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The NEAR community’s big-picture vision has always been straightforward — onboard billions of people into Web3. In this new iteration of the Internet, blockchain platforms and apps will be decentralized, open-source, transparent, and humane. This Open Web will be full of utility, encouraging maximum participation from developers and end-users. 

Web3 won’t be dependent on central authorities to access services like social media, games, Metaverse experiences, and more. Decentralization, coupled with permissionless systems (i.e, open or public smart contracts), will give people a greater sense of ownership, control, and protection over their data in alignment with the financial outcomes of decentralized apps (dapps). With this regulatory foundation—or governance, as it is referred to in crypto—humanity can evolve into a new era of borderless economic opportunity for all. 

A future built on creativity, community, and inclusivity requires a core based on interoperability between blockchains. There is no single blockchain that will own Web3. NEAR and other blockchain communities understand that the future is multi-chain, and bridges and decentralization are critical to getting there. 

Rainbow Bridge: the first step toward a multi-chain future

Enter Rainbow Bridge, one of the first fully permissionless, decentralized, and openly accessible bridges in the crypto-sphere. Almost a year after launch, Rainbow Bridge has more than a dozen projects utilizing this technical infrastructure.

In connecting NEAR and Ethereum, Rainbow Bridge is a major first step toward the multi-chain future, allowing developers to use NEAR’s fast, simple, and low-cost transaction network to move assets back and forth between the two protocols. Crucially, Rainbow Bridge gives NEAR users access to familiar projects on Ethereum.

The development of Rainbow Bridge evolved, as many blockchain projects do, out of a necessity to solve an immediate engineering problem: how does a project on a separate blockchain migrate its services to another without having to rebuild the entire product from scratch. Thanks to NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge, any token or Dapp that uses Ethereum’s Virtual Machine can run on NEAR. With this capability in place, the NEAR ecosystem is able to integrate ERC20 with native NEAR solutions. Anyone can use NEAR as a technical backend while operating in the Ethereum ecosystem. The NEAR-ETH Rainbow Bridge is entirely permissionless and decentralized. No single entity controls it.

With Rainbow Bridge, NEAR effectively becomes a collaborative Layer 2 solution for existing applications and assets deployed on Ethereum. In addition to solving the problem of high gas fees and barriers to entry and scaling, NEAR brings about an additional value proposition: it’s incredibly easy to use and simple to get to grips with.

Rainbow Bridge advances NEAR’s larger goal of advancing Web3 to create a more open and inclusive internet and financial ecosystem. The key is to empower NEAR community members to operate in a high quality, scalable, and self-sufficient manner.

Pagoda: accelerating ideation to application for Web3

For developers looking to use Rainbow Bridge or other bridges, the NEAR community offers a number of projects, tools, and resources to get started. 

Pagoda, the first-ever Web3 startup platform, gives developers and entrepreneurs access to interactive tutorials, scalable infrastructure, and operational analytics that are Web3 native. Using Pagoda’s Developer Console, tools and resources can be found at every layer of the stack, from the base blockchain protocol all the way up to the application and marketing and distribution layers. Aurora, the builders of Rainbow Bridge, also offers a number of resources on their website to developers looking to build atop their EVM. 

With this technical foundation, NEAR has already begun its journey of creating a network of interoperable blockchains.

Other bridges and collaborative partnerships

NEAR is, at its core, an ecosystem. The technology is just one part of the equation, with the platform’s true infrastructure being its self-directed, decentralized community. Human decisions are the heartbeat of NEAR and its partnerships. 

A number of exciting projects are already showcasing the collaborative efforts happening within the vibrant NEAR ecosystem. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Aurora

A turnkey solution for developers seeking to extend their dapps to reach additional markets, Aurora uses a number of NEAR’s core technologies, including sharding and developer gas fee remuneration. 

The solution consists of two core components. The first is the Aurora Engine, which allows for the seamless deployment of Solidity and Vyper smart contracts. The second is the Aurora Bridge. Based on NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge technology, Aurora Bridge enables the permissionless transfer of tokens and data between Ethereum and Aurora.

Allbridge

In December 2021, Allbridge announced an integration between Aurora and Terra, an open-source stablecoin network controlled by its stakeholders. The connection between the two networks brings Terra liquidity to the Aurora ecosystem.

As a modular and expanding token bridge with on-chain consensus, Allbridge provides a fast, affordable, and secure way to move liquidity between EVM, non-EVM, and L2 blockchains. Allbridge’s mission is to make the blockchain world borderless, with the ability to freely move assets across different networks. 

Octopus Network

A decentralized network natively built on NEAR Protocol, Octopus provides out-of-box security, interoperability, and on-chain governance to projects that are creating application-specific blockchains (appchains) for their open web applications.

Built around the $OCT Token, Octopus Network functions as a composable means by which applications can operate with different security parameters on NEAR. Octopus Network Relay runs a smart contract on NEAR, which provides infrastructure for a validator network that brings partners together.

Woo Network

In December 2021, NEAR Foundation and WOO Network completed a $5M token swap to create a partnership between the two projects. Think of this partnership, in which NEAR and WOO Network share tokens, as a symbolic bridge of sorts. 

For the NEAR community, WOO Network provides a liquidity ecosystem that connects traders, exchanges, institutions, and DeFi platforms with access to liquidity, trading execution, and yield-generating strategies. For Woo Network, NEAR provides a carbon-neutral, high-scalability platform built on a proof-of-stake, layer-1 blockchain.

Roadmap for connecting new networks

The future is collaborative — a web of blockchain protocols and decentralized projects working together to build Web3. While NEAR wants to be the onramp for a billion users, the community also wants to help enable all ships to rise to meet the challenge of onboarding the world to Web3. And the NEAR ecosystem has the grants funding, technical infrastructure, and community resources and tools to help make this happen. 

In October 2021, the NEAR ecosystem announced a $800M grants fund to accelerate the development of its blockchain. Of this $800M, the largest allocation — $350M from Proximity Labs — will go towards developing the protocol’s DeFi sector. A DeFi DAO will govern how these funds are spent. These grant funds will be absolutely crucial in connecting with new networks for the multi-chain Web3 future. 

On March 2, 2022, NEAR announced a new partnership with Multichain, the most popular bridging platform in the crypto space, which supports more than 1,600 tokens, hundreds of millions of dollars in daily transactions, and 540,000 users. As a bridge operator, Multichain has developed the technology for all blockchains to interoperate. With this partnership, NEAR’s user-friendly interfaces and tools are now extendable across the entire Web3 ecosystem. The partnership is a meaningful step forward towards the advancement of a global network of open Web 3 platforms.

A decentralized future begins with the right infrastructure. NEAR is committed to enabling the tools to ground this vision in reality, right now.

