NEAR Inaugural Town Hall September 2020: Introduction to NEAR, Flux Protocol and Mintbase

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

1. 0:09

   All right, I think we are live. Okay. Well, um, let me get things kicked off here first of all before I do the screen share. Uh, welcome everyone. I think you can see one of my ears because of the background. Um, so welcome to the first near town hall. Uh, this is really exciting. We haven't done this before.

2. 0:29

   So, I hope you bear with us. It's going to be about an hour, plus or minus, and we've got a lot of really cool stuff coming up. Um, I'll introduce this in just a minute. Uh, and I'll share my screen here, and we'll dive in. So, I trust that everything is okay and you can see the screen. Um, so yeah. Uh, and actually, hold on one sec. Let me just adjust this real quick.

3. 1:01

   So, I need to shift around one thing here so I can see if people are yelling at me. Um, great. I'll do another quick screen share. Beautiful. All right. Welcome to the official to the first near town hall. Um, we haven't done this before. It's going to be fun. So, uh, what we're going to be covering today, so my name is Eric Troutman. I'm the CEO of the Near Foundation. Uh, we have a number of different things running down the list. Uh, so I'll kick

4. 1:40

   off with a quick introduction, a little bit about the project, a little bit about what we're going to try to accomplish today. And then Ilia, who's the CEO of Near, Inc., he's going to talk a little bit more about kind of the current status of the project and and what's coming up in sort of the short term and the medium-term future. Uh we'll have an update from Peter Depalo who's Devril at the project and um he's going to be talking about all the cool stuff that's happening on the developer side. Uh we're going to have two

5. 2:04

   projects who are building on top of Near talking here. So you'll get a chance to see sort of what's possible, some people from the community, see what they're working on. Uh so that's Mintbase and Flux. You'll be hearing from um Nate at Mintbase and Peter at Flux. Uh and then at the end we'll close out with the near validator advisory board update from Victor Brunan from Bison Trails. Uh and then at the very end uh we'll do some uh

6. 2:28

   signal boosts and Q&A. So if you have questions uh you should be able to ask them in the hopin platform and uh we'll sort of figure out how to do the routing behind the scenes and make sure that those get surfaced properly. So um let's dive in. Uh so what I'm quickly going to cover here just is a quick welcome talk about NAR a little bit talk about the NER foundation and just hit today's goals and then hand you off to Ilia and uh we'll kind of be off to the

7. 2:53

   races. So first things first welcome. Uh this is exciting. Like I said this is the first time that we're doing this. Uh if you are watching this like you're officially part of the community. So there is no there is no uh you know welcome form sign up anything like that. Uh I mean if you care enough to to be watching this like we're we're happy to have you. And so thanks a lot for doing that. So welcome. Um as far as Near itself, I just want to pro provide a little bit of

8. 3:18

   an overview of the project just so everybody's on the same page because I think there are a lot of people who are watching this who maybe have some familiarity but not a ton of familiarity as far as like why are we here and what are we doing? Um so just to kick off at the very highest level, why are we here?

9. 3:33

   So so what is our purpose? And so, uh, the the purpose statement is one of the few things that that that we've had almost unanimous agreement, uh, across across the whole core team as far as, um, you know, this this really fits exactly what we're doing. So, our purpose is to enable communitydriven innovation to benefit people around the world. And we usually break that into two pieces. Uh, the first piece is we're here to help people make stuff. Uh, which really means helping builders make stuff. Um, and the second piece is to

10. 3:57

    help make sure that that stuff actually makes it to the people who care, right? Who the people who need it. And and I won't go too deep into the details of this, but this is something that we keep coming back to again and again and again when we're trying to figure out is what we're doing the right thing. Uh so so as far as what is near, I'll just assume that that you may or may not have um a full level of familiarity as far as what

11. 4:18

    is near. Um so Near is a decentralized platform which allows developers to build applications um from shared state components that natively interface with digital value. Um so it's built on top of a blockchain. So there's the near protocol which is actually the blockchain and then there's the near platform which is kind of everything including the blockchain. And so the blockchain is um it's uh public and permissionless. It's proof of stake.

12. 4:40

    It's sharded. Uh and then we have all the stuff on top of it which is the financial layer which is the uh application layer and all the tooling. Um in terms of what that looks like if you look on the right you can see that sort of the base of everything of course is the blockchain. Um in the middle stack you've got the financial components and and and that um those actually interface with the Ethereum ecosystem and in the future some of these other ecosystems uh through

13. 5:04

    trustless bridge and then on top of that you have all the developer tooling and everything uh that kind of that kind of brings that to the average developer. Uh our two focuses we we start with uh usability and back that up with scalability. So you hear a lot about scalability in the space everybody's really conscious of what's going on in Ethereum. Uh so for us it's never been enough to be scalable. You have to be scalable and usable. So a lot of what

14. 5:28

    we've been doing um as we as we put this whole platform together is um you know yes we have a scalable blockchain underneath this. It's 10,000 times cheaper than Ethereum. It's you know has one second block giant times uh and and it's it's sort of designed to to scale dynamically with the demand. Um but at least as importantly we have the ability because of our flexible account model uh you can progressively onboard users which basically means sort of hiding the

