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A little over a year ago, NEAR held its first conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Fast forward to today and NEAR is back in Portugal, for the next chapter of NEARCON. But things have changed quite a bit in that time. 

To celebrate the second anniversary of NEARCON, the NEAR Foundation looks back at all the things the community has achieved across the year. 

A catalyst 

At NEARCON in 2021, the Foundation announced an $800m fund to help spearhead growth within the ecosystem and to back technological advancements that would simplify development and adoption of Web3. 

Under the terms of the agreement, the fund would distribute $250 million in ecosystem grants over four years, establish a regional fund of $100 million, and earmarking $100 million specifically for socially impactful startups and launch a DeFi focused fund, Proximity, with $350m.

Create without limits 

In the spring of 2022, the Foundation received $590m from the following key backers: Tiger Capital, FTX, a16z, Circle, DragonFly, and others.

To ensure the Foundation can maintain sufficient resources throughout the market downturn, the Foundation has been very conservative in how the funds have been managed. Exposure to non-NEAR has been limited, with more than $500 million of funds raised held in fiat in Swiss bank accounts.

This approach has left the Foundation in an extremely strong position to continue to distribute funds to high quality projects for the foreseeable future. 

Ecosystem Growth 

The ecosystem went into overdrive over the last 12 months. Here’s a snapshot of some of the ways the NEAR ecosystem has delivered stellar results: 

Keystone Development 

During the past year the NEAR Foundation and the NEAR Community have hit several crucial milestones in developing the core components of a healthy and vibrant ecosystem. Below is a summary of how the ecosystem has matured over the last 12 months. 

Infrastructure and Integrations

Infrastructure is a catch all term for key parts of the ecosystem that are needed to help unlock mass adoption. These include things like wallets, bridges, oracles, zk technologies, privacy tools, and improved tools for developers. 

Integrations with the NEAR network are crucial to bring more users into web3. The following partnerships have been instrumental in accelerating NEAR’s connection with the rest of web3. 

Since NEARCON 2021, these key projects have been at the forefront of building out these capabilities on NEAR.  

Gaming / Entertainment

The web3 gaming space is still wide open. While it’s still early days for gaming and entertainment in the NEAR universe, the following projects have all deployed on NEAR in the past 12 months. 

NFTs

NFTs on NEAR have been growing rapidly over the last 12 months. Below are projects that have either deployed or have seen stellar growth: 

DAOs

NEAR has the strongest no-code, easy to use, DAO tech stack. It’s no surprise to see DAO growth be so strong in 2022. Below are projects have accelerated DAO development on NEAR. 

The Year Ahead 

While it has been a fantastic year for NEAR, the community is just getting started.

This year, the foundations have been laid, and thanks to NEAR’s simple, secure and scalable blockchain, it has an incredibly long runway to build bigger than anywhere in Web3. 

NEAR is the simplest, most usable and most scalable tech around. The next 12 months will be all about helping to bring more projects and users to NEAR. 

Create without limits! 

The global community is being heard. Web3 continues to surge in popularity as developers and end-users alike instill confidence in decentralized blockchains, where information lives transparently and out in the open, in direct opposition to Big Tech’s private, opaque databases storing massive amounts of data. 

Just as NFTs went viral in 2021, DAOs are now emerging as 2022’s hottest Web3 topic. Within the NEAR community, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are exhibiting rapid growth while bringing more project diversity to the ecosystem.

Decision making from the bottom-up 

A decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, is a formalized, self-governing community, analogous to an internet-native Web2 company—where control is centralized. Owned and managed by its members, a DAO carries out a set of instructions determined by prewritten smart contracts, with voting required by members for any changes to be implemented. At its core, the DAO has a built-in treasury that no individual has the authority to access without the approval of the group, fostering the “trustless” environment championed by Web3 platforms. 

The first-ever DAO, created in 2016, made waves when its token sale raised the equivalent of $120 million USD, making it one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns in history. While the DAO’s underlying principles and core values remain the same, they have experienced a remarkable evolution in the last several years.

Uniquely Web3 with unmatched power 

In 2022, new Web3 users will find DAOs quick to set up, global in scale, extremely customizable, and exceptionally transparent. Think of them as a toolbox that invites anyone to create a business structure with elegant simplicity and flexibility baked in. As such, an immense diversity of structures and scenarios emerge from them. Flat or hierarchical, open to everyone or members-only, the power is invested in the stakeholders to determine how the community should be governed. 

The power of DAOs is being harnessed right now by communities to advance a number of missions, made possible by NEAR’s extremely fast, super secure and infinitely scalable protocol. In grants giving, DAO members vote and collectively decide which people and projects to fund. Businesses can track owners’ equity and elect managers to make day-to-day decisions, while investors utilize DAOs to pool funds and vote on strategy and decisions. Clubs of any kind can use the DAO toolbox to elect leaders and decide where to spend group funds.

The DAOs on NEAR are diverse, creative, and boundless in terms of growth. Reinventing the social internet, decentralizing finance, providing structure for various Guilds, and working in areas like legal and software development, these are just a few examples of DAOs that leverage NEAR’s sharded blockchain infrastructure. 

The types and number of DAO use cases grow daily, and its true potential is just beginning to be realized. 

