NEAR Town Hall April 2022 - The future of music, entertainment, NFTs and games on NEAR Protocol

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

1. 0:58

   hello and welcome to april's town hall a flurry of initiatives have been happening in the near ecosystem spring is definitely in the air in the northern hemisphere a couple of recent highlights which we'll cover in more details as we go to this through the town hall agenda last week actually two weeks ago we've announced our partnership with sweatcoin in paris and already we have over a million wallets that have been created

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   which is huge tge should happen in the in the next couple of weeks so stay tuned for that we've had a lot of in-person activities i think it's fair to say that there is a flurry of conferences that are starting to happen back we were at paris blockchain we were in amsterdam for death connect and we had several meet up organized in several parts and places of the world but in particular one in portugal for the inauguration of our

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   ukraine in exile hub and last but not least but we're also working on a first hacker house in miami on key projects again here lots of amazing things happening uh in particular on the side of fundraises and congrats to the many projects who have raised significant amounts of external capital in particular mid-base bastion stander wallet roquetto and boro we'll talk a bit more about those but guys congrats that's amazing to see if we go to our agenda for today um we have a couple of things that will follow

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   through so i'll start with an introduction to recap you know near near the near ecosystem but also focus on the foundation what the role of the near foundation is and what we do uh to help the ecosystem in terms of updates we'll have strategic partnerships covered by chris past and upcoming events covered by yadira education covered by sharif funding and ecosystem update by josh and

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   we'll look at regions with grace our panel of the months is music and we'll have team exile from endless john wharton from artura labs amber stoneman from minting music and this will be moderated by vijay gurnashi and with that let's go into the introduction so when we look at mir and what collectively as an ecosystem we're trying to achieve it's really about creating the open web world a world where people can control their assets

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   their data and their power of governance this is possible and empowered by the near protocol which we like to think in terms of simplicity scalability and security simplicity because it's simple to use whether actually it's for end users or whether it's actually for developers for end users we try to survive on having user experiences that are as close as possible as web 2 and for a developer it's particularly enabling things such as javascript that make it open and accessible to millions of developers and

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   not only just a few scalability and security comes through in particular with the proof of stake and nice sharding initiatives that we have that continuously secure the protocol and enable its continuous scalability there is a force s that we'd like to come and think through which is sustainability the near blockchain is climate neutral and not only the blockchain but also our entire ecosystem we've partnered with salespool to continuously assess and look at auditing the footprint not only of the near

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   protocol but also our entire ecosystem and it's great to see a continuous increase of projects that are wanting to build on the near protocol because of its commitment to sustainability if we look at try to think at what is the new ecosystem and how to represent that the best design that we have for it it's really this map almost at the center of it you have the near protocol which is open source on which several infrastructure player and partner are continuously building whether it's for example octopus aura makina pagoda or

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   calimero the type of project that we have in our being build can broadly be defined in three categories of course the category of d5 the category of the creator economy with nft gaming and digital cooperatives also sometimes known as dao on the right hand side you have the different many partners who actually help things through how can funds and allocations and actually focus

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    within the ecosystem be brought through so for example regional hubs are great place to have funds dedicated to specific activities that help increase the footprint in a local place proximity lab is the lab that focuses on defy human guilt focuses on gaming and so on and so forth at the bottom of this picture we have the new you have the near foundation which is the part that i did

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    in terms of protocol uh this slide again is something that's been shared broadly uh as a reminder but today we are still in phase zero of the protocol update and in grade near is always near and so there is continuous upgrades that are happening on an ongoing basis uh focus right now is actually on enabling us to increase in particular the number of validators to go into phase one as a foundation to support the near ecosystem we have three main

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    responsibilities the first responsibility is to raise awareness of mir and that is something that we do broadly speaking through two main axes first acts is actually how can we help educate educate very broadly on what is the open web what is web3 what is also near protocol and that's the education program that will be covered a little bit uh going forward raising awareness is also through partnerships what are the type of

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    partnership that we can actually help foster so that they showcase real life use cases so that it's actually easy and easier to understand the power of blockchain and in particular what near good and evil doing the second pillar that we focus on as a near foundation is supporting projects who are building on here whether it's actually individuals or whether it's project supporting means enabling projects to grow sometimes

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    through grants but also having the right infrastructure we are in the lego land uh you know blocks and and making sure that actually the different places and parts of the infrastructure are there so that project can strive is extremely important and last but not least but the third plr that we focus on as a near foundation is ensuring and enabling governance but also active external regulatory engagement where needed

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    the flywheel that that we look after is all ultimately aimed at having weekly active engaged users that's the north style metric that we that we focus on and the way to get there is to think so well to do that we need to have at the top of the spy wheel talent how can we have qualified students people who want to participate and understand what's building on a blockchain such as i mean

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    if we are able to increase the talent that wants to participate then in turn that will actually enable us to create and have great projects being created within the ecosystem and so that's the second part of this flywheel and ultimately having great projects will ensure that we have active engage users and at the center of this triwell you have the governance so very simple to put on the slide harder to put in reality but that's what we like to be focused on and think through how can we

