Innovation Sandbox: Final Hours Left, Office Hours & AMA

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

1. 0:00

   Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, good morning. Good morning and builders. Good morning builders out there. Um, this is a little bit of a lastm minute presentation. It's a last minute office hours and AMA for anybody out there because we got about five hours left in this hackathon. So, if you have any questions about the h this hackathon, I'm going to be here for probably the next 30 minutes, maybe the

2. 0:58

   next hour. Um, and uh I'm here to answer any of those questions. So, I just need to get some things set up really quick. Let's get some good mornings. How's everybody? How's everybody building? How are your projects going? Good morning. Good morning, GM.

3. 1:49

   We're going to be having James from Funding the Commons joining here in a bit. [clears throat] I didn't know you could hear the key the keyboard that loud. I'm sorry about that. Um, okay. So, we've got one question. Will there be any extension

4. 2:58

   for submissions? Uh, okay. So, we are about 5 hours out from the submission date from the submission time. Um, let's see. Without saying too much, uh yeah, I think you can you can expect a uh extension on submissions. We'll we'll extend it by uh for a little bit just to make sure that everybody gets their things in time. Um but definitely do try and hit that uh submission time.

5. 3:35

   [clears throat] There another post coming about that soon. But, um, I would say don't bank on it. Uh, hit hit, uh, hit the deadline. Hey, Cyros, how's it going? Good to see you guys. I love near protocol. Me, too. We all love near protocol, don't we?

6. 4:17

   No, but really this this has been an exciting uh Oh, this has been an exciting past what So, what's been 21 days? 3 weeks. This has been cool. I'm excited to see what everybody's come up with. Um here, Sabros, tell me really quick. You just sent me a link. It looks like that's a link to your project. Uh we got time, I guess, if you if you want. Um, do you want to go over it or what do you what were you thinking?

7. 4:57

   Okay, here's a good question. Who are the judges? All right, so um the judges are a collection of people that work at uh Near. So people on my team, people on DevHub, people um across the ecosystem nodes as well as of course the ecosystem sponsors. So that's hot, that's ping, that's Nova for their respective tracks.

8. 5:19

   But stay tuned um because you're going to be a judge, too. So projects will be opened up to the community for review and for vote. Uh, hey stop innovation. Oh, near-inovation sandbox. Cool. This is exciting, man. Checking out a project right now.

9. 6:03

   desktop app. That's cool. Good stuff. Nice. All right. Happy to chat about it. Here, let's uh stop. I'm waiting for uh we're going to wait and for funny comments to come on. I think we're going to discuss a little bit about that. Maybe we can save some time at the end to go over projects. Anybody else that's tuning on? I I kind of want to know um how would you feel about reviewing a

10. 6:49

    couple of submissions live on screen? uh just because maybe it it helps it helps out the person that's submitting because they got a little bit more time to to kind of change some things. Maybe you can see some uh projects and you can uh assess you can compare it to your own kind of see see how people are thinking about it. Let us know. Oh, there we go. All right, we got James here. Let me bring him on.

11. 7:35

    Hey guys, can you hear me? Yeah. What's up, James? How's it going? I cannot hear you. Weird. Hang on. Um, I just closed the other tab, but if I open that, are we going to get an echo? I wonder. Try it out. You're weird. Hang on. Um, yeah, there's a bit of a delay. Um, one second.

12. 8:00

    It's okay. Take your time. So, I cannot hear you. I could open the the spaces again. Is that the idea? [snorts] Uh, let me see. Is this going to work or is there going to be So, I cannot hear you. I could open the the spaces again. Is that the idea?

13. 8:23

    [clears throat] It's not going to work. Okay, we should be good. No. Yeah. Do you hear? Yeah. There we are. Hey, Elliot. How's it going? Doing well. Nice. Nice to see you. How are you doing? Yeah, doing great. Uh, doing wonderful here in Berlin. It's snowing again. It's crazy. It's just pure white outside, which is really beautiful. Normally, it's really ugly and dirty around here.

14. 9:14

    And uh little bit distracting from my my beautiful workstation where I'm managing to spend most of my time. Yeah, I love this about winter, you know? It's like in the summer there's this kind of like sun pressure, like this FOMO that you're missing something outside, but in the winter it's just like I can just like chain myself to my keyboard and I don't have to explain myself to anybody or go anywhere or talk to

15. 9:37

    anyone. I totally feel that. I'm the same. Uh, I am the same way. Um, I love winter. Does it snow a lot in Berlin? It doesn't usually, but this year it's been crazy. It's snowing a lot. It's really, really snug a lot. Yeah. Yeah.

