The NEAR Foundation, a Swiss non-profit that helps manage and advance the NEAR protocol, just revealed that the number of people using the NEAR Wallet had increased more than ten times, from 2 million at the beginning of the year to over 20 million at the time of this writing.
The meteoric growth resulted from several factors, including NEAR’s successful cooperation with firms like SWEAT Economy, the most popular workout app in the world, and the rising popularity among developers and creators.
A major partnership
According to the NEAR Foundation, NEAR’s partnership with SWEAT Economy has been a major contributor to the growth of the NEAR Wallet user base. Sweat Economy, The Move-to-Earn platform, has been operational on Web2 since 2016, and its Sweatcoin app has more than 130 million users across the world. The app launched on NEAR Protocol back in September.
The app released its new Web3 SWEAT token to 13.5M holders. Following this, the Sweat Wallet app quickly became the top downloaded finance app in 51 countries. This follows SWEAT’s record-breaking DAO Maker IDO.
Commenting on the recent development, NEAR Foundation CEO Marieke Flament said:
We have put our emphasis on championing talent diversity, regional hub development, and sustainable practices. Equally important to our success is the strategic partnerships we have forged with prominent companies that have done a brilliant job at transitioning from a Web2 business model to Web3.
Major Partnerships
The NEAR protocol has seen some major partnerships this year. Last month, the project announced a new partnership with Google Cloud. Through this collaboration, Google Cloud will be able to supply infrastructure for Near’s Remote Procedure Call node provider to Pagoda, therefore giving “technical support” to Near grant recipients.
Back in May, the protocol partnered with Infura, the leading blockchain development platform of ConsenSys. With the NEAR Network integration, Infura developers are able to have greater access to a carbon-neutral ecosystem with a minimal environmental footprint.