The NEAR network is reimagining how decentralized applications and platforms are built, playing a major role in transforming the internet from the centralized Web2 to an open-source, community-driven Web3. Amidst the NEAR community’s growth and continued decentralization, its guild system has emerged as a significant contributor to building more open, interconnected, and collaborative projects within the NEAR ecosystem. 

Let’s take a look at what NEAR Guilds are up to in 2022, and why the Guild system is so vital to NEAR’s continued success. 

Decentralizing NEAR’s development and growth

Within the NEAR ecosystem, Guilds are communities that work towards common, specific goals, from the core protocol development to the projects being built atop it. The current roster of Guilds spans multiple continents and numerous industries. 

The Guild system’s growing capability, size, and diversity is crucial to the NEAR blockchain and ecosystem future development. Guilds are already helping decentralize NEAR’s operations and growth by enabling smaller teams of developers to work together to improve different aspects of the protocol.

In other words, many small groups of NEAR community members, enthusiasts and entrepreneurs with a variety 0f professional experiences and skill sets, are collaborating on specific goals to build, maintain, and improve the NEAR ecosystem. 

Introducing the NEAR Guilds community

The NEAR Guilds community consists of more than 73 projects, each with its own vision and mission. Let’s take a look at four Guilds that are working across different industries to further develop the NEAR ecosystem. 

Data Guild

Data Guild is on a mission to increase visibility of the NEAR protocol and ecosystem by creating tools and products that NEAR community members can easily use. The Data Guild essentially works to expand the accessibility of NEAR data infrastructure, tools, and resources for all contributors. It does this by bringing together open web contributors who can create resources that provide trustworthy data. 

Some of the team’s biggest achievements include gathering leaders of NEAR data projects to coordinate collaborations with other guilds. The Data Guild is doing this through subgraph tutorials; contributing directly to several data products, including nearstats.com and DAOstats.io; and successfully onboarding and promoting leading developers and data projects, including Dapplooker, stats.gallery, soda.com, finear.xyz, and Metrics Dao. 

James Waugh, Coordinator of NEAR Data Guild, explains that the community could use more clarity on governance of the Guilds program as well as NEAR Foundation’s involvement with DAOs. 

“Guilds are coordinating to support the NEAR ecosystem via better community governance,” says Waugh. ‘We are looking forward to more guilds and DAOs using NEAR data.” 

The Legal Guild’s ultimate goal? Reshape how legal services are provided in the crypto industry. 

“We believe that the empowerment of the community is key for building in a decentralized world,”  the Legal Guild’s mission reads. “Our playbooks, use cases, and expertise are a manifestation of our mission: to help blockchain-based projects navigate complex legal issues.”

CuraDAO

CuraDAO is an art studio that aims to launch and develop in-house creative projects in collaboration with creatives and partners. CuraDAO’s goal is to be an engineering-driven guild—one that explores and experiments with smart contracts for creative purposes. The guild has an emphasis on design and is exploring ways to creatively use NFTs. 

In terms of challenges, the team is competing for creative talent with both Web2 platforms and other Web3 blockchains. This will get better with time, as developers from both domains realize how easy, fast, and cheap it is to build on  NEAR.

“NEAR has a strong vision for community and culture [and] guilds are a great representation,” said Yassine Sania, a founding member at CuraDAO. “We see a guild as an organized community that can leverage crypto tools for decision-making and value creation.”

CleanNFTs

CleanNFTs is a collective within the NEAR ecosystem whose mission is to educate and raise awareness about energy-efficient blockchains and environmentally-friendly NFT (non-fungible token) platforms. 

After assembling on Discord in 2021 to discuss issues with Ethereum’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) energy usage, this guild of artists and NFT aficionados ramping up its community education efforts at minimizing the environmental impacts of NFT minting. The guild does this by curating information and reading resources on its website. 

The CleanNFTs guild operates under a general consensus: that NFTs themselves do not produce carbon emissions but some cryptocurrencies use energy-intensive resources for mining. CleanNFTs members also agree that the NFT art platforms running on more energy-efficient Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks are, at present, the most environmentally-sustainable option for creating NFTs. 

A brief look at NEAR Hub, NEAR’s virtual world 

Beyond the NEAR Guilds ecosystem, community contributors also created NEAR Hub, a metaverse (or, NEARverse) that allows users to log into a virtual experience using just their NEAR wallets, with a clear focus on user control and ownership over their data and assets. 

The idea for NEAR Hub came from the Human Guild, a guild started in 2021 that is focused on supporting Web3 games building on NEAR. According to their website, the Human Guild is dedicated to establishing strongly-knit crypto communities, onboarding newcomers, and ushering in what it calls the “gaming revolution.”

“Everybody should be able to earn by doing what they love. The mission is to help people getting paid in crypto and getting involved in the online economy,” said Aliaksandr (Sasha) Hudzilin, co-founder of the guild.

NEAR Hub received funding from the Human Guild and launched in December 2021. The platform offers its metaverse experience through its product, “Rooms”, which users can enter with their avatar. Each Room experience is themed and built around a certain idea or collaboration with a partner project or guild in the NEAR ecosystem. 

NEAR Hub’s goal is to onboard new users and make it “a portal to everything in the NEAR ecosystem,” according to co-founders @chronear and Jeff G. The platform is meant to be a space for users to learn about all aspects of NEAR from education, gaming, NFTs, decentralized finance, and infrastructure projects. 

The Hub is significant because it is trying to make decentralized application interactions more meaningful for users by giving them the chance to hang out with other community members, build networks, and express themselves creatively in the process.

NEAR Guilds moving forward

NEAR’s guild system is playing a vital role in the growth and further decentralization of the NEAR ecosystem. Each of the current guilds has a unique mission and purpose, doing what it can to develop different aspects of NEAR.

The number of guilds also continues to grow on a regular basis, as more teams of passionate NEAR enthusiasts band together to join NEAR’s road to decentralization.  Over time, Guilds may evolve to adapt to new developments on the NEAR protocol and the wider Web3 network. 

To stay current on the NEAR Guilds popping up on the ecosystem, check out Guild News. Want to build your own? Learn how at the Start a Guild page. 

One of NEAR Foundation’s core missions has been to create a network that empowers users to take control of their data, their finances, and the tools to govern. 

In the web3 world, this idea can be neatly summed up by one word: decentralization. This is a process whereby control and the tools to create and reimagine everything from business to creativity are progressively handed over to the contributors. 

The NEAR Foundation has been steadily progressing in this mission, from the growing number of validators to the flourishing DAO community. But NEAR isn’t alone on this journey. It relies on projects in and around the ecosystem to help accelerate this mission. Enter Aurora.    

This project, started originally by a core team of NEAR developers, is now helping build bridges to other ecosystems and accelerating the adoption and decentralization in equal measure. 