16. 9:52

    Yeah. The weather's been crazy all over Europe now. In Portugal, there's massive storms and floods and here it's snow all the time. And yeah, England, Ireland, they're getting big storms also, I hear. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Where are you at? You're in uh you said you're mountain time, right?

17. 10:08

    Yeah. So, at this moment, I'm in Utah, which um I usually live in Chicago. Chicago Chicago has gotten quite a bit of snow this year, too. But Oh, okay. Which is different. Well, I'm in Utah at this moment, but um Utah hasn't gotten a lot of snow at all.

18. 10:23

    Yeah, Wow. I'm trying to imagine Utah snowing because I've seen the photos and it looks super beautiful, but with snow. Wow. Yeah, I guess Utah usually snows out in the mountains, right? That makes sense. There's mountains. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I got to get over there. Okay, I got to see this.

19. 10:39

    Yeah, I'm getting a couple messages in the chat. Everybody Everybody agrees it. They love it. The locking in when it's raining, when it's snowing, it's the perfect time to be building. We got somebody else in the chat named Elliot. Cool, right?

20. 10:56

    Elliots as we can. I see St Ross is here also. Yeah, he's uh he's one of our homies. He's great. Oh, no way. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. He's been working on a pretty interesting project actually. You were suggesting to look at some projects. I really like that idea. Can we do that?

21. 11:12

    I Okay, sweet. I thought so too. Well then, uh, Sabros Sabros sent one. Did. Um, and just really quick, do you mind uh would you like to give an intro about yourself about funding the comments? Yeah, that's sensible. That's sensible.

22. 11:31

    So, I'm James Farrell and yeah, I've been building stuff and building teams for I guess 25 years or something. Um, my first programming job was on a mainframe in 1998. Uh, but since then moved on to web technologies, survived Internet Explorer 6. Uh, was an early remote worker before that was fashionable and been in crypto since about 2017 2018 and been always working in the public good space. So my first job was at GTH

23. 12:01

    gith.io um with Griff there and then not long after I did um six months of deep research in deep science ventures and sort of began uh entrepreneurial path that has been going since. So I regard myself an entrepreneur since probably yeah 2019 2020 something like this.

24. 12:24

    Um this this research we did at Deep Science Ventures was on the carbon market. So he went to the bottom and like mapped out the whole carbon markets trying to figure out how to stop climate change, you know, this like small undertaking. And um this led to me co-founding Tukan Protocol uh which you can see details at tukan.ear and um yeah we raised a ton of money, hired like 35 people or something and uh

25. 12:50

    worked on making carbon markets more transparent by bringing them onto blockchains essentially. Um so I did that and you know it's also like uh just before that I had started a big DA with a bunch of people that got very big. So like I've done sort of like fundraising in decentralized manner in the VC way.

26. 13:10

    Um yeah launched companies led products led product teams um shipped complex projects and the last two years I'm with funding the commons and at funding the commons I was brought on uh in order to um to to work closer with builders really. So I mean just a brief summary of funding the commons. It came out of protocol labs which I guess most people have heard of. This is where Falcoin,

27. 13:35

    IPFS and many of the critical primitives that underly all blockchains including Ethereum and Bitcoin things like bit li P2P uh these sort of um critical infrastructure that protocol labs was basically footing the bill for development of but as you can imagine this is not sustainable forever. Like it can't you know they couldn't fund that forever. I guess they could, but maybe they maybe I shouldn't say they couldn't, but let's say it's a challenge

28. 14:01

    to to fund public goods, right? And I think I mean, as we all know, but just to state it, so in case anyone's not on the same page, I mean, in blockchain spaces, we care about public goods because all of our code that's on a blockchain is inherently open source, right? Like if you want to trust a smart contract on a blockchain, you need to be able to see it and if you need to see it, then it might as well be open source, etc. And we also have this kind of other dynamic

29. 14:26

    around the um you know different blockchains or ecosystems and we want within these ecosystems to encourage people to come and play and build with us and like you know bring our bring our grow our grow our like um grow our communities, grow our ecosystems and grow all of this. And so like the challenge of of actually incentivizing people and bringing people together in order to build critical open source infrastructure is a challenge that all blockchains face, right? Like we all care about about this for this reason,

30. 14:56

    you know? So, so Protocol Labs essentially started a conference um called uh funding the commons which the mission of the conference was to figure out better ways to fund public goods. And the way that that was gone about was to you know basically put thought leaders on stage from all different aspects of society. uh people like academics uh people like Glenn While who wrote the quadratic funding paper with

