Decentralized applications startup Near Inc. today announced a $21 million token raise alongside the launch of its Protocol MainNet.

The token funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z fund. It’s the fund’s first investment after the firm announced April 30 that it had raised $515 million for its second blockchain and cryptocurrency fund. Other investors included Pantera Capital, Libertus, Blockchange, Animal Ventures, Distributed Global and Notation Capital.

Founded in 2018, Near is the company behind the NEAR Protocol, a scalable blockchain designed to provide the high performance and user experience that it claims will bridge the gap to mainstream adoption of decentralized applications.

A decentralized application is one that runs on distributed computing systems, usually blockchains such as Ethereum. In theory, Dapps are meant to have the advantage of fault tolerance and the backing of a distributed network that makes it difficult to attack while also providing users reliable service.

The NEAR Protocol is a shared, so-called proof-of-stake blockchain that is said to be the easiest in the world for both developers and their end-users while still providing the scalability necessary to serve its users. According to The Block Crypto, NEAR is similar to Ethereum 2.0 as it makes use of sharding, a method that breaks down the blockchain into servers or shards. “Instead of processing all network transactions, each node only processes transactions for a particular shard, allowing more transactions to move in a given time,” the report noted.

Near’s new release, called MainNet: POA is said to be the first fully sharded, fully operational proof-of -take blockchain platform to run on an open MainNet.

“The significance of MainNet: POA is that developers can now create production end-user-facing applications atop the smart contract platform running on the NEAR Protocol blockchain and the state of these applications is guaranteed to persist going forward, which crucially differentiates it from a TestNet release,” the company said in a blog post.

Including previous funding, Near has raised $33.1 million to date. Previous investors include Greenfield One, Coinbase Ventures, Amplify Partners, Homebrew, Arrington XRP Capital, Accomplice, MetaStable Capital, IOSG Ventures and Xpring.

Image: Near