A Bridge Between NEAR and Ethereum

Built by NEAR Inc’s core team (now Pagoda), Aurora is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) smart contract platform that creates a bridge between Ethereum and NEAR. An EVM, for those who don’t know, is best thought of as a decentralized computer that allows anyone to create a smart contract on the Ethereum network.

Although an EVM, Aurora works on top of the NEAR blockchain, giving it all of the benefits of the NEAR blockchain: super fast, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable transactions. That’s possible thanks to Nightshade, NEAR’s unique sharded protocol design that allows the network to process thousands of transactions per second without skipping a beat. 

With Aurora, the idea is that anyone building Ethereum projects can make use of the NEAR’s speed and low fees. The Aurora EVM allows developers to make use of NEAR’s blockchain, while the platform uses NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge to transfer assets. 

Let’s look at Rainbow Bridge, as this protocol is where things got started. 

Aurora and Rainbow Bridge

NEAR’s core developer team wanted to create a smart contract that would perform the function of allowing tokens to flow freely between Ethereum, NEAR, and other projects. The team’s vision: create a tool that allowed assets to exist on both NEAR and Ethereum, creating a multi-chain Web3 user experience.

To do this, the team would need to create a bridge that would be completely decentralized: anyone could use it, anywhere, and at any time—without permission. The developers were able to build the bridge and now, if one wants to move an Ethereum-based token—say, a stablecoin like DAI—and use it on NEAR’s network, they can do so via the Rainbow Bridge. 

Some of NEAR’s core team that had helped create Rainbow Bridge split off to continue their work. The result: Aurora—a project that now offers the bridge and a whole host of other features designed to create a global network of open-source Web3 projects. 

Aurora partnerships

Other projects working to improve cross-chain accessibility have since taken notice of Aurora’s work and become partners. One example is Allbridge, an application that unites scattered blockchains by means of global interoperability across all networks. Since Allbridge partnered with Aurora, it has launched a bridge between Aurora and Terra, an open-source stablecoin network and one of the biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap. 

Aurora is also playing a big part in decentalized finance (DeFi) growth in the NEAR ecosystem. DeFi refers to the peer-to-peer financial services built on public blockchains, and is one of the most active crypto sectors on NEAR. The NEAR community has been working tirelessly to make it easier for DeFi apps and tools to leverage the protocol’s developer-friendly advantages. 

One way that Aurora has made this process much smoother and more decentralized is through its extremely low fees (so low, they’re negligible), which it achieves by using the NEAR network. A constant gripe from users about Ethereum-based DeFi products is that the fees are often too high, creating a barrier to entry for developers and end users, and creating a hurdle to Web3’s mainstream adoption. 

Aurora adoption is growing so much that the team released Aurorascan, its very own version of Etherscan, the most popular Ethereum block explorer and analytics platform. Aurorascan has all of Etherscan’s features set and reliability, while giving developers the tools and data to see how Aurora’s EVM functions. 

But Aurora goes beyond DeFi. The platform is also integral to the NEAR community’s NFT projects, which have exploded in popularity since 2020. When the Aurora team spoke at this year’s ETHDenver conference in February, and they were joined by members of Endemic, Chronicle, and TENKBay—all NFT platforms that have launched on the Aurora EVM and NEAR Protocol.  

Future Aurora developments

So what does Aurora have up its sleeve for the future? Well, Aurorascan is still in beta mode, so more features will be added to that platform. And the team is also working to build new bridges, which will be announced in the coming months. 

There are also plans to allow NFTs to be able to hop between Ethereum and NEAR. You can keep up to date on all things Aurora on its Medium page.  

All this and more will help those wanting to take advantage of NEAR’s super fast and extremely cost-effective network, and help the dream of a truly decentralized world become a reality. 

Since its inception, NEAR Foundation has been committed to not only helping build a fast, secure and scalable blockchain, but to facilitate the decentralization of network to the community.

Not only are concrete steps being taken to fast-track the decentralization of NEAR’s underlying technology and infrastructure, but massive contributions are being made towards galvanizing the developer community, ensuring that power lies with the community upon which NEAR thrives.

In this series, NEAR Foundation explores decentralization from different perspectives.

Decentralizing for a vibrant Web3 experience

In decentralization, control and decision-making is transferred from one centralized authority to a distributed network of community participants. At their core, decentralized networks work to improve functionality, security, and success of the network by removing the ability for any individual party to exert control over another. 

Decentralization provides a trustless environment, where overall data reconciliation is improved through validators, and every participant has access to a real-time, shared view of the data. Decentralization really shines through its ability to optimize resource distribution, resulting in an amazingly reliable and consistent experience for developers, validators, and end-users alike.

Decentralization as a core principle doesn’t stop with NEAR’s underlying tech. Rather, the concept has been applied by the NEAR community to further its mission of engaging the worldwide community to have a voice in the future of blockchain and Web3. The NEAR Governance community acts as a forum for the community to discuss topical NEAR protocol improvements and governance initiatives. Development of the protocol is open source, inviting all to join an already thriving, diverse, and decentralized community. 

Rooted in cutting edge, scalable infrastructure

In November 2021, NEAR launched Simple Nightshade, the first step toward a fully sharded and secure blockchain. Most blockchains require every node (stakeholders maintaining the network) to store all of the chain’s information as well as process all of the network’s transactions for block production. While keeping the network secure, this can lead to extreme inefficiency and unbearable slowness, as it takes varying amounts of time for all nodes to keep themselves up to date. In turn, this can also make Web3 app building and scaling prohibitively expensive for some developers – a significant hurdle to mainstream adoption. 

NEAR’s Nightshade Sharding alleviates inefficiency and bottlenecks by partitioning a database into smaller pieces (shards). Nodes are divided into small groups responsible for one part of the chain’s data and are able to process transactions simultaneously. The inefficiency of one node verifying transactions in one block is supplanted by multiple nodes verifying transactions in multiple blocks. The result is exceptional speed and throughput on the chain.

While many new blockchains are developing layer 2 scaling solutions and offer theoretical throughput of thousands of transactions-per-second (TPS), their underlying infrastructures hit upper limits that ultimately place a throttle on their capabilities. NEAR’s Nightshade Sharding allows for linear scaling of throughput corresponding to the number of shards, laying the foundation to scale to demand as more and more users onboard the platform. In essence, the network will create more shards when the network is in high demand, and scale them back when demand drops, saving energy and resources. Ultimately, Nightshade gives NEAR the capability to accommodate mass consumer adoption, up to billions of users. 

NEAR is simultaneously working on a number of improvements on the protocol level that will build a secure, user-friendly, and scalable blockchain that can support mainstream usage and adoption. 