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    actually help have the right uh the right flower on the right kick off within the ecosystem in terms of numbers so great progress have been made through the ecosystem a couple of things i wanted to highlight here um in the second pillar you'll see we already are over 500 projects that have been created on the near protocol um the number of accounts has been growing we are now over six million accounts and it's fantastic to see in particular the impact that a project such as sweat

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    economy is having and on the right hand side as you can see tvl already over 3 billion which is also fantastic progress near in the wild or near in the news um we've put here a couple of highlights but it's been really good to see that actually whether it's you know our footprint and our presence that we've had at the different conferences that we went through or whether it's actually the fundraise that has been happening

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    we've seen quite a lot of places and near is being talked about more and more in the news and last but not least and i think after that i'm gonna hand over to the next person but a huge congrats congrats that i was mentioning earlier to the many projects who've actually raised we've highlighted a couple here i hope we're not forgetting anyone if we are i'm sure you'll reach out and let us know but

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    congratulations to the rocator team for raising 900 000 seed round from move capital meta web and ant capital congratulations to the bastion team for raising a new funding round laid by jane street congratulations to the trisolaris dao for raising 4.5 million led by electric capital with participation from jump dragonfly lemons cap and ethereal ventures congratulations to sender wallet which raised the seed round from metaweb binance labs for the continued development of their non-procedural

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    wallet on new year congrats to the borough team and project for raising five million round led by dragonfly paraffin jump qcp and for its non-custodial liquidity full platform built on here and last but not least congratulations to the mid-based team for raising a 7.5 million series a led by woodstock fund to expand the nfc infrastructure on near that's amazing to see great progress great traction and with that i'm going to head over to chris jen for strategic partnership

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    overview thank you marik i will just do a quick overview on a number of strategic partnerships that we have launching and have launched in in the last couple weeks that you've likely seen in the news jumping into the first one as marie talked about the sweat economy from the sweatcoin team has really been an amazing thing to see in the last 11 days or so we've seen over a million accounts created on near

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    pretty phenomenal when you think about the future of movement and a new economy based on movement so jumping into crypto is as easy as just walking and really the the health benefits the economic benefits of that are going to be amazing to see unfold and so i won't talk too much about what they do because the sweat coin team and sweat economy team has really uh put together some fun video materials uh to talk about the sweat

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    economy so with that let's give that a watch physical activity improves lives it makes us healthier happier and more productive so why not encourage more of it that's why we created sweat to get the world moving because of attention intention and rewards users are 20 more active after downloading the app with a new cryptocurrency we expand the possibilities incentivizing more kinds of movement with better rewards

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    to a global population this is how we revolutionize the way the world thinks of activity welcome to sweat economy powered by sweat a cryptocurrency you can buy sell stake exchange and apply to endless new use cases a mission to continually incentivize movement to create a healthier wealthier world for everyone sweat coin and sweat it pays to walk so the the sweat coin app actually converts steps into new crypto um so sweat is actually easily accessible around the globe

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    and like i said over a million while it's created in the last 11 days which is pretty phenomenal but the team is just getting started and this truly is the first touch that people can jump in with a very easy user experience to really start to see what the future uh that's crypto and near based looks like all right looking at the road map that the team is really looking forward to what the future of the the token economy looks like so the ease of access of

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    onboarding in the app starting to look at how you can actually bring in partnerships and nfts future forward looking really starting to think about governance and on-chain voting for sweat dao looking at nft marketplace and really starting to think about how do you engage people where they are when they are with that movement and leveraging that movement data and analytics to really drive the future of health and health outcomes

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    super exciting what the team is doing they're really looking forward to see where they go and how they continue to build momentum but curious to see how far and how many accounts come from the sweat economy to near looking at sale gp so you guys have heard sale gp in the news and starting to think about season three like the countdown is on with the first race actually launching in bermuda in may uh as a reminder this partnership really is about capturing the the global

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    attention uh of sport and really thinking about how does the sports league actually integrate uh crypto blockchain and near into the dna of their footprint uh so for cell gp uh we'll talk a little bit about upcoming milestones and really what is the roadmap for year one uh the approach here really is similar to the sweat economy finding very simple user experiences to bring people into crypto and web 3.

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    we're looking at global adoption we're looking at high impact high visibility moments and really creating creating an opportunity for teams and community members to participate in very different ways that you're not able to do in traditional sports so also think about future of products like ticketing how dows actually come in we hear a ton of talk around dows and everything from motorsports to football teams but really looking at how can for the first time a team be sold

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    to a dow so first part really is about strategic onboarding and really going to market you guys saw the news coming out of san francisco at the end of season two that was just the beginning so you'll see everything from writes on tv qr codes on screen and the ability to start engaging and even create wallets but we'll start to look at other ways of actually activating and bringing new experiences in uh through the footprint

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    of cell gp from a technology roadmap perspective uh really interesting opportunities for us to build ticketing open source with teams like cognizant and oracle which is pretty phenomenal when you think about the ability for other ticketing services to pick up something that is open source and then really looking at marketing support so not only is this an opportunity for mirror to be seen in 189 countries but

