Zug, November 8th, 2022 – Bitcoin Suisse today announced the full support of NEAR as part of their offering for their institutional investor base. The technology pioneer and enabler of the Swiss crypto ecosystem is the first custodial crypto-financial services provider worldwide to allow institutional users secure access to the NEAR blockchain. Geared towards organizations, external asset managers and family offices, the offering includes custody, staking and brokerage of NEAR, the native token of the protocol.

Like Ethereum, NEAR protocol is a proof-of-stake blockchain that acts as a layer on which decentralized applications (dApps), smart contracts and other blockchain-based functions are deployed. In April 2022, the platform launched after a USD 350 million funding round, focusing on scalability and usability for both developers and users. The native token of the NEAR protocol, NEAR, is used to pay transaction fees and storage fees.

NEAR’s innovative sharding mechanism called Nightshade enables the open-source protocol to process transaction data more efficiently. By splitting up the workload over multiple shards, up to 100’000 transactions per second (TPS) can be reached. Other key use cases include access to decentralized finance (DeFi) and the deployment of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as well as of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Michael Gauckler, Head of Innovation at Bitcoin Suisse, said: “We always strive to innovate for the benefit of our clients and provide early access to major developments within the crypto space. The NEAR protocol is a very promising project in the industry, and we are proud to be a trusted partner of the NEAR Foundation. Institutional demand for accessing independent DeFi solutions on major blockchain ecosystems is growing further. Innovative collaborations like these enable us to further sharpen our offering towards the needs of our growing institutional clientele.”

Marieke Flament, CEO of NEAR Foundation, added: “We put usability first in our mission to change the world with Web3 in a sustainable and inclusive way. The comprehensive offering by a trusted and experienced custodial provider like Bitcoin Suisse aligns with this goal, as it enables institutional users to participate securely in the NEAR ecosystem - while helping to bring us closer to mass adoption for Web3.”

Read more about NEAR in a dedicated article of our Fundamentals series here.