Accessible and inclusive blockchain validation

In December 2021, the NEAR Protocol team released the updated validator selection algorithm, paving the way for 100 validator nodes on Mainnet, which reduces the validators’ barrier to entry by bringing down the seat price from 3.6 million $NEAR to 67,000. This lowered seat price makes it easier for them to join the active validator set and to maintain their seats. Working against exclusivity, NEAR is committed to making these seats accessible to all demographics, socio-economic classes, and geo-locations.

To further lower validators’ barrier to entry and make this role more accessible to all, NEAR is introducing Chunk-Only Producers in mid-2022. Soon, more individuals will be able to contribute to the participants in the block producing process, which creates new opportunities to not only earn rewards but also enhance the NEAR ecosystem’s security 

The unique role of Chunk-Only Producers allows entities to be solely responsible for producing chunks (parts of the block from a shard) in one shard (a partition on the network). A truly democratizing moment for the NEAR community, this increases the potential for anyone to be an active participant in NEAR’s validator community, as producers need only validate one shard, which requires hardware as simple and attainable as a 4-Core CPU with 8 GB of RAM. 

Long gone are the images of massive buildings filled with rows of server racks so often associated with crypto. NEAR’s design renders obsolete the supercomputers needed to participate in blockchain validation. By removing this traditional high barrier to entry, the stage has been set for a new, large group of Chunk-Only Producers to emerge, dramatically increasing the number of validators on the NEAR network. The evolution of this new role translates to an overall increase in decentralization and security of the network.

Decentralization as a catalyst for community  

Decentralization doesn’t stop at the NEAR blockchain’s underlying technology and infrastructure. NEAR is placing power into the hands of those who matter most – the end-users and developer community. 

Nearly two years ago, NEAR launched the Guild Community. Conceptualized as a reference to Roman times and Role-Playing Games (RPGs), where groups of builders, makers, and merchants connected to achieve common goals, Guilds have matured into communities that share common interests in supporting the Web3 ecosystem while maintaining a stunning amount of diversity on a global scale. 250+ Guilds exist today, all working to further their common goals, while pushing the shared mission to enhance and grow the NEAR ecosystem, as well as build a multi-chain Web 3 future. 

Guilds act as community vehicles in the NEAR Ecosystem. By supporting core protocol development, they add a vibrant collection of unique projects built atop its foundation. Knowing no bounds, NEAR Guilds exist across a melting pot of physical geographies and industries. Myriad interests and goals are represented, such as energy-efficient blockchains (Clean NFT), rewarding humans for their contributions to the world (Human), supporting social good initiatives in the Web3 space (Marma J), and so many more.

Guilds, the heart of the many that contribute to this growing movement, have grown to become the bedrock of the human element in decentralizing the NEAR community.

Growth is not optional

As NEAR Protocol continues to grow and place a continued emphasis on true decentralization, this marks both a milestone towards its ultimate goals, but also just the beginning of an exciting journey ahead. As we quickly approach Q2 of 2022, NEAR Foundation has already demonstrated its ability to plan and deliver on its overall roadmap of decentralization within the organization and making real investments in fostering a growing validator community and a better overall Web3 user experience. 

Constantly challenging its own premises and writing a future that will allow for the NEAR community to build, gather, innovate, and grow together, NEAR Protocol is pushing the concepts of decentralization in the Web3 world. 

A rich, robust underlying infrastructure paired with a thriving community of innovative Web3 developers and end-users makes for the perfect combination in allowing the community to grow independently and organically, building upon a phenomenal toolset capable of unlocking unabated potential, all on NEAR. 

Stay tuned for part two of the series.

The NEAR community did a lot in February: events, hackathons, launches, and even the Lunar New Year. If you blinked, you might have missed a number of exciting happenings within the NEAR community and throughout the ecosystem. 

So let’s take a look back at all of the activity across NEAR’s global nodes.

A NEAR Hóngbāo for the Lunar New Year

February kicked off in a celebratory mood with the Lunar New Year. On the 1st, many East and Southeast Asian countries celebrated a new year. On this day each year people exchange “hóngbāo”—red envelopes that contain money, given as gifts of good luck for important social occasions.  

This tradition has taken on a slightly new form in the digital era, with people in many Asian countries sending digital hóngbāo on messaging apps like Weibo or through online games. 

To take part in the Lunar New Year, and to show how easy it is to get into crypto, open a NEAR Wallet, and use NEAR-based apps, the NEAR Foundation offered celebratory drops. People could collect their hóngbāo at hongbao.nearpages.wpengine.com, then share it with friends and family to celebrate the year of the tiger. 

MetaBUILD 2 Hackathon Extended by Popular Demand

On December 22, NEAR Foundation announced the second edition of the MetaBUILD hackathon series, which features $1 million in prize money up for grabs from 35 sponsor challenges. Originally scheduled to end on February 10, NEAR Foundation extended MetaBUILD to February 2 to meet popular demand as well as to coincide with ETHDenver’s closing ceremony. 

NEAR Foundation extended MetaBUILD 2 again to March 8, to accommodate its growth from 300 participants at launch to nearly 4,000. This will give the sponsors and community the necessary time to judge the projects that came in before and during ETHDenver.

One of the most notable MetaBUILD 2 challenges is the privacy-preserving browser Brave’s bounty of $20,000 in BAT. The Brave team challenged MetaBUILD (and ETHDenver) hackers to create new methods of issuing game skins for the browser’s simple but fun Dino game. 

The NEAR community holds MetaBUILD hackathons for several reasons. The first is to introduce Web3 developers and non-blockchain users to the NEAR platform. On top of that, MetaBUILD is also a great opportunity to showcase how easy it is to build on NEAR’s hassle-free network, take advantage of its super fast transaction speeds, its global fiat on/off ramps, all while being sustainable, and carbon neutral. 

The NEAR Community at ETHDenver 2022

NEAR went to ETHDenver 2022. Why? Because the community believes in and is working toward a collaborative, decentralized, multi-chain ecosystem of Open Web and Metaverse platforms. Projects like Aurora and Rainbow Bridge, to take just two examples, are helping build simple and secure bridges between NEAR and Ethererum, which will go a long way in realizing a truly global network of open-source Web3 projects. 

For more on the NEAR Community’s talks, panels, and workshops, check out the NEAR at ETHDenver 2022 Highlights, and start learning to build at NEAR Education. 

Pagoda Launches First-Ever Web3 Startup Platform

At the ETHDenver opening ceremony, NEAR Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin announced the launch of Pagoda, the first-ever Web3 startup platform. Pagoda gives developers all the tools they need to build, create, and maintain Web3 applications on the NEAR blockchain, though it can also be used by dapps that use Aurora and Rainbow Bridge to connect NEAR and Ethereum. 

To hear Illia’s Pagoda announcement in its entirety, check out the Twitter Spaces recording. And be sure to check out Illia’s deep dive into Pagoda and Developer Console in the video below. 

