Near Foundation partners with Alibaba Cloud

The nonprofit Near Foundation, which drives the development of the ecosystem around the Near blockchain project, announced a partnership with Alibaba Cloud. CoinDesk reports this.

The collaboration with the cloud computing division of the Chinese tech giant is aimed at accelerating the growth of Web3-initiatives in Asia and the Middle East.

As a result of the collaboration, Near Foundation gains access to Alibaba Cloud’s regional developer ecosystem to advance the protocol. The company’s infrastructure will allow those who want to run validator nodes in a plug-and-play mode.

Partners will jointly offer RPC services for developers and users. The protocol also implements indexing of several blockchains to provide developers with various API for data requests.

The native NEAR token price over the last 24 hours rose 9% (CoinGecko). The asset trades at around $1.58 — roughly 92% below the January 2022 peak of $20.44.

CoinDesk noted that the announcement followed shortly after the appointment of Alibaba Chairman Joseph Tsai. The entrepreneur is known as an active investor in Web3.

“The partnership between Near Foundation and Alibaba Cloud is significant, as we continue to support Web3 developers. It is also important for developers and validators in Asian markets, as they can use Alibaba Cloud’s comprehensive infrastructure,” said a representative of the Chinese company.

Earlier in March, Near Protocol developers introduced the Blockchain Operation System, which they described as ‘an operating system for blockchains’.