What happened
Sturdy cryptocurrency Near Protocol (NEAR -5.21%) was doing better than many of its brethren on Monday. As of mid-afternoon, it was up by over 6% in price over the preceding 24 hours. The rise was fueled mainly by an important new deal its developer announced with a major Asian tech company.
So what
Earlier that day, the developer -- Near Foundation -- announced that it had entered a partnership with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. Specifically, the developer will be teaming with the company's Alibaba Cloud unit to provide a set of tech functionalities. These include remote procedure calls and multichain data indexing.
Also covered in the Near-Alibaba deal is an agreement to collaborate on developing tools to build decentralized applications (dApps) to be hosted on blockchains like Near Protocol's. These will presumably be used by Alibaba to bolster its considerable e-commerce offerings.
In return, Near Protocol will be able to offer the infrastructure of Alibaba Cloud to developers building on its blockchain.
On its official blog, Near Foundation wrote that the Alibaba arrangement "proves that Near Protocol's technology has the capabilities to truly lift the restrictions surrounding Web3 development to allow more creators to build exciting applications while also helping to onboard billions of Web2 users to the possibility of Web3."
Now what
The financial particulars of Near Protocol's deal with Alibaba were not provided, making it tough to estimate how it will impact the former's results. Regardless, Alibaba is quite the heavyweight in the e-commerce world, opening the possibility for the cryptocurrency to benefit in numerous ways. Investors were right to cheer the news.