15. 5:52

    blockchain. um developers and their apps can earn up to 30 or can earn 30% of the fees that are generated from transactions through that uh smart contract. Uh but ultimately our entire reason here is that we want to make sure that blockchain is just build test deploy done right that it's that easy which is something that you really don't get from anything else in the space and it's one of the reasons why we ultimately originally decided to build

16. 6:16

    this. Um and so the near foundation how does this how like you know why am I here? Um the Near Foundation is it's an independent nonprofit. Uh I'm currently in Switzerland. We're based out of Zoo and um basically it's sort of the steward of the project. So it deals with coordination. Um that means gathering people like we have right now and creating space for the community. Uh we handle uh working with the the funding

17. 6:41

    of the ecosystem. So that's everything from grant funding to uh a number of different initiatives that'll be announced over the upcoming months. Uh we do advocacy which is all about empowering local communities. So that could be you if you're watching. Uh we have a guilds program where we empower community leaders to be leaders and a whole slew of different things. Um you can interface with trays or nema uh if if you have questions on that. Uh and

18. 7:03

    then ultimately governance is is really providing providing the space where governance um can occur and so that the protocol any changes to the protocol any um uh road maps and things like that you know that there's ultimately transparency and ultimately that that the community actually has a voice and uh you know that voice is is going to be heard and it's going to be expressed through the things that are actually happening on the platform. But

19. 7:26

    ultimately but uh you know today it's it's all about this it's all about you and it's all about this town hall. So as far as today uh basically my goal is reintroduce you to near um and so you'll meet some of the people of the team. It's definitely to give you a sense of where is the project and and and you know what's what's coming up.

20. 7:44

    That's really what Ilia is going to be talking about, introduce a few of the apps, get a sense of uh you know specifically how the next few weeks are going to work. Um so that's where Victor is going to come in and then ultimately help you participate in the future. So at the very end we'll talk through you know a lot of sort of like upandcoming stuff, questions, things like that. Uh

21. 8:01

    so as far as the next step though, it's time for me to bow out and we'll see if we can get Ilia up here. So bear with us a minute. We'll do the swap and we'll have you uh in good hands. So thank you. Hey honey. Hey, hey, hey.

22. 9:15

    Heat. Hey, Heat. Hey, hey, hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.

23. 10:50

    Hey, hey, hey. We're live. All right. Hey everyone. Uh it's great to be here. Uh thanks Eric for covering the introduction. uh I I want to cover uh kind of current state and uh kind of set the stage for some of the subsequent uh talks as well.

24. 11:28

    So first of all the major milestone that we achieved and we've been pretty much going to it uh two years uh as we started August 18 and pretty much this happened like September 2020 is actually having a decentralized network fully operational and having people uh running it around the world. So uh you can go on explore.ne.org and check out the um kind of current validators and where they are where are they in the world. But the kind of core point is pretty much

25. 12:02

    network is on their shoulders now. And this really kind of uh uh puts us into like the kind of next stage, right? So uh somewhere in May we published uh this plan right of rolling out uh near protocol mainet and it was in three stages right phase zero was where near foundation would be operating nodes and pretty much running network in proof of authority mode where really it was designed to test all the tooling make sure everything works and give us time to really test it in a real environment.

26. 12:40

    uh and pretty much gave us like kind of a smooth transition from uh Neo foundation running nodes to um pretty much being run by a decentralized community. So that's happened and now the next stage is uh when we enable transfers or when when community enabled transfers and the network is fully governed and kind of proven out that it can be governed by validators. And so Victor later will introduce a little bit more about validators but I just want to kind of point out there's a uh like

27. 13:10

    underneath right there's a voting contract that uh the way it operates is by allowing validators to cast a vote with their stake and so this this voting contract it only can pass right there's no uh like there's no expiration time or anything right this is not like a proposal or a bill or anything Right.

28. 13:33

    It's it's really just a contract that as soon as it achieves a enough weight it will turn on the transfers and with that right the next is not right next step will be for validators to upgrade protocol to turn on inflation to be clear this is something that you know everybody wants and we like everybody just wants to make sure that this will be made in a sustainable way.

29. 13:58

    So uh and so like I think some people saw uh the way the the kind of the votes went up and down and to be clear right uh like Vic again Victor will talk about this a little bit as well but I just want to make sure that everybody understands that right now they actually are a little bit like there's few things that are not ready yet and that's why some validators actually like uh un un pretty much like unvoted right they pretty much removed their vote uh to

30. 14:28

    wait until until the final stage uh state comes. Um and to be clear, right, the the uh as state grows, right, the the amount of stake needed will be growing as well. So, so what happened right one of the things that uh did not happen yet is actually token distribution and there's like few reasons why it's been taking a while and like I want to apologize to everyone who's been waiting for their tokens and they didn't arrive yet. Uh but it is happening and actually starting this week, starting today, we're going to

31. 15:00

    start sending out tokens to all the people who who have them. And like to be clear, right before today actually nobody has tokens, no not team, not investors, packers, financial uh coin list uh contributors etc. And uh so this is h like this is starting to happen now. And this is big part why some validators have uh kind of removed their vote is because actually like yet it's not a community vote right it's not really voting with a with a stakeholder

32. 15:30

    delegators um so the other part I I want to kind of answer and this has been a frequent question is how does unlocks and transfers work right so one one of the uh points that have happened is um the like all all the tokens that will be distributed are locked and they are locked until phase two is voted in like by by by default. Um which also means if if there is some linear unlock or any other type of kind of a locking schedule

33. 16:03

    best in schedule uh it starts only after phase two is being loaded in. The only caveat is for the coin list sale, right, uh there is a 40-day regulatory window after sale closes, which closed on 25th. So whichever come later, right, either vote for phase 2 or 40 days after uh August 25th, which is October 4th, whichever comes later, right, uh is is the kind of schedule for unlock for those tokens.

