Onboarding Millions of Users to NEAR - Alex Chiocchi - Near Day at ETHDenver 2023

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

1. 0:00

   all right Ilya thank you for getting all the bugs out um really appreciate that so folks oh here we go so I'm Alex keoki I'm the newest Alex to the near ecosystem um there are now three of us and I'm the new Chief product officer for Pagoda and this is my first talk for near so I wanted to share a little bit of my perspective so I started as a product person at LinkedIn building for hundreds of

2. 0:31

   millions of users left after we were acquired by Microsoft you could probably understand why then got open involved in open source development in a few different crypto ecosystems which was really fun and that led me to Kraken where I was the VP of product and I worked on things like Bitcoin lightning integration eth2 validators polka dot parachains I really got a chance to see

3. 0:55

   a 30 000 foot view of the entire crypto economy and that's where I discovered near which was really really exciting I had always had a hypothesis that there would be a blockchain that could build incredibly engaging front-end experiences and as you heard from Ilia everything has really been about back-end experiences and when I read nears white paper and I saw Lots about it I figured this would probably be the

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   best place with the people the technology and a really Keen intuition towards usability to be able to build that platform so why I'm excited about the boss a community for for collaboration of decentralized front ends and users aren't going to have to choose between decentralization and ease of use and I'm going to walk through demos of both of these things so as Ilia showed you we have a bunch of different gateways that come from this core boss Tech stack and I'm going to

5. 1:51

   drill into the Alpha version of near.org which is going to be the Gateway that Pagoda is going to be spending a lot of time on so I'm going to actually do a live demo of alpha.new.org so this is live as of today and what you see here as Ilia said is kind of like a developer social network in place for super fans of crypto and near and I've got a feed full of all the new posts that have been happening in the last few hours you can see people have been joining every you know few minutes

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   following each other creating components including the developer governance component that Max told you about and there's a recent feed of components and I can search into each of these things and I can find any of these people the people I'm following or my see my followers and continue to learn more about people in the near ecosystem but I get really excited about the components here and you can see it might

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   be a little bit small but they're updating like every 10 15 minutes developers as we're speaking building these decentralized front ends we have over 1770 and we're just in announcing our Alpha today which is pretty crazy and the reason why which is the next thing I'm going to show you is I actually believe that what we've done here with decentralized front ends and alpha.near.org is a step level increase

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   in front-end developer productivity Beyond web 2 Beyond what's in web 3 something super exciting that you can only do on near something you can only do in a blockchain oh and also it's mobile optimized so you'll be able to do it on your phone but let's go into that developer experience so the first thing you'll notice is that that home page there's actually a right side menu here and I

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   can remove any component that I want and this is no code but if I wanted to get really fancy here I could go back and that was that front right hand bar here I can go and I see in the develop tab I'm on the social activity homepage and I can click view details and I can see what it's about this is an updated activity feed for for social experiences I could see the developer that made it but things get interesting as I look at the source code here and I can see the dependency of all the other components that other community members have made

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    and used for it and if I keep going I actually go into history and you could see the list of commits and you've probably noticed here that this is a block height and on this block height there's a code that was committed at that block height and if I could see an active render of it but if I go back in time I can go back to any point and see a live rep live render of that and I could see oh those actually components there have been deprecated so

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    maybe I've gone too far but if I go back over here I can see oh at this point in time there was no left bar but there was a right bar which is pretty incredible that you're actually looking at live commits being rendered as we're as we're looking along here but if I wanted to Fork it there's a in uh browser component editor that has you know a bunch of different things you can get in your developer experience but what I get really excited about is our vs code extension where you're actually going to be able

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    to do full stack JavaScript so you'll be able to write your front ends in JavaScript and your smart contracts in JavaScript so this is the first time since full stack development was like coined as a term with node and react that you're actually able to do this now all on blockchain that's never been done before and Josh is going to actually show you that demo a little later on today

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    now that's all really cool for the developer and we can get some really great workflows collaborating on components leaving each other comments but what's going on for the user and we've already started to see some people really push the edges of what could be done with front ends that are developed on uh on a blockchain and if we type in a game here there's actually a game for 3D laser chess

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    which is pretty awesome and I can choose to play at PVE or PVP and if I play it PVP I can actually get a link and that link has synchronized state based off of block height for both of the players that are playing and that scales with sharding so if you think about if you're a game developer one of the hardest things is actually server synchronization for multiplayer games if you see like MMOs like World of Warcraft

