NEAR Protocol Meetup Zurich Live Stream

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   i just want to tell you that this is informal relax have your drinks ask questions and you know be entertained and be engaged and let me tell you what that agenda would look like so i will do a little bit of an introduction and if you allow me i would also explain to you a little bit about our community then yesin is going to tell us a little bit about carbon neutrality among other things because he has quite a new number of topics that he would want to share

2. 0:30

   with you and then we of course go for the open web and winery and this is a this is an exciting time for us i would love for all of you to really you know engage as much as possible and ask questions after afterwards we will open the session for questions but do get your wine do get your drinks and enjoy now oh if uh if i can just ask you from these three things i would love for you to a know what the community is and after

3. 1:02

   you finish with my after i finish with my talk you will understand the amazing opportunities in community and what the near community is about the after yes in stock i hope that you see how wonderful the web 3 is shaping the world and making it a better place in the you know in the end it's gonna be and then the third one is you will definitely understand why we are all so excited about here this is an amazing an amazing journey and we hope that you

4. 1:37

   all of you become part of this as well so let's get started the new community so i am grace and i am the head of community and the reason why i love this particular area and domain is because it really puts me in contact with the entire near ecosystem and here what is what is really the the driver of all this is that we're trying to build and create community driven economies and this is something very interesting

5. 2:09

   community driven economies that are that are placed around applications in here and the way that we do this is creating a safe a safe place for people to come in it's hot in here it's creating a safe place for people to come in and that means that that core contributors can learn explore take risks and this is one that i really want to emphasize they can take risks they can be inspired

6. 2:38

   and feel empowered to develop the new ecosystem and the way that is going into creating the web3 world it actually becomes the community becomes a channel or a vehicle that facilitates the mass adoption of web3 and this is where the connection really becomes very very strong in our communities we are structured with guilt by guilt and guilt are this unstoppable engine this force that creates value for the ecosystem they are sub-communities so they are

7. 3:11

   little communities of people that have you know an idea or they want to incubate ideas or express ideas but more importantly they are part of bootstrapping the applications that are built on there and that goes in many different directions but one area that it's uh clear is that they bring a skill set that allows these applications and near to succeed and that means helping them from the beginning from the early stage being part of that support system for them in

8. 3:43

   terms of being able to assist them with users testing their products giving feedback um marketing their their product promoting their their their community being part of an engaging force for them and lastly the near um the near my city global meetups it's it's a way that we want to also extend ourselves and decentralize a lot of this sort of spirit to empower leaders local leaders to organize meetups like this one so with that i just wanted to give you just

9. 4:23

   a brief overview and just wanted to say get involved and if this is uh if this goes the way that i wanted you will talk to me and ask me more about the community because i will be very excited to tell you all the opportunities we have here thank you and now yes hello i'm jessin i'm taking care of finance legal and operational matters at deer foundation and uh as a matter of introduction i

10. 4:57

    think about half of the people in the room know me already so i'll keep it very short uh i'm a bank auditor by training that was opposite to um christian was also in the room who said don't do it but it was like a great learning experience uh as a bank auditor and then i was into private equity for about 10 years i really grew up here in the region in zurich and uh then i got into crypto like many other people first getting into bitcoin

11. 5:27

    first block like a first generation blockchain protocol decentralized uh digital money very exciting and then discovering that there's ethereum which is a programmable uh sort of version of bitcoin and then looking now at the third generation blockchain protocol which is near i'd like to explain why i think that we have this progression and eventually ethereum will get there too with ethereum 2.0 we hope someday um

12. 5:59

    well um well with near what i really like is a user it is very simple to use it very fast to use it's like a one second block time and i think most of you have the experience of gotten a wallet to dig this on transaction it's very approachable and it's very fast at the same time it's secure and above that i like the carbon neutrality element it's not a secret i'm all about that topic

13. 6:27

    because i think um when we have a climate problem and we want to apply technology to problems and i think blockchain technology can solve a lot of challenges in the descent by decentralizing matters and uh in in various aspects and when we look at the climate problem i think it's not a solution that we just stop do do less of everything to solve it because we as humans be beings and we naturally want more we want more comfort we want more freedom we want to achieve