NEAR Partners with Elliptic to Enhance On-Chain Security

Just after ETHDenver, NEAR Foundation announced a new partnership with Elliptic, the blockchain analytics and security company. What does this mean for the NEAR community? Both the NEAR blockchain and its native token $NEAR will have access to Elliptic’s class-leading blockchain analytics and financial crime monitoring services, which will help keep their dapps and users safe, and pave the way for mass adoption of Web3. 

“NEAR’s mission is to help onboard billions of users into Web3,” says NEAR Foundation CEO Marieke Flament. “We can’t do that unless we can create a safe and secure environment for people to explore this new world. Partnering with projects like Elliptic helps us realize this goal faster.”

For more details on the collaboration, read the NEAR x Elliptic partnership announcement. 

Looking Forward into March

The NEAR community has a lot of really exciting things in the works for March and beyond, from new dapps to events and more. 

Stay tuned to the latest NEAR news by joining the community accounts below. 

Welcome to the NEAR Retrospective! It’s been quite a year for NEAR Foundation, Near Inc., and, of course, all the incredible projects and community members that make all of this possible. 

So we thought it was high time to look back at some of the highlights from 2021: everything from protocol upgrades, ecosystem funding, community developments, and new projects launching on NEAR mainnet. 

We’ll also be giving a sneak peek at what’s to come in 2022 in a separate post, so keep a lookout for that. 

Protocol Progress 

The sign of a healthy network is one that is constantly adding improvements and tweaks to the performance, stability, and security—and NEAR protocol had that in abundance in 2021. 

Near Inc.’s engineering team racked up 20 upgrades to the protocol. Among the highlights were protocol update 35 – implicit accounts. This allows NEAR to have Ethereum style accounts that are public keys. They are created on-chain when someone transfers a nonzero amount of tokens to this account.

Another stand-out upgrade was protocol update 42. Here engineers lowered storage staking cost from 1N per 10kb to 1N per 100kb. This dramatically reduced the barrier of entry for contract developers. Before this change, when a developer deployed a 300kb contract, they needed to have at least 30 $NEAR on the account. After the change, they only need 3 $NEAR.

Lastly, not leastly, protocol upgrade 48 brought our WebAssembly runtime from wasmer0 to wasmer2. This shift helped half the cost of wasm operations, helping unlock many applications building on Aurora that were previously blocked because their transactions could not fit in NEAR’s gas limit.

This trend continued throughout the year, culminating in our biggest protocol announcement this year, Sharding. 

Sharding Takes Shape 

When NEAR released its design for the protocol back in 2019, we initially envisioned a completely sharded blockchain. We quickly realized that this brand new network didn’t have an immediate demand for processing hundreds of millions of transactions. Besides, a fully sharded blockchain is a complex endeavor, and we’d need a little time to do it right. 

However, the average number of daily transactions has now surpassed 300K. As more and more projects are building on NEAR, the volume of transactions is only going to increase dramatically in 2022. While the NEAR network is still only using a fraction of its total capacity, we wanted to start the transition to sharding now to avoid any unpleasant surprises, as well as ensure we can support all applications on NEAR. 

November 15th marked the beginning of this transition, as we unveiled Simple Nightshade, the first step (Phase 0) in our fully-sharded and secure blockchain. We dropped Simple Nightshade now so that we could preempt any unpleasant surprises with transaction speeds later. In Phase 0 of Nightshade, NEAR’s sharding is split across many nodes, making it super fast and ready for the onboarding of leagues of new developers and blockchain users. 

In early 2022, NEAR will move into Nightshade Phase 1, in which we will introduce the new role of chunk-only producers—those who only validate one shard. They produce chunks (shard blocks) for a specific shard and don’t need expensive hardware to do so—all without sacrificing network security. In Phase 2, currently scheduled for Q3 of 2022, both state and processing will be fully sharded, and validators won’t need to track all shards. And in Q4 of 2022, we will enter Phase 3 (Dynamic Sharding), in which we will enable the network to dynamically split and merge shards based on resource utilization. This will make NEAR almost infinitely scalable and able to handle any short-term spikes in usage. 

For more details on sharding, head over to the NEAR Medium page, where we’re publishing a series of features on how Nightshade is impacting the platform. Beyond a simple primer on how sharding works, we’re also exploring how Simple Nightshade is now powering the DeFi space and helping make NEAR carbon-neutral, amongst other things.   

Funding finds its feet

An ecosystem needs support, especially in its early days when projects are just finding their feet. In 2021, NEAR Foundation went above and beyond to foster growth and innovation. 

First up, there was the news that the NEAR ecosystem announced a monumental $800 million in funding initiatives targeted at accelerating growth. While NEAR is giving all communities access to this record amount of funding, there will be a special focus on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) teams who are actively revolutionizing and reimagining the way we interact with money. 

DeFi projects on NEAR have already been thriving this year, with $200 million total value locked across projects like Ref Finance, Skyward, and Octopus. In addition to ecosystem fund news, Proximity Labs, a research and development firm targeting the NEAR ecosystem, announced its own $350 million grants DAO to build on the momentum.

In the ecosystem, key projects like Aurora raised $12 million in its first funding round. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for scaling decentralized applications on NEAR, received funding from the likes of Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital and other funds.  

Flux Protocol, meanwhile, the decentralized oracle provider building on NEAR, raised $10.3 million to build the future of open finance earlier in the year. The project’s round was led by Distributed Global, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, Uncorrelated, Figment Capital, Maven 11, Reciprocal Ventures, Jabre Capital, Greenfield One, IOSG, and Flow Ventures.

With funding in place, it was only a matter of time before the ecosystem took off. 

Explosive Ecosystem Growth 

NEAR’s 2021 was marked by massive growth. Fueled by Rainbow Bridge, which connects NEAR with Ethereum, as well as Simple Nightshade sharding, the NEAR ecosystem saw an exciting proliferation of gaming, Metaverse, NFT, and DeFi projects. 

Gaming

Gaming was probably always destined to be a strong crypto industry, and 2021 proved to be a fantastic year for NEAR-based gaming projects. We expect this Web3 gaming momentum to carry over into 2022. 

In 2021, OP Games, a blockchain-based Web3 gaming platform, began transforming how users buy, own, and trade in-game assets. Unlike current gaming platforms, which often monopolize worlds by sandboxing digital assets, OP Games is offering them as NFTs and turning entire games into fractionalized NFTs. This way, players and fans can co-own projects and, if the game finds success, shape how it develops through its DAO. 

Similarly, Vorto Network began developing its online marketplace, where users will be able to buy in-game items and digital assets through a crypto wallet. Hash Rush, a blockchain-based, real-time strategy (RTS) game set to launch on Vorto Network in January 2022, will let players immerse themselves in the Hermeian galaxy, where they build, compete, and exchange goods through various levels. Hash Rush will be a great example of Web3’s “play-to-earn” model, which creates a digital goods economy for participants. 

