Key Takeaways:
- The NEAR Foundation and Alibaba Cloud have partnered to expedite Web3 development in Asia and the Middle East by accessing Alibaba Cloud’s developer ecosystem.
- NEAR Protocol’s native token, NEAR, plays a vital role in its ecosystem, and the partnership led to a positive market reaction with a 14% surge in NEAR’s price.
- The partnership will provide developers with “plug-and-play” infrastructure, Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), and multi-chain indexing on Alibaba Cloud.
The NEAR Foundation, which spearheads the development of the NEAR protocol’s ecosystem, has revealed its collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud services arm of Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba. This collaboration is aimed at propelling Web3 growth in Asia and the Middle East.
Through this partnership, the NEAR Foundation will gain entry into Alibaba Cloud’s extensive developer ecosystem in these regions. This will facilitate developers to build on the NEAR protocol with greater ease.

NEAR Protocol is a decentralized application platform that aims to make apps usable on the web while still giving users control of their assets. NEAR’s native token, NEAR, is central to the ecosystem, allowing users to pay for transactions and computational services, and is often used for governance voting within the platform.
Alibaba Cloud will offer a “plug-and-play” infrastructure service to those keen on launching NEAR validators. The collaboration will also see the introduction of Remote Procedure Calls (RPC).
Moreover, there will be and multi-chain indexing as services to developers and users, making it easier to read data from blockchains and execute transactions across different networks. The NEAR Blockchain Operating System (BOS), which was launched earlier, will be accessible for developers on Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure.
This will enable them to build and communicate within the ecosystem. The market responded positively to this announcement, with the price of NEAR token witnessing a surge of over 14%.
This partnership is timely as Alibaba has recently appointed Joseph Tsai as Chairman, who is renowned for his Web3 investments and has been involved in multiple crypto-related deals. Raymond Xiao, head of international Web3 solutions at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, emphasized the significance of this partnership for developers and validators in Asia, leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s comprehensive infrastructure.
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