14. 7:01

    we want to have a bigger house we want to drive a more comfortable car etc it's just in our nature and yes we probably can be a bit more modest but we we can maybe apply technology to to still make our lives better while um saving the climate right and so i use a technology which was a great proof of concept bitcoin and continue to use that when it's uh becoming part of the problem not of the solution so we have

15. 7:30

    newer technologies and so let's apply this and so in this context i'd like to uh briefly explain the difference between proof of work and proof of stake and so the security taken with bitcoin is proof of work and that means the miners they're listening to all the transactions everyone hears all the transactions coming through that are happening and only one miner can decide what's the

16. 7:54

    next block right so that's a lot of power decide what's the new block to be put into the blockchain by recording all the transactions and with bitcoin that's being done by uh extending a certain amount of energy up a certain amount of work to for to solve a riddle and that's not being done by many many iterations and the more iterations you do the better the chances are that you get to

17. 8:17

    insert that block and get the block reward right and and so everyone is fighting to get that next block and with proof of stake the validators put up a stake and then there's a uh by by an algorithm if one validator is chosen more by chance who can insert the block and in case he tries to cheat he loses his stake and by that you only need you don't need all this computation this proof of work and that means um that creates quite a huge difference because for a bitcoin transaction

18. 8:50

    you can the estimate is that it creates as much co2 as two thirds of an oil barrel burned right and so if you send a transaction a test transaction to an exchange then you send your funds and exchange reshuffles your funds three transactions two barrels of oil just blasted to the atmosphere and um near is by a magnitude of a million or more more efficient and so it gives us the

19. 9:16

    comfort of a simple secure scalable blockchain and at the same time doesn't create this climate problem right so that's why i like near um well beyond that it has a very approachable emotis team that's what really keeps me in here as well so it's uh it's great to have elio here and we i think we lift the community you can feel like everyone has a say everyone can introduce his idea to improve the protocol to improve the experience of

20. 9:47

    the community to improve the user experience on various levels be it as a even a core contributor uh in some way having a job or being part of a guild or or coming to this meetup and exchanging ideas we're very open and approachable blockchain um so then how to engage with nir so i think if you don't have a wallet yet get one get a few tokens just to try it out try the apps and interact with it and

21. 10:18

    whatever you do is is re is on the blockchain forever just that idea is is quite neat but there there are more and more application popping up so we the protocol is just a bit more than a year on mainnet basically at the beginning we had just a couple of applications but now it's really going exponentially and i'm losing the oversight of what's being built on here um you can contribute you

22. 10:44

    have about 40 job application job openings uh so you can browse near.org slash careers and see how you want to contribute maybe directly you can engage within the community you can even create a guild around the topic where you want to interact with nir you can join any of the many projects you can create a project i think even in this room you have about 10 new projects that intend

23. 11:09

    to build on your on here it's like a medical device tracking we have securities stock certificates on here we have a gambling platform on here over there we have a payment international payment application on here it's if i'm looking into the room so that's a lot of things happening um and so i'll um yeah then there is one very unfortunate case which i i'd like to talk about and that's particularly here in zurich and it's it's very very awkward because

24. 11:46

    that's rare rarely happening in zurich something like that but there was an armed robbery just a few days ago on a near community member where two guys entered an apartment of that person and with and threatened with with a with a weapon to provide access to a finance account and so that was just giving access to a phone access to a binance account and all the crypto uh that was on that line it's account was wiped at once right and

25. 12:18

    that's very unfortunate uh and have have never heard or that this is like a thing in crypto it's like called the five dollar wrench attack right it does takes you have like all the security of the blockchain and then it just takes like uh a wrench to get your way into the crypto of someone and so because it's in zurich i want to uh let you know that there's something is out there police is on it and just be careful and there's a lot of things you can do it's basically your

26. 12:49

    phone is not good it's not a good security to your assets right okay get a hardware wallet but even that's right keep you the seat uh the recovery seat in a safe have maybe multi-sig setup for large amounts or stake your tokens because the tokens that were staked couldn't be stolen away they are on staking over two days and then there are still measures possible to secure the funds um before before they're gone i mean none of these measures are

27. 13:22

    completely perfect to secure yourself but like be sensitive to that reading to the topic make sure that you're you're not bonkering while you're empowered through blockchain you're not bunkering all the blockchain accessible at home because somebody could really threaten you and yeah think about your personal security in general yes there's a question don't tell people yeah don't don't brag about it right it's difficult when you engage but don't