34. 16:38

    The benefit is you can delegate those tokens at any time, right? Uh the tokens inside lockup contracts are delegatable and this allows pretty much to participate in the vote, participate in the ecosystem right away without needing to wait and also participate in in the lock itself. Uh I want to do give a quick shout out to the Dokia. They have built a really nice UI to showcase all

35. 17:03

    the validators and allow to stake to them through near wallet CLI ledger and they uh planning to add few few more options. And so this really allows to like users who maybe not familiar with this command line right to go out and stake with their uh their tokens and delegate to the validators.

36. 17:23

    Um all right so the other part I wanted to kind to talk through is some few of the things that are come upcoming right so even though you know we built the first version uh it it is running live but like we're not finished there's a lot of kind of improvements and also a lot of features that we want to uh roll out and so and it kind of spans across both protocol and tooling right kind of things that I'm working on top so on the

37. 17:48

    protocol level one of the pretty much big things that our team been working on isi improving test infrastructure. So it's been a pretty kind of big leverage for us uh for past like three four months as we've been running stakeors is to continue improving testing infrastructure pretty much capturing whatever have happened at the uh test nets with stakeor and replaying some of this uh some of the same situations or some of the same scenarios in the test infrastructure. And so the plan is to continue improving it especially as we

38. 18:21

    kind of uh continue expanding on the sharding. Um the other part is improving web assembly performance uh kind of originally right near uh like the whole design of near is to create a linearly I mean to create a scale out uh functionality right to ability to scale with shards uh instead of scale single shard performance at the same time. So we didn't have we haven't actually focused on improving performance of the single shard and now that we you know

39. 18:51

    have the kind of basic structure out we want to improve some of the web assembly performance low hanging fruit there to really kind of maximize what one shark can do. The the other really important piece is EVM. It's like from the start right we've been focusing on web assembly. It's really great for new developers. It's great for kind of some of the seasoned developers who come in with Rust like assembly script is good

40. 19:16

    for new developers but in crypto right a lot of people familiar with uh kind of solidity and there's a lot of code there's already a lot of audited code so EVM really allows to kind of unlock all the use cases that are um that already exist and sounds a kind of combination of those and uh port them on mirror so VM is being added as a pre-ompile so it's kind of pretty native and has also

41. 19:40

    like few interesting functionalities in how it works with other contracts on near and force is kind of changing blog production block producer selection it's been kind of a like our schedule our current selection process is very fair but at the same time it it limits sometimes how many actual nodes we can have on network uh based on stake so we want to change it to always uh bring

42. 20:03

    pretty much top like top uh whatever number of nodes and but still pretty much have a fair distribution of ST. The flip side of this is tooling. So obviously we want to continue improving kind of tooling for developers and uh uh we are adding staking support to wallet.

43. 20:23

    Uh there's a lot of work on kind of bringing rain rainbow bridge to mainet. So right now it's running on test net. have a hackathon happening right now but uh pretty much doing a lot of work to make sure it is fully secure and ready for mainet and adding web3 support right for near VM so you can easily plug in your front ends into mirm cool that's pretty much it and I'll let Peter take over from All right.

44. 21:21

    Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey, hey. So, I think five. Okay. All right. I'm live. Hey, everyone. Uh, so if you haven't heard from me before, hi. My

45. 22:25

    name is Peter. Um, I'm sort of the head of the developer community or developer relations. Uh, used to be developer experience, whatever you want to call me. Uh, that's fine with me. All you need to know is if it relates to developers, um it's my business and I care a great deal about it. So, first I wanted to talk a little bit about some of our goals uh previously and how we're

46. 22:49

    moving forward with our developer experience and our developer community more broadly. Um we set out to build the best developer experience in blockchain. Um but I'm also I I really want to emphasize something and Max actually said it in the chat. Um, that's that's sort of just a milestone. That's not really our end goal here. Um, and as Eric said, it's not really our mission.

47. 23:14

    It's something that serves our mission, but our baseline, the place that we're heading towards for improving the developer experience in the blockchain ecosystem overall is actually creating a developer experience that beats something like Firebase or beats something like Amazon Web Services. And that is the milestone that we really want to achieve, you know, on a longer timeline other than just being the best

48. 23:38

    in blockchain. Uh we think that not only is it something that we want to attain, but it's something that's going to drive the entire crypto space overall. Um and so I wanted to tell you if you're a developer and you're watching this, essentially there's three takehomes. I I have a few announcements. They're pretty minor, but there's three takehomes for how you can contribute to Near. Um, and this is where I want to um start sharing my screen. So, let me go ahead and do that.