Another title, NEAR Lands, is a pixelated land-based open-world game designed as much for the community as the gameplay. In the NEAR Lands online universe, players create characters and items, as well as engage with friends and other participants, while adventuring through the game’s landscape. 

As Q4 drew to a close, Inite earned a $50,000 grant to help build its NFT gaming platform. A unique type of Metaverse experience, Inite is a motivational game based on the scientific method, where players receive daily tasks designed to boost their creativity. By playing Inite, players can earn tokens by generating ideas to improve individual cognitive skills and productivity. 

NFTs 

Even more than gaming, 2021 was a strong year for NFTs. And with NFTs percolating into the public consciousness, it’s easy to see why. Paras and Mintbase, two NEAR NFT marketplaces, led the charge in bringing more NFTs to the NEAR ecosystem. 

Mintbase, which began building on NEAR in August of 2020, officially launched in 2021. The team had originally begun developing on Ethereum, but migrated over to NEAR when it became prohibitively expensive for them. With its fast transaction speeds and low costs, NEAR was the obvious choice for Mintbase, which hosts its own NFT marketplace but also has an NFT utility engine that helps people build their own.  

In early December, electronic music DJ and producer deadmau5 and indie rock band Portugal. the Man collaborated with Mintbase and NEAR to mint their NFT single “this is fine”. If deadmau5 and Portugal. the Man go platinum (sell more than 1 million records in the US), they will make blockchain history. It’s already putting Mintbase firmly on the NFT map. 

The NFT marketplace Paras offers real-world trading cards of artworks as collectibles, which users can quickly mint, buy, and sell quickly at little cost. Paras recently launched Boom Boom! the first mini digital comic series on NEAR, and PARADIGM. Both of these are part of Paras Comics, the platform’s new comics-specific feature. The Paras marketplace already has thousands of users purchasing one-of-a-kind NFT collections. It also boasts over 18,000 Twitter and 3,000 Telegram followers—a testament to its rapidly expanding community. 

From July 17th to the 25th, 2021 at the Shanghai National Exhibition and Convention Centre, Paras collaborated with Web3Games and NEAR to showcase Chinese artists who were selling NFT artworks at an exhibition. One artist, Huang Heshen, created the “Toorich City Series”, a collection of exclusive NFTs on Paras that explores Bu Tu Garden Community, a digital set of 10 luxury single-family villas.

Elsewhere in China, the NEAR dApp Feiyu recently debuted. Built atop NEAR, Feiyu is a new take on social media, where users express creativity by sharing memes and GIFs. All of this happens in an NFT-based metaverse where users don’t have to register a wallet. Driven by rewards, Feiyu users earn tokens or NFT items (skins, weapons, etc.) for participating in the community.

On the audio NFT front, DAO Records is working to reimagine the record label and to fairly pay musicians for their recordings. In the current music industry model, record labels and streaming services take the majority of musicians’ earnings. With DAO records, the founders are encouraging independent artists to release and package new music as audio NFTs. 

To Date, DAO Records has released over 150 NFTs from over 100 artists. And in the last 14 months, DAO Records has also produced over 50 virtual events, where musicians, fans, and NFT lovers can meet and socialize in custom-designed Metaverse gatherings. 

Metaverse 

While much crypto momentum found its way into DeFi and NFT apps, a number of Metaverse apps also launched on NEAR in 2021. These Metaverse apps laid the groundwork, in their own unique ways, for integration with blockchain gaming, DeFi, NFTs, and other crypto projects. 

Metaverse AI, for example, is developing an Open Metaverse for Web3. Using Metaverse AI’s advanced AI engine, users will be able to create decentralized identities and high-fidelity 3D avatars. These blockchain-based DiD (decentralization identifier) avatars give users ownership of their virtual identities and assets, and the ability to move them across the larger Metaverse. 

Another NEAR Metaverse project is Reality Chain, which will launch on Octopus Network, a substrate-based appchain network on NEAR. Reality Chain offers users gaming and social activities with the feel of immersive, multiplayer functionality and features.

A radically different take on the Metaverse can be found in the Illust Space app. Billing itself as an “open augmented reality infrastructure for the world,” the Illust Space team is building an augmented reality Metaverse. The app gives users the tools to mix the real and digital worlds for their artworks while making them collectible through NFT technology. 

Also in 2021, NEAR debuted its MetaBUILD series, a hackathon designed to encourage developers to build on NEAR. As the name indicates, building the Metaverse is a major emphasis of this hackathon. The first MetaBUILD held August 27th to September 19th, and the latest, MetaBUILD 2 (December 22 – February 10, 2022), both made $1 million in prizes available to developers and teams.

DeFi 

DeFi, or decentralized finance, has become a cornerstone of any crypto ecosystem. In little more than 12 months since mainnet launch, there are now more than 40 DeFi projects calling NEAR home. From infrastructure providers like Rainbow Bridge, Flux and Aurora, to token swap markets 1inch, Trisolaris, and Onomy Protocol, there are staking platforms, lenders, borrowers, credit scorers, and even BananaSwappers. 

As noted above, both NEAR’s $800 million global ecosystem fund and Proximity Labs’ $350 million Grants DAO will support DeFi projects and other dapps building on NEAR. NEAR’s Nightshade sharding will also supercharge DeFI by expanding the blockchain’s transaction speeds and security. 

Launched this year, Aurora is one of the most notable DeFi projects on NEAR. A platform that makes EVM contracts interoperable on NEAR, Aurora allows developers to keep using Ethereum while boosting their apps with NEAR’s super-fast transactions and low barriers to entry. Aurora is partnering with a number of other promising DeFi projects on NEAR, like the cross-chain oracle Flux and Rose, a stable swap and borrowing protocol, to level up the ecosystem’s DeFi game. 

Yet another highly visible DeFi player on NEAR is Ref Finance, a community-led and multi-purpose decentralized exchange, asset issuer, and lender. Ref Finance accomplishes all of this through a single, synchronous DeFi stack. What’s more, it’s fun and easy to use. 

If you’re looking for an interest rate market protocol, then Burrow is a dApp to check out. And if you’re looking for a token launchpad, be sure to dive into Skyward Finance, a DeFi platform that makes token launches fair and community-centric, as well as bot and attack-resistant. Another cool thing about Skyward Finance is that its DAO gives the community access to the token launch immediately instead of letting front-runners like private investors and VC firms pump and dump tokens. 

If you’re looking for more on NEAR DeFi apps, we’ll be publishing an article on the top DeFi projects building on NEAR. So, stay tuned for that in the new year. 

The DAO Community is Growing

One of the major takeaways of 2021 is that NEAR’s community of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations is rapidly growing and diversifying. This is another trend that the NEAR ecosystem and larger blockchain community can expect to carry over into 2022 and beyond. 