31. 15:21

    Vitalic for example or people like David Dao who are doctors in AI you know who win the XRP prize and want to talk about how we can use blockchains and public funding uh to fund ecosystem development for example for ecological outcomes like how do we bring all of these thought leaders together and put them in a place where they can communicate these ideas outwards to builders to the public sector civic sector and um you know

32. 15:46

    entrepreneurs really to sort of you know get these ideas into the minds and then if we think of like science as sort of like theory and experiment right like there's this kind of like theoretical aspect and then the experiment aspect you know we want to also facilitate the experimentation that enables um you know learnings to come from these theoretical ideas so case in point I mentioned this

33. 16:10

    paper with Glenn Wild and Metallic around quadratic funding Gitcoin then executed this as an idea and we learned how great quadratic funding is and we learned how imperfect it is and we learned that there's shortcomings and then we learned a whole lot of stuff but if we hadn't tried it then we wouldn't know right [snorts] so how can we like at funding the commons like we've been thinking for the last couple of years like how can we help to facilitate and encourage

34. 16:34

    catalyze more experimentation and support builders in our ecosystem and across different ecosystems especially near in order to encourage and facilitate this experimentation And so as a part of this we've done hackathons for the last years um where we meet new builders we bring people together to to meet and like ideas to gel and explode into wonderful colors.

35. 16:57

    Uh then we've had our residencies which are three to four weeks. Uh they're once a year highly sought after, highly curated to kind of spend more time with a smaller number of people who are synergistic in terms of being able to help each other to build projects um in a better way in a in a make more progress to learn from each other. And then now we're exploring sort of like the the natural progression of that which is more like an incubation model.

36. 17:21

    Okay. And uh we're spinning out something called commons lab which essentially aims to work with early stage entrepreneurs like the people here uh who would like to explore opportunity spaces under the sort of themes that we think are important. So things like privacy, things like impact evaluation, things like um ecological outcome funding, etc. Um we have like five or six of these that we're interested in.

37. 17:46

    Decentralized AI is another one. and like bringing people, supporting them, working closer with them over a longer period of time in order to help them succeed. Now, the main goal out of all of this is how do we how do we engender and create projects that actually last last longer periods of time that have got sustainability in mind that actually grow and become successful companies essentially. So, this is the space we're we're exploring now. And that's kind of

38. 18:15

    I guess the backstory to how we got here from the Genesis. Excellent. Uh let me ask you because I've actually uh I' I've heard of funding uh the Commons for quite a while. I remember when you guys did you guys always have these events like the one that you did in Bris Berlin, which now I'm kind of putting together. You must have been a massive part of all that.

39. 18:37

    Yeah. I've got a couple of friends that went and they they've actually they've been uh asking me also about this particular hackathon and oh you guys are with funding comments how's that going to go like so uh could I could I maybe ask because I know that that this is a question that comes up what does it look like for a builder having potentially in these next steps of what could happen with funding comments.

40. 19:03

    So okay so it depends on where they are right and I mean of course I mentioned our residencies already so this is for like early stage builders with ideas some people have projects when they come in at this stage also others do not like we curate a variety of that essentially so depending on uh the other people that are there there is that opportunity and so we have for example our next

41. 19:26

    residency will be in um Nairobi in Q3 and so applications will open for that um I don't want to say soon but it will be it's probably you know keep an eye out subscribe to our newsletter on finding the commons.io IO. Um, so that's kind of like the the residency thing and like I I can talk more about that at length, but I suppose what we're talking more about now is around um the incubation around comments lab. And so what we look to do is bring an individual in an early stage individual.

42. 20:01

    Um I've been talking to Stavros for example about this and um I'll make an example like so we've been working with the internet archive uh around a resilient uh publishing platform which you can think about something like um WordPress running on electron basically okay word WordPress ugly but like you know blog software running on electron or something like this but something that then is using onion routing so that like onion routing from tour like not invented by tour but as utilized by tour

43. 20:36

    and this means that basically anyone can run this application on their local computer and um provide a tour a tour URL to anybody anywhere and this is completely uncensorable and this is to get around the fact that DNS is sensorable and that ultimately we have a chain of trust and a chain of reliance and dependency that we don't control etc and this came from requirements around