49. 24:05

    Uh, here you go. Looks like Okay, I'm I'm just going to assume this is working. There we go. Okay. So, yeah. Uh, ignore these announcements for just a second. I just want to show you guys a couple of things. Number one is actually uh to build apps using Near. And so I do this in in demos that are more technical, but you can see this um list of example applications that you'll you'll be able to fork in your browser and start developing right away. So the number way the number one way that you can contribute to Near is actually by

50. 24:46

    building on top of Near. Whether it's a real real application, meaning you want to turn it into a business or you want to build something for a lot of people, or it's just a toy application. Um, both of those are things that we find really valuable. We get feedback from developers and we also like to see things built on top of us that we haven't thought of. Um, the second way that you can contribute is just to

51. 25:09

    contribute directly to our projects. So if you haven't been on our nit our GitHub and you are a developer, there's a couple of things you should do. Um so number one is if you go to the old GitHub, I know this is a little bit confusing. There's two. There's near protocol and there's near and star near core. That's super helpful. Um but if you go into this uh github.com/near, you can see a lot of active development

52. 25:33

    tools. If there's anything, you know, even a language that seems interesting to you, something that you're you're uh like you, oh cool, near contract helper is written in JavaScript. I'm a JavaScript pro, click on that, look through the issues, just start coding against our core tools. So that's the second way that you can contribute. And then finally, the last way is to go to near. There's a couple of things you can do here. Um, and so, oh yeah, it looks like here, I don't want to open Discord.

53. 26:00

    I want to I want to launch it in the browser so you can see. Um sorry it's loading here. All right. Well, while that loads. All right. Here we go. So, um number one, you have to verify. A lot of people get confused by this when they're onboarding. And as soon as you do, go to either the development support or the developer channel um in in the community or actually I think we might have moved it.

54. 26:28

    But anyways, if you go into these development channels in Discord, there are tons and tons of questions. Uh asking these and answering these is the third way that you can contribute. And furthermore, if you link to these on Stack Overflow, it grows our SEO on Stack Overflow and it grows our community more broadly because this is how people find answers to their questions. I realize that we've been talking about this a lot internally, but

55. 26:53

    we haven't said this explicitly. So, I just wanted to tell you guys if you're like, I'm really stoked. I'm a developer. I really want to contribute, but I don't know how. Let me review this really, really briefly. Number one, build on top of us. That's near.dev, you can go start go get started immediately.

56. 27:09

    Uh, number two, contribute directly to our tools. So, on GitHub, if you just click one of these, honestly, any one of these things, if you find it interesting, if it's up your alley, start putting in PRs, start putting in issues. It's extremely helpful. And then the last one is inside of Discord in the development support and in Stack Overflow asking and answering questions.

57. 27:30

    This is huge for us. It's something that we can't scale internally. We actually rely on our community for this to grow. Sort of by definition, right? I mean, for the community to grow, the community has to be active. The community has to grow. Um, so I wanted to tell you guys that before I just make a couple of minor announcements about our developer stuff, just in case you weren't sure how to get started, this is the best way.

58. 27:53

    Um, and if none of those things resonate with you and you're just totally lost, feel free to hit me up on Discord or email me directly. It's public. My email is peterne.org and I'll help you funnel into one of these things. uh either start building on top of our platform, building into our platform, building on our tools, or engaging with the developer community. So, with that being said, there's a couple of things I want

59. 28:16

    to tell you guys about. So, number one, if you haven't seen uh our YouTube channel, um which I'm sure most of you have, there's a new series out called Blockheads that's for beginner developers. Um and the next video that's coming out is actually going to be a tutorial, uh based on the last video.

60. 28:34

    So, these are designed to be more entertaining than educational. The next one coming out is a how-to guide getting started. If you're a total noob developer, not even new to blockchain, but just totally new uh to development, you're just getting started, that's a great place to get your foot in the door. Um, number two, we're opening the ecosystem to external partner engineers.

61. 28:52

    What does that actually mean? So, a lot of people right now are really excited to transition uh from other blockchains or to build a new product that they intend to try to turn into a business or it's already a running business. And right now, we don't really have the resources internal to support them because of the of the demand. And so if you're a really strong developer, especially if you're someone who's got a

62. 29:16

    lot of experience in Ethereum, um or you have a lot of Rust experience or even if you have a lot of TypeScript experience, I would love to talk to you. Uh we're bootstrapping this ecosystem, connecting partners who want to onboard with partner engineers so that you guys can work together to like launch your project faster just because we cannot address it as fast as we're getting uh questions. And then the last one is

63. 29:38

    something I'm really excited. We haven't publicly shown this off um which is the bounties page which pulls directly from GitHub. So this is the most important thing uh in my talk and maybe it's a fourth way that you can contribute that I didn't actually mention in the other three is you can either pick up bounties yourself um by going and hacking on bounties that already exist. And there's a few of these in this near.org/bounties.