28. 13:48

    brag about it don't uh like tweet how you got into crypto which exchanges you use because this was a very dedicated attack they knew what they were looking for they they went in four minutes later they were out again because they knew exactly which ext which exchange what they needed to do it and they were gone with it and uh yeah so it's obviously a very devastating experience

29. 14:13

    and for myself as well i was very shocked um so then to to a more pleasant element it will be i think the networking experience of of you in the room and so that's why i want to cut my presentation short at this stage so you have more room to mingle and get to know each other and learn all about what everyone is working on and so thank you very much for coming and i'd like to also thank ilya for coming to zurich i can like to introduce him up to

30. 14:47

    stage and yeah welcome here thanks jason um so it's an as usual it's a um i wish more like five windows of work uh

31. 15:57

    some point technology will just work but until that day well uh thanks for coming i mean this is amazing turnout um had a pretty short notice so i'm excited to be here excited to uh kind of share some of the stuff that we're working on and kind of how i see the world coming together and yeah thanks to grace and yes and for organizing kind of uh getting all this i'll try to go fast because yeah i don't

32. 16:27

    want all of you to just stand here and kind of listen to me talk and we can all chat and have drinks afterwards um so kind of the thing i want to talk about the most is actually what we're trying to build because kind of there's a lot of like blockchain talks there's a lot of obviously kind of talk about investing in blockchain and trading and doing all those things but we kind of forget a lot of times why this technology has started and where are we actually going

33. 17:00

    with them and kind of bitcoin started with this idea that money should belong to the kind of people who are owning and using them not to the banks or kind of uh some authorities that was you know kind of the what was literally in genesis block the kind of this news about um kind of collapse and banking system and so expanding beyond that but expanding away just from money like the whole world you know right now is kind of obviously has financial assets and

34. 17:32

    various other assets it has data but more importantly it has this idea of governance right this idea that we as people are able to kind of participate and contribute and also receive the value from the communities from the kind of government governments from platforms and from kind of products that we use and so like this idea of open world open web world is this idea where people are in control of this not you know some set of shareholders not the people who are

35. 18:04

    kind of started it but the people who are actually using it are active for participants and and they have control of their assets data and the governance and so kind of how we see this evolving right is actually on pillar of three things right one of them is obviously finance right finance is a motivator and if you know kind of how open source evolved and if it started with a lot of

36. 18:30

    kind of people who believed in open source but then it actually didn't go anywhere until big companies started investing it and actually paying people to build open source applications and some kind of finances are really important they're driving the economy to driving the kind of everyone but at the same time you want to kind of offset it with communities and with creators right and so we see this as kind of this triangle of

37. 18:53

    creators who are are able to expose their passion who are able to earn from this and nfts are a way to do it right is a medium but there's other mediums as well and there's communities who are able to govern all this who are able to kind of create the value and capture it and this is where kind of you know launching tokens creating doubts all of this infrastructure that a lot of people are working on is facilitating

38. 19:18

    so just kind of to mention few of the species that already there are near so this is some of the financial components right from exchanges to kind of lending protocols liquid staking so and like this is just you know few highlights there's more being built there's more launching on aurora so there's like a ton of stuff happening similar on greater side right there's a lot of there's like a couple big

39. 19:43

    marketplaces but even more importantly there's a ton of communities which are now either helping onboarding or themselves are kind of collective or creators who are creating something new offering it to the people you know pretty much generating revenue and then going and educating actually more people to come into the space and like why nfts are such a fundamental change for example from all the existing

40. 20:09

    kind of you know this property rights there is you know piece of art there's royalties all the stuff exists in the regular world but most of the stuff is super hard to use for a regular individual creator right like usually we need a record label company we need a like you know huge lawyer firm the defense this league of like um label company because somebody's violating this legal right

41. 20:33

    etc and here we have kind of just set of rules that anybody can use right this kind of marketplaces you know those people who've never kind of wrote code or or done any legal work or anything can go in kind of issues their own pieces of art music video etc start offering it start get receiving kind of future revenue from it being resolved and appreciating value and the other side is dallas right dao's and especially in switzerland is