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    we're looking at ways to bring in the community and actually hear the community and get that kind of spread as well so starting to think about nfts and platforms like mint base or for us and starting to see how can we activate in local markets but at global scale and then fun parts you'll start to see branding on boats and calls to action to actually go and learn more about nearer so stay tuned

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    for that but i think on the next slide we've got a fun little uh preview of what's to come in season three uh the turn marks uh that are actually in the course uh will actually have near branding on them as well uh and we'll also have qr codes so hopefully if you think about that moment around the uh the big game uh being able to see qr codes on screen and engage with near uh in the blockchain in over 189 countries in real time is a pretty big deal so with that uh season three kicking off

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    may 14th and 15th in bermuda will be on global broadcast so shifting from partnerships and really looking at upcoming and past events so the the last month has really been busy uh we've been jumping around and really talking about near in pretty formal settings like paris blockchain week we've really seen a ton of activity and a ton of interest both from a community perspective but also with partners starting to advocate so at paris blockchain week we had folks like

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    charlie from cell gp talking with the alien team on panels and really starting to look at what does the future look like with a property like stlgp with the adoption of dows and the future of fan engagement uh but we really had a great opportunity to talk about pioneering the future of daos it is still very early days but when we start to think about how dow zonier can actually lead the broader dow ecosystem uh from a proof point uh super excited to to see that

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    and then marik and oleg from the sweat economy team had a great panel talking about access movement and the economies of the future on nir super exciting to think you can just walk earn a token and start to create economic value jumping to the next slide we actually went from paris to amsterdam so ton of education opportunities with sharif shashian team uh and really starting to talk about uh the development side and the roadmap uh for near elya talked a ton about the

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    sharding roadmap uh and going from simple nightshade to full full-fledged nightshade uh over the coming phases and with that uh we've got a ton of upcoming events uh so if you haven't checked it out check out mir.events and you'll start to see a lot of what's happening within the community some of these are organized by our team some of these are actually organized by community members so if you've got a topic that you're looking to support if you've got something that you're interested in please do go in here check these out log

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    your events and help the community grow and thrive our next big event that's coming up is actually consensus in austin texas we've got some pretty amazing activation opportunities at that event is one of the biggest events in the u.s so really looking forward to consensus and bringing the community and partners together hopefully we will see you there and if you're looking forward to going and you haven't purchased a ticket yet

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    there is a near community ticket where you can receive 25 off give a check on the slide here but also in the notes and details in youtube sign up on the consensus website and with that i will pass it over to sharif for education thanks so much chris appreciate it uh hey everybody let's talk about education for a couple of minutes uh so for sure uh being in amsterdam for devconnect was a lot of fun met some great people and very much looking forward to continuing those conversations uh to get

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    into education a reminder near university near dot university where you can learn more about all of these things we've got tens of thousands of students millions in ecosystem grants and tens of programs shipping with more programs on the way at the top of the queue of our programs although this is not the complete list that we have we are interested in engaging people with our near certified

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    programs near certified analyst developer and entrepreneur we have about half of our applicants coming in half of you that are submitting to join a certification program are saying that you have no software development experience and so we want to meet you where you are with a neo-certified analyst program and that is basically to spend some time talking about what are these systems how do you think about them and how can you make a

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    contribution without necessarily you know fingers on a keyboard typing code as within your certified developers so we're excited to announce the upcoming launch here near certified analyst we have a couple of different proposals in play and hopefully this quarter will see that course in full swing we have continued with our near certified developer new teachers new content and and so on and the plan is to

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    actually see the near certified developer automated to the point where you can take a self-service course from beginning to end now that we've tested out that course for some amount of time we have a good amount of feedback there and we're comfortable that we can actually start to scale that out and then near certified entrepreneur we've launched the first iteration of that back in early february i believe and that's just getting wrapped up now we're aiming to launch the second one in may

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    um as this first cohort begins to wrap up lots of great uh activity there in the near certified entrepreneur cohort now really excited to see what projects come out of that so these are our featured certification programs learn more at near dot university we are also doubling down on something that has been uh on people's minds for quite a while so even as late as uh as early as uh late last year people were

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    asking for better onboarding to the near ecosystem how can we make the experience of getting oriented and getting started easier and smoother and we finally hope that we found something that is going to make a difference in your life and the lives of all of those that are new to near with this better onboarding experience it has a number of names today welcome track and smooth boarding and so on but in the end you'll find it at your university sometime in the next

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    week or so we plan a soft launch and then we'll start to market and grow from there so you'll definitely hear about this but we're starting with two uh two tracks one for uh react developers and one for entrepreneurs and so that way we hope that we can get some good feedback both technical and non-technical and then as we start to mature out this this on-ramp it'll be better but you'll learn exactly what you need get instant access to update

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    updated content and uh it'll be self-guided and of course as i said we'll start with react developers enter so hopefully this will be good and and you'll enjoy it keep your eye out for that better onboarding coming in new university that'll come up soon the fellowship program many of you are familiar with this near.university fellows if you want to sign up and learn a little bit more about this program has been growing we

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    have over 500 applications now in for this fellowship program and about 1 in 10 people who apply get an interview and uh and get uh involved in the program it's uh it's quite a high bar that we're holding and we hope to even raise that bar a little bit uh to uh to keep uh people in good company and uh it's it's very exciting because this is a a kind of low or no friction entry point