Together we can do so much 

The lion’s share of DAO community growth on NEAR can be seen in blockchain infrastructure and the decentralized finance, or DeFi, space. By total assets, the largest DAOs are Aurora, a token exchange bridge between NEAR and Ethereum, and Octopus, a platform for launching and running Web3 independent, custom blockchains, known as “appchains”. 

DAOs don’t stop at providing structure for organizations blazing entirely new trails. They are also serving as the foundation for organizations challenging our preconceptions of social networks and even music recording and distribution.

Feiyu, a picture-based social network on NEAR, allows users to express creativity through memes and GIF sharing. In its novel take on social media, it all happens in an NFT-based metaverse where users earn tokens or NFT items for participating in the community.

Elsewhere on NEAR, DAO Records is reimagining the record label, building tools that will help write the future of the music industry, while working to fairly compensate musicians for their songwriting and recording work. Its founders are encouraging artists to release and package new music as audio NFTs, whose smart contracts allow for an entirely more equitable royalty structure, in perpetuity.

On DAO-powered social platform t² (short for time²), launching in late 2022, users explore a world of narratives “curated by time.” Feature articles are created, curated, and propagated under a curation market mechanism where all participants are fairly rewarded for the network value they contributed. t² acts as the first organization in the Web3 space attempting to monetize human time with the consensus achieved by “Proof of Attention.” 

Supercharging the NEAR community

DAO launchpads are gearing up the NEAR community through platforms that allow individuals to join forces with others and create guilds for meaningful projects and more. 

Sputnik DAO, a hub for NEAR’s DAO ecosystem, has a platform that welcomes and rewards creators of all kinds within the NEAR community. Individuals can receive rewards by submitting proposals to existing DAOs, it’s that simple. Meanwhile, developers are able to quickly and efficiently build apps on Sputnik because it makes use of coding languages that are already widely known, such as Rust and AssemblyScript. Paired with NEAR’s support and community engagement through Near Academy and the NEAR Certified Developer program, Sputnik is approaching 250 DAOs with a total of nearly 20,000 transactions completed on-chain.

Helping propel NEAR’s ecosystem to become one of crypto’s most diverse, AstroDAO is empowering groups anywhere in the world to make decisions together, collectively. In less than 10 minutes, and without a line of code, everyday users are able to launch a DAO using AstroDAO’s powerful platform. With over 100 DAOs and counting, and a total locked value approaching 90,000 $NEAR, AstroDAO is now a catalyst helping to bring communities together that thrive in the NEAR ecosystem.

The key to AstroDAO’s early success has been a feature set that has been incredibly well-executed on their platform, powered by NEAR. Central tenants are democratic by default, ensuring that decisions like distributing funds and member admissions happen through an intuitive and transparent voting process. Thanks to smart contracts, funds are held in a treasury and always distributed through a community-defined process. Who votes and how it works can be precisely configured to meet a community’s preferred operating style. 

Extremely versatile, DAOs act as one component of NEAR Protocol’s commitment to facilitate the decentralization of the network to a worldwide community on a fast, secure, and scalable blockchain. Through their democratic, flexible, and collaborative foundations, DAOs are empowering like-minded individuals to come together and take action in a truly global way. 

Robust and disruptive in nature, prepare yourself as 2022 shapes up to be the year of the DAO, powered on NEAR.

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. 

The NEAR ecosystem is announcing a monumental $800 million in funding initiatives targeted at accelerating growth. 

The announcement, which includes the $350 million in funding announced by Proximity Labs last week – reported in Bloomberg – is designed to build on the momentum in the NEAR ecosystem over the last 12 months. 

While NEAR is giving all communities access to this record amount of funding, it will be focusing on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) teams who are actively revolutionizing and reimagining the way we interact with money. 

DeFi projects on NEAR have already hit a significant milestone of more than $150M Total Value Locked (TVL). NEAR has an ambitious goal to grow that number quickly and securely. NEAR is also actively looking for projects focused on NFTs, DAOs, and gaming. 

NEAR’s next chapter is all about fostering growth by helping developers access best-in-class support and providing users with a frictionless experience using and navigating the web3 world. New funding helps accelerate this process.

NEAR levels up 

Of the $800 million in funding, $100 million will be allocated to Startup Grant Pools. More than 20 startups will be identified and given $5M each in funding to redistribute to key stakeholders – the ecosystem ultimately decides who gets funding. 

Some $250 million will be allocated to ecosystem grants helping existing projects further develop and scale. The remaining $100M will be allocated to Regional Funds: money allocated to foster the development of NEAR’s largest community regions in Asia, Europe, and the US.  

Prior to this announcement, NEAR had already spent $45M across more than 120 projects, including Core Protocol Infrastructure Grants to the likes of: 

The sleeping giant awakes 

NEAR has been building on its roadmap steadily and securely. Later this year, it will launch the next phase sharding, nicknamed Simple Nightshade. NEAR will go from one to four shards, increasing scalability while not compromising on simplicity. Developers won’t have to add any additional code to smart contracts or adjust their platforms and users will continue to experience the same great UX, but at faster speeds. 

Once complete, NEAR will be decentralizing further by lowering the barrier to entry to its validator network, increasing the number of validators first to 100, and then to a few hundred in Q1 2022. As part of this process, there will be further funding to projects helping the rollout and development of NEAR’s sharding technology. 

Stay tuned for more information. 

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