42. 21:04

    actually becoming more important topic but overall right from my perspective this is where kind of organizational like new organizational designs are moving toward dallas just because it gives you so much flexibility on how to structure decision making on how to structure kind of how you want to manage your assets how you want to invest how you want to make decisions and in a way like there's a lot of people who try to

43. 21:28

    build kind of social networks and crypto and they try to kind of take facebook or take twitter and just do exactly the same thing and that's not how it works because kind of because crypto is this idea of like how do you coordinate people and how do you manage money first and foremost from my perspective dao's are the social of the kind of of the three of open web and so we have a

44. 21:51

    pretty cool thing called aurora server the astro dial that is pretty much allows you to create really easily your own kind of collective you're able to then you know receive money manage money make investment decisions create subgroups that have like specific responsibilities etc and there's work being done in ecosystem to make it like also legally protected registered variant in switzerland and some other

45. 22:17

    entities in other countries and so this really allows kind of to open up like where before you need to go and like set up a very complicated you know bylaws and then have all those things you can now expose a lot of this in code and then open up who can join it and create really interesting structures so overall right you know new ecosystem like there's a lot of stuff going on this is actually a pretty old

46. 22:42

    chart but um just kind of to show you the diversity is there's everything from finance to kind of infrastructure but more importantly there's a lot of different communities and yes and mentioned guilds which are pretty much kind of filling in different functions similarly how you would have you know ministries or um kind of different departments in a big company right that are serving you know

47. 23:06

    helping with user experience or helping with legal or helping with kind of go to market to specific products and so in a way like on a higher level this open web idea is like kind of building one big company that is just open and anybody can join right and so i worked previously at google where you have this huge company you know hundred thousand plus people and you have a lot of those

48. 23:30

    departments and you have a lot of things and internally it's actually really open you can build on top of any of the kind of other people's infrastructure or tools you can communicate with everyone but it's closed from outside right you can and it's actually like kind of almost by design does like the people internally don't want to talk with people who are outside of google and so this leads to kind of a lot of

49. 23:54

    times people just building for themselves right like a lot of products you see from google if they are designed for people who work at google they work really well and if they design for somebody else like social networks they were trying to do that didn't work at all and and that's kind of the result of this and so the idea here is kind of use the same principles of openness but open it up right to actually have everyone participating and everyone

50. 24:18

    being able to join and so our goal is to have one billion people actually using this and be active participants on uh near in five years and this is a very audacious goal because uh we're still pretty far from that as a space actually um kind of how do we get there well so there is a this is my mind map of a lot of kind of pieces that need to come together for for this to happen and

51. 24:47

    i don't want to go super deep into this but if if you want to learn about this hit me up later but the thing is like we already have a set of primitives that are working right now and i'll not go over all of them but the idea is like you you have now things that pretty much you did not have before that enable new types of experiences right and and like i just want to mention if

52. 25:10

    you're not familiar with their knowledge proofs it's pretty much magic it's ability to prove something to somebody else without actually revealing them anything except like the kind of the logic of what you were trying to do but you don't need to tell them what inputs you have and what outputs you have and you can do a lot of magical things for example you know you can send money without revealing who you sent it to and from whom but you can also prove for example

53. 25:34

    that this person never had cancer for example in their medical history or this person has gpa above some score without revealing the full transcript so you can start proving a lot of information that needs to be private uh to other people and so this is enabled by kind of innovations and technologies that have been launching over the past year year and a half right and like scheduled blockchains like near there's a lot of kind of work on like indexing querying

54. 25:59

    like the graph uh storage chain like file coin we have oracles like chain link and flux and then we have obviously ways to get in and out into the system like exchanges and obviously when i mention uh like kind of near started with this idea that you cannot have one computer to process all of the world's transactions and this is what kind of in a way bitcoin ethereum and most of the other networks are assuming and this is by design because you want to make sure that

55. 26:30

    everybody validates every single transaction you know in that happens to the network and near started this idea kind of that we need to scale beyond that right we'll need to scale kind of with demand and if we're going to get to a billion people we'll need more than one computer processing things and so we actually launched the shards on november 15th this is a little bit older slide um that uh now like near actually is runs