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    into the web3 space it's not just for programmers but also for entrepreneurs designers teachers writers and researchers as you can see here a few of the options that we have available to you the idea is uh you come in you submit an application um and uh you know we we have uh checkpoints uh every month uh 30 60 and 90 days uh can be full or part time you set the pace for yourself and

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    we compensate you in near tokens you know whatever is a fair compensation for your experience in your region so very excited about the fellowship program that's been moving well on the next slide here let's take a look at the impact we've had so far nine out of ten fellows are saying that they work in collaboration with each other so this fellowship is not an isolated experience you're really spending time connecting

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    with other people in your community and that's of course important because builds your professional network and and brings in fresh ideas from the diversity of mental models that you get exposed to nine out of ten fellows are also working on driving user adoption and growth among our user base and nine out of ten fellows are helping more people learn about nir so it really is about user adoption through education in collaboration that is what most of the

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    fellows are doing seven out of ten are also increasing the number of developers so targeting technical uh users and that's pretty exciting and about half of all fellows are actually launching new product projects and products in some form or another some of those are educational products excuse me products some of those are nft products and the usual suspects as you can imagine and here on the right we have a quote from one of the fellows that seems to appreciate uh what's happening so far

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    near.university fellows please check it out uh thank you so much and uh have a great april uh on to josh for funding thank you sharif that was really uh exciting updates from the education side there's always great activity there uh hello everyone josh daniels here i'm going to provide a brief update on funding uh and our ecosystem broadly which has seen a lot of growth over the last quarter as we've kicked off the

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    year so first as we always like to do is give just a general overview of what we think about when we think of funding within the near ecosystem and the big piece of that is developing our funding platform which again has these four pillars which are really around supporting a diverse collective of folks who are interested and engaging in your ecosystem providing them access through introductions through connectivity and products as

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    well as community support and then making sure we're aligning some incentives and so as projects are developing and building whether it's at the mvp stage or transitioning from a web 2 experience incentives are aligned and everyone's looking to drive growth from the ecosystem standpoint now i want to take a moment here and just speak to funding growth year to date so we've had a lot of activity in the ecosystem and a lot of positive

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    activity uh on the external funding side quickly i know marie mentioned quite a few projects that have raised which is so exciting but want to kind of talk more at a top level in terms of the numbers and so we've had over 64 million dollars of closed funding rounds from outside sources in the ecosystem to date we have 90 plus projects actively fundraising now looking for a total valuation of 4.3 billion and those

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    projects are raising around 480 million dollars and so i know we have a lot of active uh backers uh and advisors and vcs that are engaged in the ecosystem so continue to stay in touch with us for introductions or uh engagement there but really exciting stuff and growth now on sort of the grant side of things we've had a really banner quarter in terms of grant growth and support but i

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    think the important thing to note as we look at our grants program is not necessarily how much we're deploying or committing to deploy but the quality of those projects and we've really seen an uptick in the quality of projects that are coming into the ecosystem whether they're looking for a multi-chain strategy or transitioning from web 2 or tier 1 teams that are coming in to build uh from a first principal standpoint and

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    so we've committed to deploying uh almost 26 million dollars in capital uh year-to-date uh to almost uh 360 projects and the important thing to note as well here is that the diversity of those projects is quite expansive whether it's on a regional basis or in terms of the sub-ecosystems or areas of the general near environment that they're looking to deploy so really excited about that growth and continued to focus there one of the projects we are supporting uh is efus they received a grant recently from the near

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    foundation and we're really excited to take their esports uh and gaming uh project and team uh into the web3 environment and there's two ways we're going to be partnering with them one is the creation of an nft platform to help to make gaming moments for particular folks that are using the esports and eq's environment the next is setting up a league via dalles to help basically uh run

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    gaming esports leagues uh on top of efu's leveraging the near uh technology and the astro dao uh uh technology we're really excited for the potential here and what that could mean for the ecosystem as we continue to see more and more projects in the gaming space uh really excited and wanting to uh sort of build on deer and continuing on sort of the gaming narrative uh one of our guilds within the ecosystem

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    human guild has actually just created a really great video uh highlighting a bunch of projects that are crypto games on near some which they are directly supporting via grants or advisory and then others that have just organically developed in the ecosystem and so i'll pause here to show a bit of the video

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    so that was great i really human guild has been an incredible long-term team in the ecosystem that's been really driving at this gaming narrative and it's great to see a lot of these different games come to fruition and really have these unique uh diverse gaming experiences so really exciting to see another way that we've really been activating the ecosystem is through some of our accelerated relationships so this past week we actually uh supported and

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    partnered with the wharton school at the university of pennsylvania for their initial batch of the cipher accelerator and they had their demo day this past friday a lot of great projects were able to present it was great also to see the team that was running the cypher accelerator including folks from undergrad and grad as well as professors and there was a lot of great content chris giancarlo who's the former cftc