44. 20:58

    um from journalists themselves like First of all, a lot of people are very concerned about censorship. There's a lot of censorship examples. Sony, for example, didn't like what someone said and went to courts and got the DNS taken down. And other cases where I mean like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive get court case notifications. I don't want I don't know how often, but very often from what I understand. So there's a lot of concern around this. And so this was

45. 21:22

    express expressed to us as a concern and something that we want to see built and we have a fiscal sponsor for that. And so essentially we're looking for an entrepreneur who wants to work in that space and who wants to build out and work closely with the internet archive around this. So that's a kind of example, right? Like where we bring somebody in and then ultimately like this could become a product, right? Like so the two pathways that like are in my mental model is first of all um we

46. 21:46

    either going to create a company that's got a business model or we're going to create a public good that needs a like that is hopefully sustainable and if not then it's going to need to find a source of funding, right? So if it's if it's to be funded then who cares about it? Do you know what I mean? uh if it's public good but ideally like we should be able to build in sustainability through some sort of mechanism especially given we have smart contracts blockchains for

47. 22:11

    coordination etc. So that's kind of my mental model of how it works. And so to kind of get closer to your question, um it depends basically. So like we have a lot of opportunities. We have like things that we were looking for people to work on. We're also very open to people who have ideas. Um like St. Ross has got a very cool idea for example. He really cares about Brazilian publishing

48. 22:34

    for example. Like that's something we care about too. And um we're super interested to just bring someone in early, support them and explore that space with them and you know mentor them like advise them, connect them with mentors, connect them with adviserss, connect them with legal support if and when if and when the time comes to spin out and like we will have funding available also and sources of funding in order to support people later in that

49. 22:59

    journey. But essentially it's about like really just working with people where they are and also presenting sort of opportunities to people. So it's quite open. I mean I think if you want to know more about it, please reach out to me and uh we can definitely keep people in the loop on that.

50. 23:15

    Cool. That uh yeah, that's that's great. I uh uh I want to it's it's a sounds like an excellent opportunity. I'm excited to see what comes what comes next with it. And also um I want to thank you guys. So, for anybody that's tuning in, Funding the Commons has been our community partner for this whole hackathon and you guys have been a pleasure to work with. Uh, I want to shout out Theresa for getting all this set up, kind of like kind of coaching

51. 23:41

    all this through. Um, real you guys really know what you're doing and um, I'm really excited to see how funny the comments has been evolving. And yeah, well, well praise to Theresa. She is amazing and yeah, she's a pleasure to work with and she really knows her stuff and she really knows the community and she really knows the topics and the spaces and everything. So yeah, I mean she's she's golden for sure.

52. 24:06

    Well, here I'm going to So for anybody that's tuning in, we got quite a quite a uh quite a good lot of you now. Um let's see. All right. So, we are here I'm here with James to uh do a last minute office hours and AMA. So, if you have any questions, maybe uh we got about four and a half hours left in the hackathon, I think. So, if you have any questions, please post them in the chat.

53. 24:33

    Um we'll see them. We'll answer them live. And then in the meantime, I'm just going to do a little overview of just of what this innovation sandbox is, uh where we started and how we've gotten here. So, just real quick, um it is February 16th, that last day of the hackathon.

54. 24:54

    Um we started back in January 26. It's been a virtual builder sprint. We've had um six six workshops. This would actually be the seventh now. Uh we'll have the the submissions are going to be closing tonight and then three days from now we'll be doing another live stream a closing ceremony where we will announce the projects. If you want if if folks want us to do some live review, which I think we'll do a little bit today, but if you want more live review of the projects, happy to do that. Just shout us out. Join join the uh Telegram chats and and let us know.

55. 25:33

    And then all this culminates uh in Near Con in real life, which is going to be February 23rd through the 24th. This is in San Francisco. I'll try and get a link up here, but if you are in San Francisco and you want to attend, join the Luma here. You can find it at nearcon.org and we'll get you reviewed uh to to try and come out here. Let me just get this link up. Okay.

56. 26:07

    So, that's that's five hours left in the hackathon or Yeah, under underneath five. Uh we're we're about four four and a half now. Um Oh man, it it gets it gets fun when you come down to the last the last hours. My my advice is do not underestimate how long it takes you to submit, how long it takes you to prepare materials. I mean, I've judged a couple of khakathons and it really makes a difference when you're going over submissions and you really

57. 26:38

    like in like how can you help people as quickly as possible understand your project when they've been looking at loads of projects and they're exhausted and they're tired and they're coming with a fresh eye. Um, don't underestimate that is my advice. What do you think?

