General Guidelines

It is important that content, written by NEAR Protocol contributors, is clear, accurate, and does not mislead people who might consider buying tokens, using NEAR dApps or otherwise participating in the ecosystem.

1. If you publish something with minor factual inaccuracies, we will ask you to fix it as soon as possible.
2. If it has major factual inaccuracies we will ask you to take it down.
3. If it contains either egregious factual inaccuracies (slander etc.) or advertises NEAR tokens as a profit-making investment opportunity, we will ask you to take it down and also ask you to step down from your role as a contributor.

The crypto industry is full of projects that scam users and do not deliver on their promises, and it is important to us that the NEAR Protocol earns the trust of users and the wider crypto community by being truthful, accurate, and refraining from making questionable predictions about the future behavior of the token. protocol, or the team building it that could mislead people.

Some useful things to know:

Near Inc versus NEAR Foundation versus NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol is a decentralized blockchain protocol. This means that it is permissionless, and isn't run by any one entity. Many stakeholders can contribute to the development and governance of the protocol, both now and into the future. The aim of the core development team is that over time more and more stakeholders take part in developing and running the network. In particular, this means it is important to distinguish between three separate entities:

The NEAR Protocol

A permissionless, Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocol that anyone can access, add transactions to, or read from. The public NEAR blockchain is an instantiation of the code at github.com/nearprotocol/nearcore, but theoretically this repo could be forked and deployed as a separate chain, much as many protocols have done to build upon the core Bitcoin code.

The NEAR Foundation

A governance body that oversees the growth and trajectory of the NEAR Protocol. It is a non-profit foundation headquartered in Switzerland, and is responsible for contracting protocol maintainers, funding ecosystem development, and shepherding core governance of the protocol.

Near Inc

A for-profit company that is currently doing most of the core development of the NEAR Protocol. This company is not the only entity doing work on the core protocol, but it is currently the largest. Near Inc does not own or run the NEAR Protocol; rather, it completes development work as an external entity. In the future this may not be the case; core protocol development may be done by one or more other entities. This company currently employs Alex and Illia (the cofounders) and other major contributors.

Please make sure that when you refer to any of these entities that you make it clear which you are referring to. For example, do not say:

The NEAR Protocol released a new testnet.

when what you mean is:

Alex and Illia and the team at Near Inc released a new NEAR Protocol testnet.