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    chairman and runs uh the digital dollar project uh did a keynote speech where he spoke about sort of the need to really engage uh local lawmakers as they're thinking about what does it mean for crypto to become sort of something involved in the broader sort of narrative as it expands and grows as a web 3 environment it was also great to see several of the projects that were presenting they were quite diverse in terms of business

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    models and use cases one of the projects actually is actively already building on near mediversal ai that's supported by metaweb one of our ecosystem funds so it was really exciting to meet and engage with a bunch of these projects please be on the lookout for many other accelerators we're going to be supporting in the future especially from a global perspective so really excited to see and if to learn more about cypher accelerator in their next batches please

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    visit them here on twitter next up one of the other ways we've really seen organically of folks wanting to engage with the near ecosystem is through this concept called hacker houses uh it's something that in web 3 that's gained a lot of traction and the idea is that you have a sort of set amount of time where a community of developers locally in a particular city or region come together and meet and

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    have sort of hackathons and content and learning and just general social engagement and so we're going to be working with an uh independent group that's already sort of developed this and is building this on their own uh to have the first hacker house in miami which will take place a little bit later in may so we're really excited to see the developments here and you can scan the qr code of the lower right corner to learn more but as we start to expand on

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    this as an opportunity we expect more folks in the ecosystem to really raise their hand and want to sort of have these in their own local areas so really excited to see this development and growth so lastly i want to leave you with this slide here which basically talks about if you are a builder how can you get more involved and that's whether you're already actively building in the near ecosystem or you're looking to join uh in the early days so for builders

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    there's many ways to get involved you can reach out to the funding team directly for several types of funding models uh you can also reach out to our grant pools which uh focus on particular sub ecosystems within the broader near ecosystem we also have our backers network which is a collection of vcs angels and advisors who are really looking to engage and support projects within the broader ecosystem and then ultimately here you can see these

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    various other links out to uh major projects and teams in the ecosystem so definitely excited for folks to continue to build and if you want to learn more please reach out and so i'll pass it off now to grace to talk about regional hubs well thank you josh for those uh funding updates that are also relevant for the regents and that brings me to the original overview i hope to make a very brief one since most of you already know what regional hubs are so let's get uh to the basics in a

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    nutshell why what and how we understand the why is because there is a need for us to decentralize even more and to create the means for mass adoption what are the hubs where they are independent entities they are completely aligned with the foundation's missions and our objective but they are completely autonomous and independent entities they have been set up by a web 3 experience leader and they are

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    looking at creating traction in the open web in the web3 world the way they do this is in two different verticals one vertical aims at creating talent web3 talent and the other vertical aims at creating 3 projects building on here and these two verticals complete what a hub function will entail just to make sure that it's clear hubs are not near offices in those locations they're not an extension of the near foundation

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    so the current state shows that we have five hubs we are allocating a hundred million in funding to create the network of regional hubs and all these are very much focusing in developing the ecosystem that means very close ties with new universities with product labs with web3 incubators for both talents and projects and for ecosystem funds if anyone wants to get involved and wants to understand a little more about how to get started with the hub please

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    feel free to join the telegram group this is an overview of the hubs as we have them today we as i mentioned before we have five active hub and 14 are under consideration as you can see the extent to which we want to create a good reach of hubs that will be a fully decentralized ecosystem for near it's the main goal here underneath here you see all the different activities that the hubs are currently taking on some of the hubs are fully fleshed

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    functional hubs with local events local communities web talent product lab fast grants ecosystem funds and some hubs are just starting with the very basics local events local communities website telling what three time and incubation so there are different levels of uh of evolution and maturity of these hubs we hope that any hub can feel that they can get started very easily let's talk about the ones that are active right now and i will start with

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    ukraine ukraine was one of the early hubs that was uh that went live this year uh early january and circumstances have changed for them drastically so therefore they had to refocus their activities to help refugees uh fleeting ukraine and settling in europe a lot of that work was done not only for the core team but also for for family members and people that were already part of the near ecosystem the team is looking after community building project accelerators product lab

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    and an ecosystem fund as well they have a very active ecosystem development activities which includes fast grants hackathons conferences office hours and monthly meetups as you can see in the pictures that this was the very last meetup they held they have a very a very specialized product lab it's currently working on a central bank digital currency which has already been piloted in ukraine and that's one of the the most amazing products they are building they are actively hiring and i

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    will encourage anyone who wants to join the ukraine hub in exile in portugal to please contact them through the website the next one is kenya and this is a very simple but very effective grassroots way of building a hub this cup came from the guild from the local kenyan guild sun quarry 2.0 this hub is focusing right now on events academy ecosystem bounties and incubating projects so so far they have they have organized

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    several events that are bringing students from five different universities into this event with people attending over 280 in one event alone they're also training a lot of the uh of students who want to be now near certified developers and are incubating a total of seven projects three of them which were just um incubated in the last month this hub has been in life for only two months

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    the third one is the balkans and this is the last hub that went live right and the beginning of april they are raising awareness and hitting the ground running that means that they have already launched several events in four different countries they have created a lot of attractions and that has prompted some pr coverage across several of the countries they have a one successful lab product uh proof of concept that is already coming out