58. 26:55

    We I want to get your take on this actually. Uh, we got a uh we got a question this morning about quite a few questions asking about the time limit on a demo. We put down 3 minutes, which I think is a pretty perfect amount of time for for a demo. Honestly, you don't need to be going uh much longer. You definitely don't need to be hitting five minutes. I don't think so. Um, but I think uh

59. 27:21

    I want to know, so I was saying not too strict. definitely try and go for three minutes. But I think you really touched on something there about how we are we're we're probably looking at over 120 projects right now. We got to review them in about three days. Maybe it's actually a little bit less than that. Uh what makes a good what makes a good video in your in your opinion?

60. 27:42

    Okay. So I mean I have my opinion and um yeah quite a strong opinion on this. Like for me, I think I would follow I would follow just just search for like Y combinator um like pitch like seed pitch or something like this because the format for me is like nearly identical.

61. 28:01

    It's like you want to like at the beginning state what it is and who you are like super succinctly and then I go straight to the problem and say like um you know have you ever tried to blah blah blah and then realize that da da da and that is really annoying because na na na na na na and then I would move to like well with my amazing solution over here you can do this this this that that that and do do you know and then move on to the features It's basically um so

62. 28:33

    that's a classic problem solution uh explanation dive in. Exactly. Exactly. And I think it's I think it's important, right? And I think it's also it's also very helpful because it it makes out like you're actually solving a problem, which you hopefully are, you know? I mean, it shows product thinking and like it's just important to like really use very few words and just like make a frame like before you draw your picture. Do you know what I mean?

63. 29:03

    And it's also like I think I I think I'm not alone in this kind of like structure as an idea. And I think it's also very helpful for judges if um if everyone is using a similar like structure, then it's less cognitive load. You know what I mean? Like when you when you pose it like that, they're like, "Ah, okay. This I I see what they're doing. I understand the format." And so it's easier for the

64. 29:28

    judge to then put it into their post boxes, if you know what I mean. Definitely. And I think to that point too, um, part of the submission requirements, it is it's this written project summary. So, we're going to know what this project is about from you. Um, we have that public repository link so that we can see the code, a live deployed URL, which the application uh, preferably should work. Um, and so that does kind of leave up your your demo is more about

65. 29:57

    your explanation of of uh what you built, why you built it, and the explanation, the context around all these things. Maybe the go-to market strategy uh what's how are you actually like thinking about this in the broader stream of things because we do have this live deployed URL uh to be able to try out ourselves and see the product.

66. 30:18

    Yeah, totally. I think that's that's absolutely perfect. I think like just like also three minutes I think is it should be enough and if it's not enough you should really reconsider like what like what are you trying to show here? You know what I mean?

67. 30:32

    I also like I I'm familiar with demos going over three minutes but it's like this is on applications that I've been building for a long time. So if you brought something with you um how are the how are the guidelines set up for that Elliot in terms of like what you can bring to the start of the hackathon and things like this? It is quite a long a long buildathon also right it's like yeah it's been 21 days uh we did

68. 30:55

    encourage projects are allowed to come uh you allowed to bring existing projects forward you had to make a meaningful contribution let me actually get that slide up right um had to make a meaningful contribution during this time period and it has to use uh the uh near tech stack specifically. So that included the near AI private cloud, near intents, shade agents or all the really wonderful unique capabilities of the uh protocol

69. 31:28

    itself like the account model, chain signatures, global contracts, all this good stuff. Yeah, I love that. The other thing I was going to say is that like like I think it you should keep in as as a as a hackathon participant like you should think in your mind like you should be very clear on like what criteria the judges are going to be using in order to judge the hackathon and like this is your these

70. 31:52

    are your pillars right like as you're telling your story in your video like you want to hit each and every one of them and prioritize them like frontload the things that are important if you especially if you have a lot of features and a lot of like user journeys you want to show or something like this like really frontload what you think is the killer the killer solution and here we are yeah look at this this is what we got definitely and I just I saw a comment uh

71. 32:17

    in the chat sorry no mention of out layer no out layer is encouraged out layer is underneath that um yield resume section so that is a meaningful use of near I mean you're calling a contract you're you're taking advantage of yield resume um absolutely that counts So yeah, this is the this is this this is the evaluation criteria. We're looking at technical execution, the user experience, the impact and usefulness, and then the the completeness and the functionality of the application itself.

72. 32:50

    Love it. I love it. Like do you have something in mind, Elliot, like for like what does success look like for the hackathon for you? like in can you imagine like what kind of projects we're going to get out of this? Yeah. Uh so [clears throat] in the tracks themselves I think uh I definitely tried to really align it with the funding to commons goals and everything that was going uh that you guys hold near and dear near and dear.