Sputnik DAO V1, a hub for NEAR’s DAO ecosystem, currently has a total of 248 DAOs, with a total of 17,633 transactions for a total payout of 989,598 $NEAR ($9,292,324 USD). The Sputnik DAO hub now has a Total Value Locked (TVL) of 113,969 $NEAR ($1,070,164 USD). Factoring in those decentralized organizations in the Astro DAOs ecosystem, it’s safe to say there are now over 400 DAOs on the NEAR platform. 

Much of the DAO community growth can be seen in NEAR’s blockchain infrastructure and the DeFi space. The biggest DAO by total assets is Aurora, a token exchange bridge between NEAR and Ethereum, and Octopus, a platform for building appchains (independent, custom blockchains).

2021 saw explosive growth in how DAOs experimented with governance tooling on NEAR. In the first half of the year, SputnikDAO went through two iterations—one for disseminating the Community Fund and the other to incorporate custom call ability. By the time Astro DAO launched in October, there was such demand for its offerings that hundreds of DAOs came into existence in only 2 months. And in Q4, the NEAR community did quite a lot of thinking about liability protection, legal entities, and state regulation of DAOs. 

Creatives DAO, a fully community-run DAO Vertical, launched this year to support the ecosystem’s creative Guilds and DAOs. Discussions are just beginning about MultiDAOs, and how DAOs can better coalesce for collaborative decision-making efforts. NEAR is also supporting a research initiative hosted by Governauts that is examining DAO-based reward systems. 

DAO projects are being supplemented by DAO Guilds, which support these and other blockchain sectors with different resources. Various Guilds are even acting as specialized sub-DAOs working in areas like legal, software development, and DeFi. These and other Guilds are there for when app founders and developers want to tap into specific expertise and resources to improve their own project, technology, or DAO.

DaoBox, based in Switzerland, is another resource for projects and organizations looking to design DAOs. The company offers a toolkit for DAOs building in NEAR, helping them establish the DAO, get a headquarters address, raise funds, and stay compliant through accounting. 

A Brief Look Toward 2022

A number of developers building on NEAR will launch their projects in 2022, bringing many more DeFi, NFT, Gaming, Metaverse, and other exciting and cutting projects to the NEAR ecosystem. These teams came to NEAR because they know that whether you’re developing or simply using NEAR apps, joining the ecosystem is fast, easy, and secure.

With NEAR’s $800 million global ecosystem funding initiative, expect to see many more DAOs established as we head into 2022. These funds, alongside Guilds and other blockchain-based expertise and resources, will be vital in helping DAOs succeed and, just as importantly, bringing the masses from Web2 to the Open Web. 

I’m proud to say that, earlier today, the NEAR Foundation announced its selection of Marieke Flament as its new  CEO starting January 1st, 2022. It’s an exciting time of transition and we’re thrilled to bring Marieke aboard because she brings world class leadership to the NEAR community. Her hiring highlights how this ecosystem is pulling in more and more of the best talent in the world to drive it to the next level.

As we head into the new year with new leadership, I just wanted to send a personal note out to everyone at NEAR with some context for the transition and thoughts for the future.

NEAR’s Progress

In the last 3 years, the NEAR project has undertaken an extraordinary evolution. What started as a whiteboard idea to fix the scaling problems of existing chains by using a novel sharding approach quickly grew into a juggernaut that brought in some of the best technical talent in the world. Along the way, we realized that scalability was only half the solution, so we built a flexible contract-based account model to help apps achieve the kind of usability that enables mass adoption.  

And today, just a little over a year after launching, NEAR has hundreds of apps, thousands of community members, and over 1.7 million accounts. It’s been an incredible journey to see this ecosystem grow, and especially to join the community in NEARCon Lisbon to announce over $800M in funding to power the ecosystem to the next level.

Growing from 1 to 100

My role from the beginning has always been “do whatever it takes to make this project successful.” In its earliest days, that meant building out the original development company so the technology could surface. For the last 2 years it has meant standing up the NEAR Foundation so the protocol could launch from its genesis block to a fully decentralized community hand-off in 2020. Now, both the NF and the ecosystem around it have changed substantially.

In 2019, the NF was a piece of paper on a long table in a Swiss lawyer’s office. Now it is powered by the efforts of more than 50 people spread around the world who help to advocate for a community that has grown exponentially. As with any startuppy organization, the NF has reinvented itself several times during the intervening years but, at last, I can say that it has officially made it from 0 to 1. 

Now, the NF is ready for the even bigger journey from 1 to 100 and it’s ready for the right hands to guide it there.

For the better part of a year, the NFC and I have conducted a careful search to build out the right leadership team. This is a strange-shaped organization in a strange-shaped ecosystem so it takes an unusual leader to carry it forward. With a mandate to support and advocate for the community, this requires someone who has the mentality of a founder, experience scaling global organizations, an intimate understanding of crypto, an unusual community orientation and, of course, world class servant leadership.  This led to an extremely narrow list.

Marieke

Marieke is the perfect fit.

Her experience growing Circle’s European operations and, later, their entire marketing organization, made her deeply familiar with both the power and the unusual nature of this community. She took those skills into the leading edge of the banking world as Mettle’s CEO, but the future of finance is decentralized and we’ve managed to guide her back home to an ecosystem that’s truly breaking out at NEAR.

Marieke has earned the faith and trust of the leadership team and the NFC so I hope you’ll welcome her too 🙂

The Transition

Marieke will take the lead of the NF on January 1, 2021, where she’ll continue to support the explosive progress of the NEAR community and ecosystem.

As for me… my job description in the next stage will be the same—do whatever it takes to make NEAR successful. So, I’ll be supporting the transition, advising the NF, and engaging areas of the ecosystem where we can do even better, including by creating bridges through product, growth, and community to help NEAR-based applications achieve mass adoption.

This project has been a hell of a ride and it’s still the opportunity of a lifetime for anyone who’s ready to get involved. I’m excited to read its next chapter from a different perspective and to have Marieke at the helm of the NF to help write it.

Onwards!

Erik

The NEAR Foundation is thrilled to announce it has selected global executive Marieke Flament as its new CEO, effective January 1, 2022.  

The appointment comes at an exciting time for the NEAR ecosystem. The NEAR blockchain is a permissionless, proof-of-stake carbon-neutral blockchain designed to be super-fast, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable. NEAR is backed by top VCs including A16Z, Pantera Capital, and Electric Capital.

In October 2021, the NEAR ecosystem announced $800 million in funding initiatives targeted at accelerating growth. The announcement, which includes the $350 million in funding announced by Proximity Labs, is designed to build on the momentum in the NEAR ecosystem over the last 12 months. In addition, NEAR recently closed partnerships with Opera and The Wharton Business School, started working with crypto payment provider MoonPay to make NEAR accessible in 150 countries worldwide, and continued collaborating with Near Inc. to launch Simple Nightshade, the first step towards a fully sharded blockchain. 