64. 30:07

    Um, or if you're inclined, you can write bounties for things you want to see on Near and one of our team members will actually go and fund these bounties. Meaning, we'll we'll put what we think this is worth paying for out from the from the Near Foundation uh on these uh bounties that are created. So, for instance, this is a bounty that has a PR active already, which is someone thought it would be cool to create an Angular

65. 30:30

    template in the create near app, and we ended up funding it. Um, uh, just a shout out to, uh, I'm not going to try to say your name. I'm sorry. I don't want to say it wrong. Uh, but Far Farraly on, uh, your GitHub handle. Um, he had the idea to build an Angular template inside of our our, uh, generator uh, that uses npx and now that exists. There's a PR waiting to be merged. So, uh, that's one minor success

66. 30:54

    story uh, I wanted to show you. And so just to reiterate uh the last thing is uh remember new tutorials but the three things if you're a dev build apps using near contribute to the near tools or ask and answer questions on discord and then last most importantly bounties. So, thanks. Passing the mic, I believe, to uh Nate with Mintbase.

67. 31:44

    Everybody, is Nate Guyire, uh, co-founder of Minbase along with Carolyn. Hi. So, we are from the future. Uh, we've been ranting about NFTTS for a couple years now and no one's really believed us and now it seems all the hype is back. So, we're we're going to keep saying what we've been saying for a while and and show you all sorts of neat stuff and uh in a full eight minutes of time. So, so at a high level, we are Shopify for

68. 32:53

    NFTTS live on Ethereum right now and we will be adding uh Neo in the upcoming weeks. Yeah. All right. So let's go here. We're just going to kind of show you the process. So right now you can see some fancy numbers here. We have 811 stores that have been created on minface. That's a unique smart contract deployed by our users. So we've somehow managed to get a bunch of people who have never really interacted with a wallet uh to deploy their own smart contract, mint NFTts on that contract and sell them through a

69. 33:25

    process. Uh now we're going through a new phase where it's like how can we make these NFTs more useful? Um and what are some things that are people doing? So it's like the second wave of NFTTS. Um so um there are lots of artists like musicians who are tokenizing their songs on Mintbase. Um Camila Russo the author of the infinite machine. She even tokenized like proof of pre-order tokens um and distributed them to people who

70. 33:50

    ordered her her book. So this is just like one example that beautifully shows that it's not just like a collectible, an image, but um also you have sound um packed to this NFT. And so to take a step back of what the heck we're actually doing, this is kind of a good good thing. Let me get rid of that. Okay, so what do we do? A user comes on board, they mint a smart contract. We call that a store. You can create as many stores as you want. And

71. 34:19

    you basically upload all that file content to another blockchain called Arweave. Uh each NFT can have music, sound, legal documents all pegged to that NFT that we can't change and even the mentor can't change. Um so why are we adding near? Um basically back in the day to mint one of these things or create one of these things was about two bucks and now it's somewhere around 200 to 300 bucks. and to mint a few NFTts.

72. 34:46

    Uh yeah, three NFTs was literally $50. So try doing ticketing in in that sort of situation. So apart from the cost of like u you know NIA has obviously some advantages but we are also um creating new like business models. We are allowing our um our customers to create their own business model. So for example, just imagine you're a ticketing company and um you don't have money to like um you know set up the event before you need to pay like uh the caterer, you need to pay the

73. 35:18

    musician, the artist, but now on NIA we adding a split fee function so that whenever a ticket is sold it gets automatically distributed among different parties. So that's like a completely new um model that the traditional finance world has not um seen yet. So we are hyper interoperable.

74. 35:36

    So you can uh right now sign with any wallet like Formatic, Coinbase Wallet Connect, Metam Mask, of course the NIA wallet in the future. And it's awesome that uh NIA has met transactions baked into the system. So you don't always need to confirm every transaction when minting a token.

75. 35:53

    So you can see we make it as simple as possible. You can add your background image. You can add dates to whatever this thing is. You can add a lock file where the only the owner can uh see the NFT and so on. We're getting pretty close to uh moving towards near. So the biggest most biggest gripe we have is the fact that we don't have this giant beautiful engine called uh the graph

76. 36:16

    which we're really excited for them to move over at some point. But basically our entire backend data structure runs off of this thing. It's an indexer. So if you're curious what really makes a production application in blockchain, uh it all comes down to the indexer because you can always create an application where uh you can change the state and pull the state and it just ends up becoming loop after loop. Um so what we're actually building now and we'll

77. 36:41

    show you uh later on is that we're building kind of this mechanism on on uh on near as well. But coming back to like our vision and how we see the future. So on Ethereum it was a great experiment. We could see like people um minting NFTTS as tickets, as art, as photography. It was a great experiment but we could not scale. But now with NIA we have this new opportunity that we can actually scale. We can like uh do ticketing for stadiums. We can um

78. 37:11

    provide a tool like Spotify for musicians. So we can really like uh decentralize so many different things. And we believe that in the future like anything then uh then money will be tokenized shoe you can tokenize music songs videos anything and NIA will really allow us to scale now is showing how how it will work on MIA. So he's deploying a store right now which is like the foundation of um of our tokens.

79. 37:39

    Um, so what so we actually see your smart contract with 25 near tokens and as soon as that does that it boots you back into the app and if the indexer is doing its job right then we'll see all that beautifully update but it is broken right now because I was just developing on it last uh a few days few seconds ago before this thing. Super excited about our launch. Yeah. Yeah.

80. 38:00

    I think that's it. Dona from Berlin. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat.

81. 39:38

    Um, am I live? Yeah. Yes, I think maybe. Um, yes, I am. Okay. Hi, I'm Peter, co-founder of Flux. And um yeah, I I actually have some some fun sort of demo to show you. Um so it's actually the the first sort of public viewing of our app.