56. 26:54

    with four shards and you know we can keep changing this number based on demand and the thing is like it didn't change at all for the users or developers like the idea of kind of designing it similarly how do you you don't know how many computers actually running behind google.com or behind amazon.com there's actually lots of servers right they add more servers when there's more demand like you don't need as a user to ever know about that

57. 27:17

    similar idea near done um also more importantly if you're a developer entrepreneur nir has actually most versatile ecosystem because we actually support pretty much every single thing that you want to build on right if you come in from ethereum and been already building utility we have aurora where you can write stuff if you've been you know into web 3 into polka dot and then building

58. 27:41

    uh kind of power chains we have octopus network where you connect your bar chain and it's going to cost you like uh probably like ten thousand times cheaper than uh working with uh getting into slot in polka dot and we obviously have kind of more native support for typescript and rust uh which are pretty kind of typescript the super common language there's millions of people who actually know how to write it and rust is the most loved

59. 28:06

    language uh which is gaining popularity so one of the fundamental things though that changed right is this idea of ownership economy and i kind of want to emphasize this because like the open wab on its own is not possible without this economic incentives right i mentioned kind of finance and define open finance as a driver but kind of underneath the core concept is that you can give out pretty much ownership in the platform in the future value of the platform early on to attract users to create network

60. 28:38

    effects to bootstrap your um kind of ecosystem and this is pretty much extremely powerful tool and from kind of from what i see now every single entrepreneur especially in consumer is switching to build and use blockchain as part of kind of their tool set for building consumer applications this is already happening like three of my friends coming from google for example to start a company last three months all of them are using crypto like it's a startup doing something with crypto right and this is because they see that

61. 29:10

    this is the only way to bootstrap and really quickly grow their ecosystem and the only way actually to kind of be more um like innovative in a way against those like other tech companies that they exist right now and we obviously see that this facebook kind of moving that direction as well because they also realize that so i'm going to skip all this if you want to learn more um there's a cool stuff i just want to mention something super interesting because this is kind of when we're starting here

62. 29:42

    we actually um started looking at kind of in blockchain to build a crowdsourcing platform crowdsourcing platform this idea that you want to collect data kind of for machine learning four other tasks and uh you want people to kind of fill in this data for you and they were doing it because i'm coming from a machine learning background and we were doing some ai problems and we saw a problem literally just paying people

63. 30:06

    around the world right like paying from us to china to cuba to russia to ukraine is complicated and so we actually had a community member built the this crowdsourcing platform on near it launched in april and it actually has the biggest like this also updated has the biggest data set i think ever as far as i know collected of actual human label data by by now and i know some of the ecosystem also they're trying to expand this to become a service but the more interesting part is because it's open because it's

64. 30:40

    available everywhere in the world we had people during corona who were not able to have a work working on this being able to receive a salary and pretty much survive almost during this time um because this platform exists right so kind of it's not like crypto is not just kind of this like ability you know to invest or this kind of pipe dream of open lab it's actually something that's here already helping people and it's really delivering value and from this perspective things like this

65. 31:11

    right the actual business applications like while i was at google i was spending millions of dollars on this kind of work which was lower quality than what what are they getting here and way slower like it took us to this took from may to i think august 1 million it took us three years to collect one million data samples while at google and we spend a million dollars so like this already is actually a

66. 31:34

    business application that is available that runs and you you can pretty much build things like this and you can use token economics to incentivize people to join early on and be like global from day one so just to mention kind of at the end we announced a 800 million uh kind of ecosystem fund there's a lot of opportunity to build kind of an ecosystem there's grants which you can apply at the grants so d5 kind of for dif applications uh we're actually launching a thing called regional

67. 32:04

    uh kind of hubs which are specifically helping projects in region and obviously switzerland kind of having foundation here it like we just have a direct connect and then obviously there's a lot of venture funds and and kind of support and accelerators that are happening here and just as a last note keep learning this space is moving super fast there's so much stuff going on um there is near week if you want to follow new news new university if you want to

68. 32:33

    get kind of educational how to build on becoming a structure they're launching more programs as well kind of that are not technical there's an analyst for example program as well and we have blog and a lot of other content on youtube for example where you can watch and learn thank you and let's let's get to drinking yeah i mean if you have questions i'm here we're drinking like a better option

69. 33:15

    i guess i guess thank you very much the suggestion very complimentary