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    it takes like tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars to build that infrastructure but now just a front-end developer is able to go in and start syncing state for multiplayer games and if I actually look this is a fully 3D rendered game and if I shoot off this little mirror here a laser fires and that laser if I actually got my mirrors correctly I'm not as good at geometry as I am that product would be actually the goal to hit the other red mirrors in the back and that's how you

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    eliminate the other uh player and like Ilya showed you this same game is rendering in boss.gg a completely different Gateway ran by a completely different organization but utilizing the same components with just like a few lines of JavaScript to be able to render it there pretty cool all right so let's keep going here still loading maybe this will work there we go all right so uh QR code again if you didn't get it the first time some storage for your first component that you can build

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    sign up for an account and I'll leave that open for a few seconds cool all right let's talk about fast dots so you have these great experiences you have these really Dynamic things that you can do how do you get users on really really quickly and how do you make sure that you don't have to fall into the Trap of decentralization versus ease of use we've all seen this this is like the

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    Paradigm that all of us have to suffer with I either choose a decentralized wallet or I choose these very centralized custodial login systems right and auth zero is a very common choice right that web 2 developers use for this but instead what I'm going to show you is you could go to the blockchain operating system you could go to near.org and you could create an account and you just all you have to do as a user is type in your email and then we'll actually try to give you an existing um username name and this is a named

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    account on the blockchain so human readable and if there wasn't one that exists we actually even have like a little randomizer there these are small things in UI that seem like that's not that big of a diff big deal but when you're doing sign up flows these add incremental percentages of people who are likely to complete it's just fewer clicks and we talk about millions of people those small seconds and those small clicks really start to matter because of laws of big numbers

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    but now I can actually secure that account so I have an account now on near with a pass key and this uses the secure Enclave of your phone there's a secure chip that's accessible there and you can use either face ID Touch ID or just the Android pin and secure that account now to uh your phone and that took all of maybe five or six seconds and you have a full account behind this will be what's called meta transaction so the user's initials fees

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    will be handled so they can explore all these experiences that we just showed you on the boss without ever having to make a purchase as well and now for about as accounts get more valuable 2fa becomes super important and so we're going to have a threshold a progressive security model something that I learned a lot as I've been working on you know crypto Security in the past and then the last Innovation that I'm really excited about here is let's say you lose your phone right let's say you

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    can't get access to your fast auth account anymore well you could use a remote login if you had used a different device through a QR code or you can do an email recovery and this email recovery is really interesting because it's actually a decentralized email recovery that's going to be as decentralized as the protocol itself so it's not a single server that's just a honey pot full of everybody's emails it's secure as a blockchain and the validators and then finally we'll

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    actually allow you to be able to do a social recovery where you can set up a few threshold of friends and their emails that if let's say two out of three of them let's say something unfortunate happens to you get hit in the head and you don't even know your own accounts you know your husband and your brother can then go in and send two emails in and recover your account for you so completely decentralized as well

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    as you know just a few seconds to get started and super easy to recover and there's a wait list for this so we actually have a component for fast auth it's going to be a component on Boss equippable across all the different gateways and you can scan this QR code and sign up for Early Access if you want to try to use it in some of your projects and I'll leave this one open for you know 20 30 seconds all right

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    so what's next so the boss is going to have a few phases behind it what you just saw today we call Discovery and this is where we talk about decentralized front ends and super fast onboarding next is going to come opportunity where you're going to be able to build complex D apps as Ilia was kind of hinting to which we'll use probably hundreds of different components from different chains and a new digital task economy which is also

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    what the other Alex was talking about we start thinking about some of these uh puzzle games that he was saying that are that are able to be verified in a decentralized way this is going to provide opportunity for for average users to start making augmented income and then finally we arrive at what I call Super D apps and I have another talk about this at East Denver where I go into detail about what super D apps

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    are but it's essentially the um you know bringing together decentralized communication and multi-chain commerce into one experience and anybody would be able to make one fork it and reuse it everywhere so you can imagine these super powerful experiences that are only in the hands of maybe three or four different web 2 players around the world today any developer being able to make themselves and be able to communicate and

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    collaborate together on continuing to develop these for users so again near is not just a blockchain it is a blockchain operating system and all of these different things that we've shown you here I think hopefully you're starting to create that picture for you and I'm super excited for the rest of the speakers that are going to go into all the different pieces of the tech stack that really enable this to happen so thank you everybody