82. 40:01

    So I'm going to share my screen really quick so you guys can all see. One second. I think I just have to share it on Zoom. Okay, can everyone see my screen? I hope so. Um okay, cool. Um so this is actually the Flux app. Um, so I'm actually going to bring you through sort of the UX of the Flux app really quick.

83. 40:21

    Um, so we were actually one of the first um, teams to start building on on Near about 18 months ago. So we're super excited that we were able to basically um, you know, get to this point now where where Near is is is now fully sort of in their in their phase of decentralization uh, pending community vote and um, this is now sort of the the first kind of real world usable application launching. So I just want to give a quick demo of basically the UX of

84. 40:45

    the Flux app. Um so here you can basically click login. Uh there's two options. One which is uh sign in uh basically normally and the other one is to sign in with oneclick transactions. So I'll demonstrate this one. So this is kind of for power users basically. So basically what we have here is you click uh you know sign in. I'm going to click allow. Yes, I want them to be able to access my account. Um so now this is sending and this is the on onboarding flow that a user will actually normally

85. 41:11

    take. Um and now we actually have a fun market here. So, so again, this is just like first first version. We're still running through some bugs, but um this is, you know, kind of the market view. Uh this is a fun one. Uh we're actually kind of internally talking like what will be the near emoji uh in the future and sort of, you know, what will be their their DeFi meme. Um and so we actually have a market for this that that people are trading on. So I can just basically show, you know, how it looks. So let's say we want it to be uh

86. 41:36

    this little, you know, kind of like gamer pixely emoji. So what we'll do is we'll buy let's say 10 shares. Um or actually let's do 100 so it costs a little bit more. Um let's say the chance is uh 51% so market price 51. We click review. We click confirm trade. And this is kind of where the the real meat of near comes in. So all of this is done onchain. Uh this is processed. And if we go down to the order book, you can see that this is actually in the order book.

87. 42:03

    So in a few seconds we were basically able to go from you know logging into the app actually making a trade and confirming that transaction uh with very very e sort of ease of use um which really isn't existing in Ethereum today.

88. 42:17

    Um and so you know how I sort of see this is that where we're at right now is we're kind of at the intersection of usability and sort of like cost efficiency. And when you look at for instance Augur today as an example um you know people are routinely paying anywhere between $50 to $150 to actually make a transaction on top of Augur and um we actually get that transaction down to one cent. Um so I just wanted to give a quick demo. I'm super excited for for

89. 42:41

    to go to its sort of community vote and um you know this is what can be expected. So if you're a developer please reach out. Um, you know, we have this awesome SDK um that allows any developer to connect their app in three lines of code to the existing uh Flux protocol. And then we also have this open source app which I just demoed uh which is you know completely free to to clone. Um and so if you're a developer let's say in San Francisco and you want

90. 43:03

    to create markets on air quality um then you can get that up and running in just a few seconds with your own you know logo and UI color. So that's just a quick overview of Flux and um yeah thank you for having me in the in the town hall. Happy to to be here and present.

91. 43:33

    Are you buying?

92. 44:41

    Hello. Anyone here? You're you're live. It's in the chat. Oh, I see. Um, okay. Um, hi everyone. Victor from Bison Trails here. Um, Bison Trails is a uh an infrastructure as a service uh company predominately based out of New York where we're kind of all over the place now with with COVID. Um, and I'm a protocol specialist. Um, I've worked very closely with protocols and uh, you know, work have been working very closely with NIA over the last um, year I guess now or or year and a half.

93. 45:13

    Um, we're part of the NAR validator advisory board. And so what that is for folks that are just um dialing in for the for the first time, it's a group of professional validators that assist in the team with monthly discussions, testing, beta releases, new feature suggestions, etc. Um we we've been around for for a couple of months now.

94. 45:32

    Um and one things that we that we try to uh try to help with is just like you know shephering along processes um giving feedback and and requesting features a lot of the time um that continue to help you know token holders and help infrastructure providers that help DAPs and other folks. Um and so something we've been chatting with the new team about for um for the last couple months really is the phase 2

95. 45:56

    launch process. Um, and for those of you that aren't as familiar with it, um, you know, Eric touched on it earlier, but in order to get to phase two, which is the full unrestricted mainet launch, there's actually a two stop two, um, two-part process to it. The first part is to do an onchain vote to enable token transfers. And so that in order for that vote to pass, um, it requires twothirds

96. 46:22

    of the stake that is currently online to be voting in favor of it. Um and the second part is a near core update to enable inflationary rewards. And so at that point transfers are live, inflation is live. Everything that you know is required for a decentralized network to be live is live. And at that point like phase 2 is the considered you know full launch unrestricted mainet do whatever you want. Um and it's like completely

97. 46:47

    run by the community. And so uh the near team has done really really well to get us to phase one so far which is a phase that we're currently in. But in order to get to phase two, it the first step is the vote and that vote is conducted by validators. And so um you know it's it's fascinating because if you look at most protocol launches, they're done in a little bit of a more coordinated way where the team takes on like a bigger

98. 47:12

    more leading role. Um and sometimes they serve as as primary coordinators, sometimes they, you know, will launch networks themselves in a very centralized way and then decentralize it. Um and this is I think um probably the first like full launch that is done in a completely decentralized way where you know only validators get to vote.

