NEAR

What is a blockchain?

A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree ). The timestamp proves that the transaction data existed when the block was published in order to get into its hash. As blocks each contain information about the block previous to it, they form a chain, with each additional block reinforcing the ones before it.

Therefore, blockchains are resistant to modification of their data because once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks.

What is NEAR blockchain?

The major difference between NEAR and ETH 2.0 is that NEAR uses a single chain that shards each block, instead of having a separate beacon chain. Each block produced contains “chunks” that are processed by a different subset of nodes. This allows us to ensure data availability for transactions in each shard on the consensus level and easily mitigate any shard-level attacks. And at the same time, it provides cross-shard communication that arrives in one block to the other shard - allowing to remove the need for developers to understand shards.