Alexander Skidanov is a software engineer and entrepreneur best known for his role as Co-founder of NEAR protocol, a layer-1 blockchain protocol that allows the creation and execution of decentralized applications and smart contracts. ^[1][2]

Education

Alex Skidanov studied for his Masters degree in Computer Science at the Izhevsk State Technical University (ISTU). ^[2]

Career

Alex served as a Software Developer at Microsoft from October 2009 to April 2011. In May 2011 he moved to the role of a Senior Software Developer at MemSQL and then he was promoted to Director of Engineering in 2013 until July 2016. ^[2]

NEAR Protocol

Alex co-founded Near Protocol in 2017 alongside Illia Polosukhin Originally called "Near.ai", NEAR protocol targets the scalability problem of traditional blockchains through the implementation of sharding. Sharding is a method used to reduce the computational load on the network by dividing it into smaller parts, called shards. Each node in the network only runs the code that is relevant to its specific shard, allowing the different shards to process information in parallel. This enables the network to handle more transactions and increase scalability as the number of nodes in the network grows. ^[3]

On January 30, 2024, NEAR Protocol announced the testing launch for Phase 2 of Sharding. Phase 2 introduces fundamental upgrades to NEAR’s core protocol architecture, enabling greater scalability and decentralization for the network. It also introduces a change to the implementation of stateless validation: an innovative approach to state change, or the process of updating the status of all the data posted to the blockchain. ^[3]

NEAR Token

$NEAR is the native token used in the NEAR Protocol. The token is used for paying transaction fees, and for storage, and it can be staked by holders to participate in validating transactions and reaching network consensus. ^[4]

The NEAR token helps secure the network, it provides a unit of account used for processing transactions and storing data, and it serves as a medium of exchange. ^[4]