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Welcome to the Documentation!
Near documentation for Ruby developers. Guide how to create Ruby-On-Rails web application with NEAR protocol integration. Guide covers common use cases: login with near, reading status, creating transaction.
A blockchain is a particular type of irreversible distributed ledger which combines aspects of both computation and data storage. Each new block that is added contains modifications to the state of the ledger that has been agreed upon by the consensus of the distributed nodes which run the network.
These ledgers allow for a large number of participants to permissionless but collaboratively manage extremely large amounts of value (Bitcoin is worth >$100B) entirely through basic crypto-economic incentives.
While it is intellectually interesting to explore the theory and technology behind blockchains, it is not necessary to do this in order to build, test, and deploy apps. Similarly, you don't need to understand how fault-tolerant commodity computes clusters work inside AWS, GCP, or Azure in order to deploy an app to these clouds. Focus on the code! We've made it easy.
You may have heard of distributed computing, databases, or computer networks, all of which play a role in blockchains.
Currently, most web-services utilize a single server and a single database to process your request and provide information. This infrastructure is usually managed by an individual entity who treats all of their data processing like a black box: the request goes in, something happens, and the user receives an output.
While the company may rely on third parties to verify those claims, the user will never be able to verify what happened in the black box. This system relies on trust between users and companies.
NEAR is similar in principle to the “cloud-based” infrastructure that developers currently build applications on top of, except that the cloud is no longer controlled by a single company running a giant data center — that data center is actually made up of all the people around the world who are operating nodes on the decentralized network. Instead of a “company-operated cloud,” it's a “community-operated cloud.”
To set the stage, we’re building a “base-layer blockchain,” or a layer-one, meaning that it’s on the same level of the ecosystem as projects like Ethereum or Cosmos. That means everything in the ecosystem is built on top of the NEAR blockchain, including your application.
- watch Blockchain 101 Onramp: Deconstructing the Blockchain Ecosystem
- watch What are Decentralized Applications and How Do They Work?
- watch The Design of Blockchain-Based Apps
- watch But how does Bitcoin actually work? by 3Blue1Brown
- read The Beginner’s Guide to the NEAR Blockchain
- [ read ] Blockchain Infrastructure Landscape: A First Principles Framing
- [ read ] a16z Crypto Glossary
- [ read ] a16z Crypto Canon