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    very much involved in university relations and partnerships and they're going to formally launch the hub at block split in croatia the event for for this year that is at the end of may if you are in croatia you should check them out the next hub to go live is latin america or latam and this hub entails mexico colombia venezuela and argentina we are very happy to have them live very soon they're in the process of getting

84. 40:08

    themselves settled and ready for launch it is under the leadership of native adventure and more to come about the latin half for the next time so that concludes the regional hubs update and now the best part of the town hall which is the panel enjoy it what we're going to talk about today in this panel is really the future of music and entertainment and perhaps gaming in the context of a bunch of new technological developments we're going to talk about web 3 we're going to talk about blockchain we're going to talk about nfts and really talk about the

85. 40:42

    possibilities in the future so where is this world going what are the new opportunities available to all of us and how can we exploit these opportunities and i think we're in for some exciting times and unsurprisingly it's the creative world that is actually showing us the way uh which i'm really excited to learn more about so with that i'm going to welcome the panel i'm going to do a short introduction on each of them and then they're going to introduce themselves and their companies and so

86. 41:06

    i'm just going to go in the uh in the order that you appear on my screen which may not be the order which you appear uh it appears on your screen let's start with amber stoneman who is the ceo of minting music uh tim exile who is the founder of endless music iota who is an nfc business developer with tank dao and nathan pillay with endeavour so amber take it away tell us a little bit about yourself and the company

87. 41:30

    yeah um i've been in the music business for the past 10 years i headed the largest independent community in the city of nashville which is kind of by no surprise is the heartbeat of the music industry as a whole and so tapped into the independent artist community and as nfts and blockchain became a topic of conversation it forced uh like innovators in the space to look at it and explore it and that's when we

88. 42:03

    created minting music which is in the name we specifically only work with music nfts we use nfts as a technological process not technically a thing but a process to get somewhere um you know we're really excited about nft white label nft marketplaces building those for artists teams labels publishing companies management companies anybody with a roster and giving them the ability to um create a more engaging fan base uh to bring on we deal with a lot of independent investors for artists that

89. 42:36

    we work with so now i think blockchain is giving us space for investors to come in independently and have a locked in roi um yeah so and we also bring nfts to the mainstream music festival space so um you know like being able to engage with the crowd elevated experiences um you know elevated tickets um you know air drops um uh collaborating on nfts in real time with other people that go to festivals so there's just a lot there's so much exploring that's going to be able to

90. 43:13

    happen in this space um yes so that's kind of what we're working on with mentee music is just to create like that bridge between 2.0 and 3.0 making the the nft marketplace to feel varied 2.0 um without like all of the things you know uh blockchain doesn't look pretty behind the scenes so i think the cool thing about building with nir is we've been able to really focus on a clean very simple and easy to use interface great thank you amber tim

91. 43:46

    yeah so i'm tim exile i am the founder of endless which is a live collaborative music creation platform um we actually started building in uh the web 2 world um quite a few years ago now we launched our first product in the marketplace um just over a couple of years ago what's really magical about endless is it allows you to collaborate in real time with musicians around the world so

92. 44:11

    you can spin up what's kind of music's answer to um a live musical chat where you can throw down musical ideas share them with a bunch of people in real time and anybody can chime in add layers to that remix it and send it back so it's it's conversational music making and this is really kind of inspired by my uh my first life as a musician as a as a recording artist um i you know i was a producer i was really deep into electronic music production um i loved the sound world but i i found

93. 44:43

    it very disembodied and i you know i i'm an extrovert i like to communicate with people i like to vibe with people i like the things i say to be an opportunity for someone to say something back rather than just a statement that goes out into the ether um so that was what inspired me to uh to found endless um and absolutely love everybody in the near ecosystem who i've been introduced to and also the tech is absolutely great

94. 45:09

    it's fast you know one second uh block time instant finality human readable wallet addresses and so many other things that you know near is being built for consumer um massive adoption and that's what we're here for and ultimately that's what we want because you know that you know we're we're taking ourselves into a different world but tim i have to say and i'll get to your iota in a minute but you

95. 45:32

    reminded me of i hadn't planned to talk about this but this movie called echo and the canyon i don't know if you've seen it or not uh you know where's the california rock sound in the 70s i want to say maybe mid 60s 70s um and the reason innovation happened as i'm a big music fan happened as rapidly as it did was because all these musicians lived on one hill uh i think drugs had a little bit to do with it as well but i think a lot of it had to be with them crashing into each other's homes and whatever

96. 46:03

    innovations they were coming up musically got shared so this was like a two-year phenomenon and it completely changed the face of music you know we're talking about the mamas and the papas buffalo springfield and all those bands right um and what you were talking about now which i find just so exciting is uh you're enabling that with technology you don't have to live on the same hill uh

97. 46:26

    you can be global you can do this in real time and i i think this is really going to change the face of how music is developed and written and performed but i also think it sort of changes what it is we create right because you're allowing the things that we weren't doing before hi okay uh this is iota i'm from the tank bay team and tank bay is a near nft focused incubator style launch uh in the past three months we've helped 20 collection launch their pfp project

98. 47:01

    on top of near what we provide including um technical support marketing and community building um as long as also like com connecting the team with the deaf um power um to build their long-term success utilities also we could we are very well connected with the space so we help we've helped the teams to get their financial support through nearly consistent law through connecting them

