By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
BitGo will provide custody services for the NEAR Foundation, the first time NEAR is plunging into institutional investing.
Digital asset trust company and security platform BitGo is partnering with The NEAR Foundation on a blockchain initiative. Pursuant to the collaboration, BitGo will provide support for NEAR’s network, assets, and the NEAR native token, NEAR. The NEAR Foundation will also custody its own treasury with BitGo.
Collaboration between NEAR & BitGo
The NEAR Foundation chief executive officer Marieke Flament touched on the new partnership between both platforms. This is the foundation’s first significant foray into the world of institutional investments. According to her, it is proof of NEAR’s commitment to expanding its ecosystem.
BitGo Vice President of Product Nuri Chang also commented on the platform’s projected close working relationship with The NEAR Foundation. According to Chang:
“By nature of our business, it’s really important for us to capture and support all the leading blockchains in the entire industry.”
In addition, the BitGo VP also stated that developers working on projects, including protocols and exchanges, will be privy to BitGo’s resources. Among other things, this includes the ability to launch support for NEAR using BitGo’s programmatic wallets. As Chang explained:
“We’re also building BitGo staking support for NEAR in and of itself. What that means is clients can stake NEAR directly from a BitGo wallet with literally a few clicks.”
In a media session, Chang revealed that BitGo is looking forward to supporting NEAR’s ecosystem. This is largely due to the latter’s intrinsic technology features which hold great appeal to developers.
As part of the deal, BitGo will also provide custody services for NEAR’s treasury. This will include a staking part of the treasury using BitGo’s hot and custodial wallets. However, the institutional crypto custody firm did not specify the number of NEAR tokens it would hold.
NEAR Antecedents
Over the past year, NEAR has launched a series of projects, especially around cross-chain interoperability. For instance, back in April 2021, the non-profit foundation launched Rainbow Bridge. This initiative allowed users to transfer ERC-20 tokens between the Ethereum and NEAR blockchains. Furthermore, in June of the same year, NEAR joined ICON Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP). This was done to facilitate sending native tokens, contract calls, and data to BTP Partners, including Polkadot (DOT). In addition, NEAR also launched cross-chain compatibility with the Cardano stablecoin Ardana (DANA). Furthermore, NEAR launched Aurora, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocol.
NEAR
The NEAR Foundation is a Switzerland-based non-profit in charge of sustainable development on its native NEAR protocol. This NEAR protocol is an open-source platform for decentralized applications founded in 2018 by Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin. According to research conducted in January this year by The Block, the NEAR ecosystem had 213 projects and companies across 14 verticals.
BitGo
BitGo is a leading Bitcoin and blockchain security platform that launched the sector’s first multi-sig Bitcoin wallet. Apart from keeping BTC safe from theft and other security breaches, BitGo also offers portfolio management and corporate treasury.