I only learned this after getting burned.
NEAR accounts can use easy-to-remember names (like alice.near), rather than just a long string of random characters.
Sharding means that different shards each handle a portion of the transactions, allowing the network’s processing capacity to increase as the number of shards grows.
$NEAR is the native token of the NEAR Protocol, used to pay transaction fees and for staking on the network.
Anything else to add? Let us know in the comments.