NEAR is an open-source, decentralized platform with the potential to change how systems are designed, how applications are built and how the web itself works. It is a complex technology with a simple goal — allow developers and entrepreneurs to easily and sustainably build applications which secure high value assets like money and identity while making them performant and usable enough for consumers to access. NEAR provides a community-operated cloud infrastructure for deploying and running decentralized applications.  It combines the features of a decentralized database with others of a serverless compute platform. The token which allows this platform to run also enables applications built on top of it to interact with each other in new ways.  Together, these features allow developers to create censorship resistant back-ends for applications that deal with high stakes data like money, identity and assets and open-state components which interact seamlessly with each other. NEAR’s token economy is built around the NEAR token, a unit of value on the platform that enables token holders to use applications on NEAR, participate in network governance, and earn token rewards by staking to the network.