platform’s performance. Which is huge.

These are the main reasons we chose NEAR. Now, I know there are a lot of great chains and they all offer something unique and, to quote my American friends and colleagues, ‘compelling’. However, only NEAR appears to be answering the needs of the entertainment industry and its audiences in a way that is sustainable for massive expansion around the world. And, this is why we choose them. Sure, they haven’t got the huge names attached that some other chains may have, sure they aren’t as well known and most of the NFT buyers are elsewhere, but that doesn’t matter. Most of the audience isn’t on-chain yet and NEAR is the most prepared for explosive growth and mainstream adoption, in a way that other blockchains can’t compete with.As I said earlier, it is impossible to know everything about every chain and I, nor any of my team, pretend to. So if you disagree please let me know and if there are other great solutions out there we would love to hear.

The future genuinely is cross-chain and interoperable so in time none of this may matter anyway but today we are placing our bets on the NEAR protocol.