99. 47:31

    The new foundation isn't running any validators and so like they're delegating tokens of course but they don't have a direct say into you know what the community decides and that I think is really really special and it is unique from from the protocols that that we work with. Um but one of the consequence of it or or the other sides of the coin is that the responsibility is much greater on all of us as community members to you know think

100. 47:56

     about and be intentional with you know how and when and why we decide to vote uh in the affirmative to vote to want to launch the mainet. And so as we were thinking about this internally um we started putting together a list of criteria that we thought are important in order to feel confident in voting yes and say hey you know the near network is stable it does have everything that that is needed to uh to launch in mainet and

101. 48:22

     we're confident in it. Um and as we're putting together this list, um we wanted to open source it and we wanted to uh share with the community in that this is um you know important for like to to help everybody um think about the mainet launch process. And this is list isn't like you know a mandatory list and it's not like a list of hardcore requirements and not everybody has to uh to use the

102. 48:50

     list or agree on it. Uh but we do think it's important to have a conversation around the criteria and and get and get give people's feedback, answer people's questions um so that all of us can make like an informed decision and of course like each validator will be making you know their own decision but it is helpful for all of us to to talk about it first and to see like what's important to everybody and what we think is is required. And so, um, if you, uh,

103. 49:13

     are able to get access to the GitHub links, I'm sure somebody will will, um, drop them in the chat, but you can actually take a look at the GitHub GitHub issue over here. Um, and so it's voting criteria for the transition to phase 2. It's in the near enhancement proposal category within the near protocol GitHub. Um, where we outlined some of the some of the things that we think are important. Um but also like

104. 49:36

     I've tried to you know be very clear that you know these criteria like you're welcome to you're welcome to engage you're welcome to talk about it welcome to ask questions and we do want to improve these but you know we do want the community to feel um confident that everybody can you know make their own choices come up with their own criteria and and do whatever they want. um you know these aren't mandatory in any sense of the world in any any sense of the

105. 50:00

     word and at the end of the day bison and trials is still if we're going to be running you know one bison trials validator we're still going to have only only the votes that are um that are on that validator and so um I'd love it if you could head over and provide feedback questions and engage with the criteria and then the other thing we're doing is we're actually hosting um two community calls to talk about this as well and so the first one is going to be in just two days and the last and the next one is

106. 50:24

     going to be at the end of the Um, you know, I think the goal is to try to um treble these conversations along as as quickly as possible because we're extremely excited for the Near Network to launch. We're extremely excited for, you know, some of the some of the dabs that you saw um displayed earlier to finally come to fruition and be able to attract users. Um, and we're just extremely excited for um Neo to start,

107. 50:49

     you know, iterating on, improving, continuing to get better um with every passing day. And so we do want to get this done as quickly as possible, but at the same time we also want to do it um you know as safely and securely as possible so that the mainet launch is a full success. Um and so where you could help is again go to the go to the GitHub, go to the community calls um attend, make your voice heard. We'd love to chat with you. Um and yeah, we appreciate your time.

108. 51:42

     Hey, hey, hey. I'm happy. Hey, hey, hey.

109. 52:51

     Hey, hey, hey. Uh oh. All right. Yeah, we're official. Okay. So, um there there's going to be a little bit of a lag between us here and and the streamers and the people who are who are watching this. Uh so if you have any questions now's the time to ask in the hop in chat or on any other channel that we can somebody can can locate and so fire away questions. Um so basically this is unstructured time. This is just

110. 53:38

     you know we have we have uh I don't know maybe seven or eight minutes here uh we just want to be available. So if there are questions from the community if there are thing if there are events that you're hosting and you want to highlight and let everybody know as a shout out like if if you just post that and hop in we'll see it we'll read it. we'll shout it and um everyone hopefully will be able to know.

111. 53:57

     So I'm gonna start manning channels and otherwise I think question for Peter is when's when's the end of the hackathon? When's the next one? Sure. Yeah. Well, hackathon ends uh 9:30 which is the end of this Well, yeah, 9:30. That sounds like a time. Uh Wednesday. This Wednesday is when the cuto off for submissions are. Judging is going to be the next couple of days after that. Uh and then we're also I might as well announce it here. We're

112. 54:25

     sponsoring ETH online which is the sort of uh COVID influenced successor to ETH Global. And so if you're interested in hacking, if you just want to keep that keep the hack alive, uh please submit to ETH online under a near project. Um and we've already decided that it's cool to double dip. So if you're hacking on a bounty, we'll pay the bounty out and the hackathon prize. Um yeah, it's it's uh

113. 54:50

     no problemmo. Also, before we start answering questions, I just want to give a huge shout out to Ashley Crawford. Uh, that's the person highlighted in the event and stage. What you guys don't see behind the scenes is she's been doing all of this tech stuff, switching uh, like cameras and aspect ratios and making sure Hopin works and she's done a fantastic job. She always does. Give her some love. Huge shout out to her. Yeah, she's awesome.

114. 55:13

     Yeah. So, um, oh, there's a there is a question here. I'll I'll ask it and then you guys can maybe answer it which is will validators pick and choose from the criteria list and then attract user delegation based on shared interests or are all valid or or will all validators share unified list of criteria? So I don't know who wants to pick that up.

