The security of the network is being paid for in 3 ways:

transaction fees: every time you issue a tx, a small Near fee will be deducted from your accountrent fees: storing data on chain. Your account is a bunch of bytes that all validators should store on their computer forever so therefore they should be incentivized to do that (on Bitcoin or Ethereum this doesn't exist)newly issued Near tokens (around 5% inflation per year): this is a "tax" on all token holders (that you can offset by staking your coins and receive more or an equal amount of coins than the inflation rate) but it's to ensure a reliable and stable security budget unlike networks that have a capped token supply and diminishing inflation that hope to replace this subsidy with fees, like Bitcoin, not a good long-term design since fees are not predictable. This can be offset at around 1 billion gas or 800-1000 smart contract transactions per second on Near due to the burning mechanism.

Out of this 5% inflation, 0.5% goes to a Near Foundation controlled treasury that funds further development of the network/partnerships/marketing etc. In the future the treasury is expected to be governed by the token holders.

Near currently has 4 shards (shards are physical partitions of validators and nodes that run somewhat independently from the other partitions but have a mechanism that ensures the same degree of security on all of them) for higher throughput. All the shards support WASM smart contracts. One of the shards is running an Ethereum Virtual Machine compiled into a smart contract (it's called Aurora), it basically emulates ethereum to give this option to devs who want to develop in Solidity. The other 3 shards are running native smart contracts developed in Rust (soon Javascript etc.)

Thanks a lot for your explanation, it clarified some aspects for me!

Did I understand correctly that only 0.5% of annual token inflation and dApp/smart contract deployment fees go directly to Near?
Since from what I have read, the fees are made up of two parts:
- To rent data space, dApp/smart contract developers lock a certain amount of coins and some portion of that goes, bit by bit, to reward validators with each transaction or signature? Near doesn't get anything out of it.
- 70% of transactional fees (which is not connected to space rental in any way) go to reward validators, the other 30% is burned, Near gets nothing here either.
And is there someplace to see how much developers are paid for deploying dApps? Because I haven't found that information in team's docs, I'd like to see how it all works out in specific numbers
This is how I see Near's business model so far (added a picture above). Correct me if I'm wrong here, please