“We are delighted to have Marieke join NEAR to help accelerate our next phase of adoption and help us realize our vision.” shared Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR. “Her skills and experience are the perfect blend to help NEAR reach its next phase.” 

Flament brings a wealth of international business experience to the role, as well as in-depth knowledge about the world of crypto and fintech. Born in France, Flament trained as a computer engineer and has worked across the globe in a diverse range of companies from the luxury giant LVMH of Louis Vuitton fame to Boston Consulting Group, Expedia’s Hotels.com, crypto giant Circle and more recently Mettle by Natwest. 

During her time at Circle she was Managing Director of European operations, where she took to market several products and built a user base from 0-2 million in less than 2 years. Shortly after that she became the company’s first Global CMO, leading the branding and rollout of USDC – one of the world’s most successful stablecoins. 

After her position at Circle, Flament became the CEO of SME banking app Mettle by Natwest, targeting the passion/creator economy. During her time in the role, she launched the app and grew the team from 50 to 250 employees. Mettle has gained widespread customer acclaim  (above 4.8 app store rating) and has become one of the bank’s biggest product success stories.

Flament is passionate about exploring the ways in which technology can be used to change people’s lives, and is an advocate for diversity and inclusion in finance and technology. She was recognised in the Women in FinTech Powerlist in 2017 and 2019 and she is frequently quoted by the press; including The BBC, The Telegraph, Fortune, The Financial Times, Reuters, Forbes, and City AM. 

“I am absolutely delighted to be joining NEAR,” said Flament. “The tech, the team, and the community are absolutely fantastic. I look forward to working with Illia and the NEAR Foundation team to help achieve NEAR’s vision and bring OpenWeb technology to millions of users. And most importantly I look forward to serving and supporting the NEAR ecosystem.” 

“NEAR is a unique, once-in-a-lifetime global opportunity to shape the future by democratizing access to the tools that people need to create service for everyday life,”  added Flament. 

”With its permissionless, proof-of-stake blockchain, NEAR has the capability to help us unlock many of the long-promised uses of the technology and to create products and services that promote greater inclusivity and reflect the needs of the people they’re designed to serve. As the CEO, I am excited to play a role in achieving the foundation’s aim and to ensure that through collaboration and openness, the blockchain can be used as a true force for good.” 

Since its launch in 2020, NEAR’s ecosystem has seen a surge of activity. To date, it has processed more than 50 million transactions, across more than 1.7 million accounts, and helped incubate and foster over 200 projects and 300 DAOs.

“A huge thank you to Erik Trautman, who has been instrumental in helping NEAR reach those major milestones and will continue as board advisor to help advocate and grow the NEAR ecosystem,” said Polosukhin. 

Excitement continues to build around the potential of the NEAR blockchain. Unlike other networks, NEAR gives software developers easy access to build new crypto applications, from Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to decentralized finance products –  and to launch new business models and consumer products.  It’s also much faster than Ethereum – the world’s most used blockchain – capable of 100,000s of transactions per second, versus ETH’s 45, and charges 1000x lower transaction fees. However, instead of competing directly with Ethereum, NEAR runs in concert with it, along with other blockchains, allowing for the free flow of assets and communication between networks for the betterment of all.  

NEAR’s foundation aims to help evangelize, raise awareness, support, and grow this ecosystem and allocate grants on behalf of the ecosystem. To date, the foundation has allocated over $45m to new projects.

NEAR Foundation is delighted to announce that Chris Ghent has joined NEAR Foundation as Global Head of Brand Strategy & Partnerships. Chris will be spearheading the Foundation’s efforts to build on its strategy of creating a blockchain that is simple to use, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable.   

He’ll do that by looking to build the NEAR brand to help join the dots between product, the organization, and the community to ensure the NEAR ecosystem is working collectively to bring more people into web3 and deliver on its mission of mass adoption. 

“Chris brings exactly what this ecosystem needs right now — a clear and experienced voice to help surface the stories and ideas that matter so everyone can see what the NEAR ecosystem is capable of and what it’s doing well right now,” says Erik Trautman, NEAR Foundation’s CEO. 

An award-winning marketer and entrepreneur, Chris started his career launching an eCommerce retail start-up in 2005. In the marketing and communications industry, he has specialized in strategy first, digital-led, technology-powered, and data-driven initiatives. Delivering business strategies and marketing approaches that transform how companies go to market is his primary objective.

Chris has worked with leading brands including Breaker (formerly SingularDTV), First Republic Bank, Harman International Industries, Infiniti Motor Company Ltd, Johnson & Johnson, Keds, Nielsen, Novartis, Prestige Brands, and Stanley Black & Decker.

Chris has already spent three years in the crypto industry, previously leading the development of a US-based marketing team in NYC, which focused on global brand coordination and paid marketing initiatives in the Tezos ecosystem. He has been an advocate and early adopter of non-traditional blockchain based advertising solutions, partnering with Brave Browser from alpha to beta to mobile capabilities, and believes that traditional mediums like digitally connected out-of-home media will be key to mass adoption. He looks forward to driving awareness of the NEAR brand and delivering awareness that the NEAR ecosystem is the home to crypto/blockchain innovation. 

“Having worked in the crypto/blockchain space full-time since 2018, I’ve always been attracted to projects that have very clear value propositions yet have a hard time telling their story,” explains Ghent. 

“Teams and communities in crypto are fantastic at focusing on amazing technological advantages, but often overlook the core reasons why new users join the space or project: simplicity, a compelling brand, and a number of key features that can’t be found anywhere else. One of those is seamless UX for onboarding users, which is what attracted me the most to NEAR. It’s worked harder than most to make someone’s first step in crypto, simple.

Crypto Barriers 

Crypto has struggled to identify the needs of developers, engineers, and end-users curious about the industry. Is it easy to use? Can programming languages from Web2 be brought over to Web3? Are there hidden costs to deploying and maintaining code? 

It’s on the protocols, their foundations, and their communities to solve these issues if mass adoption is to come to crypto. It’s something the NEAR Foundation is focused on and looking to build on over the next 12 months.  

NEAR’s developer ecosystem, the community and founders, have consistently put the end-user at the heart of technological development and decision making. We often forget that the category is still relatively new, but NEAR has become an innovation inspiration for so many other projects and teams.

“I can’t wait to learn from what’s working best from the community and Foundation team to harness those insights in order to drive net-new developers into the ecosystem who will build even more of the most end-user friendly NEAR-based experiences.”

We are excited that Chris has joined our team to help us achieve these goals. His work will help NEAR continue to build out its brand and storytelling capability, while simultaneously creating better ways to support NEAR’s thriving ecosystem. 

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