115. 55:34

     Yeah, I I think I can grab that one. Um that's that's actually a really great question because uh it's almost like two different questions rather than like an or. Um, and that the first one like validators can come up with whatever criteria they want and it's up to them to communicate with their token holders that are delegating to them of like how they're making the decision, why they're choosing one way or the other. Uh, and that's entirely up to the validators.

116. 55:59

     Um, but and and they're welcome to use the criteria that we as a community come up with, but they're also welcome to use their own use their own and provide their own arguments for why, you know, why they they made that decision or use those criteria. Um and then the second thing is that it is actually really interesting because validators can um I think like make their stance public uh in advance of like what they're looking for as a way to attract additional additional delegation and make sure

117. 56:25

     there is that alignment. Um and so I would probably recommend like there should there should be an evolving conversation. Um you know if you want to connect with with the validators um definitely ask in your team. a we have we have like an a list of of validators such as zero knowledge valid validator and dokia and certus and and a number of others. So yeah definitely talk to them and reach out and and reach out to us as well. Happy to have that conversation.

118. 56:55

     Uh we we've got a couple of questions coming in. Um I think this one was asked first um which is as near protocol you claim to be 10,000 times cheaper than Ethereum. Of course it is as fast but Ethereum hosts thousands of DAPs and projects and that's why blockchain systems are slowing down. If Near were now in the same situation as Ethereum would it still be so cheap and fast? That's an excellent question.

119. 57:19

     Yeah, I can take that. I think like the core point that's near built on is kind of scale out right the idea that as you need more capacity you actually add more nodes like running stuff in parallel and this is the same idea that everybody on the internet right now using to scale up servers for Google, Facebook and any other like big company that has users and so the idea is as you know like right now on Ethereum you have thousand

120. 57:51

     applications that are competing for pretty much one computer's capacity and on near you know if when we get there or ideally even more hundreds of thousands of applications it will just keep scaling and adding more validators running nodes in parallel right pretty much lowering the barrier of entry to validators getting more nodes to be able to uh run the computation think of it as like if the freeway is congested you could make more lanes pretty much. Yeah, but it's software so it can do it dynamically.

121. 58:24

     Infinite lens. Um, cool. Here's a question for me. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Eric. I I was just going a little bit also on on the fact that one of the reasons Ethereum is expensive is because of congestion. And one of the cool things about once once uh sharding is good to go is is that actually the congestion spikes will will actually create a sharding event which will dynamically reshard the network which will then

122. 58:48

     reduce those fees. So there's a certain level of smoothing and stability that will be achieved. Cool. Um question for me. I'm not a developer. What can I do? uh a lot of stuff. Uh number one, you can go to near. chat and get involved right away.

123. 59:04

     Uh I mean, I think the coolest thing non-developers can do is still design applications or still design I like just sit and think about what cool things you could make. Um like there's so much opportunity now with fast blockchains that like you know just going back and looking at old ideas that maybe you could put a spin on is like one of the most valuable. The other one is if you want to be a community manager, reach out to me or nema in near. Um or again

124. 59:29

     you can email me public email peter.org and I can introduce you to people if you are interested in building community. Uh here we can move on. Oh there's a follow-up question. Uh what exactly are you achieving that Ethereum can't afford? Not exactly sure what that means but IA if you want to do do you understand? If you understand you can you can answer maybe. can't afford.

125. 59:55

     I think I mean yeah I'm not fully understanding but I think like one important piece that is different between just an approach itself right is that like what you mentioned we we approaching it from experience perspective right we're trying to make the user experience the developer experience and hopefully validators experience as well better smoother right in a way that you know people can just use applications and don't bother to figure out all the details underneath And like I I'm will

126. 1:00:27

     be willing to say like we're not there yet, right? It's it's it's a journey not like we're not a destination for sure. Uh but that's kind of the focus that we've trying to have tried to put ourselves you know up is not you know build even like the best you know scalable technology right scalability is just part of this experience. It's obviously that you know if you have this congestion problems if you have huge fees it's going to hinder your experience. is going to you know destroy your developers you know business models

127. 1:00:57

     is going to uh destroy your users exper like ability to use applications so like all of the things that we've been building right like un under it still power the kind of idea of how do we make this more usable and I think this is like very different from any any other protocol out there like just from the focus perspective right what people look for okay so I think we could probably do Like maybe one more quick one because I know we're out of time.

128. 1:01:26

     When will top level account registar be deployed? It will be essential to have that facility. That's a great question. Uh we will probably need some validator vote for that. Um I mean we don't have a clear time just because like the the top level naming is is is a really cool feature.

129. 1:01:50

     there's like already a lot of demand even on like near names but at the same time we want to make sure that it's kind of is at the like it starts at the point when it's fair and everybody can participate like when people already have all the you know half tokens and have ability to acquire them if they want to to participate in this right so like we definitely want to to do this uh like later after you know some some

130. 1:02:16

     initial roll out of the of the applications and ecosystem on here. So, for now, just bribe Ilia. Great note to end on. All right. Thanks a lot everyone for uh for joining us and uh tune in again in four weeks. We'll be doing this again. So, hi everyone. Delegate.

131. 1:02:59

     Hey Hey.