99. 47:41

    with independent vc the team actually has over 20 years experience in digital art creation so uh besides the um culture contribution on to near we also have technical um expertise the core team providing a smart contract is actually the members that contributed on nep171 nft standard on top of near we're looking forward to this uh topic and uh join the conversation fantastic thank you

100. 48:22

     nathan so you come at us quite differently i guess working at endeavour as you do so nathan's with endeavor one of the biggest i think talent management content houses out there so nathan take it away thank you vegan thank you for having me um so yeah endeavor is a publicly listed um uh business on the new york stock exchange where seven thousand people plus we kind of occupy a very unique space in in that we sit right across the uh the entertainment spectrum

101. 48:53

     um and so i guess in the context of web 3 we would sit across or sit at the heart of all the different passion points that that can really drive mass consumer adoption and that's because the things that we own operate license or manage um are the kind of things that people deeply care about and so when we think about how to drive adoption into web three um we are incredibly fortunate that we have seen so many different ideas projects

102. 49:25

     concepts that are bubbling to the surface that the that we kind of that we're seeing on a daily basis and so you know one part of our business william morris um endeavor is you know one of the largest talent agencies in the world from athletes directors producers writers um any form of talent we we are very fortunate to be in a position to be able to represent them and so we are seeing a lot of um opportunities uh coming to this talent uh in a variety of different ways

103. 49:57

     what are some of the big opportunities that you see in this space right now for the people that you represent um what i think there's a lot of talk about disruption and obviously the kind of um the disintermediation of the value chain and how you know there's going to be a shift of of of you know wealth and influence i i i really see it as actually as an opportunity for you know all parts of the ecosystem to kind of work together and yes there will be maybe fairer

104. 50:30

     distributions of wealth but but really for me i think it's how do we look at growing the size of the pie rather than figuring out what part of the pie each one gets right um because i think everyone has a role to play in this and so whether you're a studio you know your your industry is not going to be disrupted overnight it's just going to evolve i think you know throughout history this you know every time there's

105. 50:53

     been a major technological advancement it's just about evolution and sure there's going to be one is there's going to be losers but i think what i think what we should all be working toward is how do we all come together whether that's through you know a r whether that's through you know if you're a filmmaker and trying to get your project funded there's just so many areas where i see um those communities who may have been disenfranchised and not had

106. 51:19

     access to this now have now have opportunity and i think opportunity is really what web 3 comes down to is is broadening reach and and that for me is the most exciting aspect of this yeah one thing that i read about sale gp was i believe there's an all-women sailing team now right and so you can see that people who have a stake in it can become stakeholders in these sort of interesting new initiatives and i'm

107. 51:43

     going to go over to you next uh tell us about some of the most exciting things you've done at your company like you know what are some of these new things that you nfd's or otherwise that you're able to do now yeah i mean well this list is so long um being in the industry for so long um i when i saw nfts and i understood the technological process i started thinking about what are where are where do our problems lie

108. 52:07

     and how can this technology fix it because i think ultimately that's what we're going to need for it to do there's no surprise that the music industry is broken in a lot of ways i work directly with pro level independent artists that have been with labels and are currently with labels um and maybe not on a label anymore um but all to each their own but figuring out different ways um a you know um

109. 52:31

     ways to license licensing is hard uh in the industry licensing with major platforms like facebook and instagram and how do you go get your payments from youtube how many different agencies you have to register your music with across the globe to be able to get paid and the answer is very scattered you know like i've discovered over 11 and most artists that you talk to only know two so there's a lot of money being left on the

110. 52:54

     table and i i feel you know what we're working on with with uh minting music is right now we're building white label nft marketplaces so we're seeing fan engagement we're seeing uh merch sales and nft sales kind of almost be reflective of each other um but the artists are learning how to coach their um their fans that you can resell your nft and make money off of it so i think there's a whole leg there

111. 53:19

     that's that people are just now starting to talk about with the resale the secondary sale um so and then actually one piece that we're most excited about right now is rentable nfts uh which actually disrupts the licensing space um a rentable nfp is a license um sync licensing is the number one revenue stream in the music industry right now and it you talk to any sync licensing agent they have a really really really hard time um ensuring that the client

112. 53:48

     stays in line with the contract so um you know i've seen i've seen a client exceed the contract by two weeks and owe eighty thousand dollars to the artist so there there are some broken places and i and again i feel like technology uh should be used to fix the holes um and then to also elevate what is already being done we are also doing air drops at concerts so we're taking our regular web 2.0 creators the photographer the videographer we're pulling the content immediately we're putting it into a

113. 54:22

     template we're air dropping it into the crowd in real time so they're getting uh memorabilia we collect all this stuff anyways we collect the poster we collect your lanyard we collect our wristbands all year from a festival so how do we digitize this how do we make it beneficial financially to the fan too because i think that grows into a super fandom way and i think we're able to unlock super fans

114. 54:47

     in in a whole new dynamic um and then two a couple of other things a crowdfunding uh with the with the dissolve of pledge music a couple of years ago there was a huge void left in the space we sold kickstarter we have patreon but again i feel like the web 3 space is taking these 2.0 companies and creating just an ecosystem for crowdfunding um for ways to gain revenue for ways to gain investors so for the artist it is about elevating an experience but

115. 55:18

     if we are to talk about the nitty gritty of it they are broke they're broke they're left with nothing they're getting 15 of the overall song when it's fractionalized out between 30 different owners like they're the last ones to touch the money and it's causing mental health too the financial aspect is causing a huge huge increase since 2020 and mental health in the music industry i've always been an underdog

116. 55:40

     advocate and now the technology has created a way for us to be able to do that tim tell us what it's like for you is the you know endless music and and uh so on love to hear more about your perspective to to add to what you just said about um the ideals that we're pursuing i think another one particularly what we're thinking of endless is actually enfranchisement um decentralization i think is a very value is a very valuable technical benchmark a technical um ideal that we're all we you know we want the

117. 56:12

     systems that we that we build our identities on um to be decentralized and not be controlled by one single entity um but i think from the term um from the point of view of creators and the point of view of culture um the biggest thing um the biggest wrong to be writed um is that creators have been disenfranchised from the platforms we use to to create value and and really all that

118. 56:37

     value gets delivered to shareholders i mean the people who've made the most money out of spotify were the early investors and the shareholders the same with facebook etc i mean it's it's a pattern that's replicated connect with each other um all over the world using this decent decentralized network in real time but the value that was created there couldn't be tracked by the technology layer um so anyway i what i think is really important and

119. 57:02

     what we're really aiming to do endless is to enfranchise our community so um we already have a community of about 150 000 accounts on the platform um there's you know a huge number of people um making music on endless right now and you can go you can open the app and there's people there making music the majority of these tokens will end up being owned by our community and that

120. 57:25

     will be the token will represent the the ownership and control of the endless ecosystem so you know aside from our nft marketplace um i think it's it's just really important that creators own the platforms that they deliver value to because when it comes to culture the creators deliver the value really why blockchain and why near like what is this what is this enabled so actually enter the space with a different angle which is starting from building the commit the

121. 57:56

     creators community so um near actually has the nft market not for long uh that was the at the very early uh of 20 20 21 so that's at the very uh beginning of the and the nft hype start we have uh on there we have our first uh second the market nfd marketplace which is uh for us and at that time near as a new chain you have to attract uh artists to to hey there is another alternative way to um to launch your nft project so we wanna we see what's successful for

122. 58:37

     attracting them is to build this creator's culture i can find the best way to uh facilitate them and uh probably not uh at the beginning that's the most financially uh powerful blockchain so what we do is through a bunch of like a creator culture building stuff for example card for cards for artists to support each other when there's you know when the buyers are not that i have not been seeing um and then more we see is the artist or

123. 59:16

     the craters they've um they've not stayed they're not gonna stay long even though they saw all the benefit of all it's there's a very easy um onboarding there's it's a fast transaction the gas fee is low and when they've launched their project here for approximately two to two to three weeks and it's a it's not like the liquidity not going well they laughed at the eventually all they've tried and they left um that's when we starting to shifting from um

124. 59:51

     building the contents like starting with the creators community and make sure the content on their platform is to the standard can attract buyers and the other side we starting to really provide open source facility to the creators that we are already established here too hey um you can you are you're not just supported by um the just infrastructure you're also supported by all the tooling that we

125. 1:00:23

     have that's uh tank dial begins if you are interested to launch a nifty project you can go to uh tankbay.com that's our platform we are providing uh technical support marketing and the community building support and uh yeah don't hesitate to reach out nathan your closing thoughts uh i'm most excited about purpose um you know and i think we have we we're at a time and space where more of us are thinking about our you know our role in society and what we can do with

126. 1:01:02

     you know our our thoughts our our energy our impact and um you know what's great about web 3 and and practically speaking what i get to do every day with sale gp is that we have a purpose um that exists beyond profit and entertainment and and near is really helping us to enable that you go to cellgp.com you'll be able to see all the exciting developments that we um we're working on so thank you all i just want to close with a few quick thoughts one is i'm

127. 1:01:33

     just blown away by all the things that all of you are doing um you know if people thought web 2 was a big deal uh web 3 is a big you can add an f in the middle deal uh right it's and and for me um either creatives are what make the world fun what makes the world livable we we sort of so much we consume culture in whichever way we choose to consume it and anything that we can do to sort of uh encourage the creation of content sort of make the world a better place for all

128. 1:02:06

     of us but the thing that i will be completely candid here that i wasn't anticipating is all of your passion for equity and equality for the environment uh you know it's just wonderful to see because we all know that the world is under grave threat from a variety of different uh for a variety of different causes and so while we make the world a better place we also want to make it more equal which is part of making it a better place and i can't

129. 1:02:30

     wait to see sort of what you all go out and create i think it should be great fun and i think the world is going to be a lot different in a few years from now and a lot better with the energy of folks like you and then thanks to chris and david at the near foundation for providing us with this opportunity to share our thoughts it was a delight to meet all of you and hear what you had to say so thank you all

130. 1:03:46

     you