73. 33:25

    Uh, but um, and so I kind of projects that are kind of rooted in reality, an actual product that is supposed to gain consumers because for anybody that's that's uh, tuning in, Near has a very big community effort called the Legion.

74. 33:46

    Uhhuh. And you should be building for the Legion. So all these projects that we're building um that are coming from the hackathon, ideally we want to be funneling them to this community of users to get that immediate feedback, maybe even get uh uh recurring users daily and to improve upon these. So that would be ultimately the uh that's that's the north star is usable products that tie and solve a real world problem.

75. 34:19

    um that leverage the use cases of near. So this is um really privacy focused. So that's the private cloud or uh our trusted execution environments and then also um I'm sorry I'm blinking privacy. Let's see. Let's go back through tracks.

76. 34:47

    Yeah. So we have we had three tracks the private web and private life. So this is building consumer apps where privacy is the default. So this is leveraging the private cloud near's private AI cloud. Um and I really want to highlight this consumer apps. So there there is definitely an emphasis in this track that we're trying to build something that can be used daily revisited uh that we can serve to the legion. There was actually a specific blurb in this in

77. 35:17

    this track about building for the Legion and trying to get that activity. If we we've got about uh we're we're now approaching four hours left. Um you can share your project link in the Legion chat. So do join do join the Legion and do share your project in there and try and get users immediately. Um I did I did kind of allude to we will have a sort of community vote. So uh getting

78. 35:41

    your project public and in front of Alleion is going to be is going to be important. The other track is AI that works for you. So this is leveraging near's AI stack. That's whether that's the private cloud, the private chat, shade agents, agentic payments, uh all the other really unique capabilities like the account model, chain signatures, yield resume, um to build ultimately

79. 36:05

    autonomous userowned AI. So here especially we've seen well in the past two weeks things like openclaw have come on or uh open code as well. So a coding agent these are autonomous agents that kind of focus on a single use case and they do it really well.

80. 36:25

    Those are also really good submissions for this track. During this whole hackathon near AI launched their agentic marketplace market.ai AI which you can kind of release your autonomous agents like open claw, open code and so on to complete jobs for payment. So a submission around this would also be a really worthwhile submission. Something that that kind of solves that individual it does a job really well.

81. 36:58

    Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. How does that like can we talk about the agent marketplace for Yeah, go ahead. like uh how does that could you tell DR how that works? It's the first time I'm seeing it actually. So essentially like do the agents need to um interact through an API like they or how does that how does this API docs?

82. 37:20

    Yeah, tell me. Yeah, so uh if you come to the site, you're going to see two little toggles. I'm a human. So you can copy and paste this so that you can give it to your uh your agent. And ultimately what the agent will do is yeah it'll it'll call it will view this this skill document and it kind of tells you how to deal with the market specifically how to browse jobs how to how to create them and then how to bid on them.

83. 37:48

    Cool. All right. Interesting. Yeah. I have a bit of a a passion project called exponential.im and it's a bunch of AI agents also. It's kind of similar to Open Claw, but less scary. Okay. I'm curious. I'm gonna I'm gonna go like maybe on the weekend or something. I'm gonna go and have a look at this and see if I can integrate that.

84. 38:11

    Yeah. I mean, you you think you could start uh claiming some jobs? There's a there's 1,700 that are that are open here. There's one that has that's 250 near. Whoa. Okay. Nice. Nice. Nice. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. Gonna look at that. What do you make of that?

85. 38:28

    like it seems like the uh the open claw or clawbot um took the world by storm. No, like how like how have you guys felt that interaction with Near? Like how like what is the crossover and the the collab space there? Yeah, so uh open claws definitely been exciting. We as soon as it happened, you know, near near a huge push um because you know there's security flaws. you're giving some private

86. 38:56

    information to open claw and you want to be careful with all that. So near aai our whole thing is privacy and we have these trusted execution environments where you can actually run and deploy an open claw in these environments so that you can get that those those privacy guarantees.

87. 39:16

    Oh really interesting interesting nice I like this. I'm going to try this out also. You guys got a lot of great stuff, Elliot. It is pretty cool. And I I mean this is this was kind of one angle on it, but I do also need I have to show the other angle because um so this angle is taking the existing open claw and it's deploying to these these um secure private environments.

88. 39:41

    Yeah. Well, Ilia uh who's the founder uh one of the co-founders of of Near, he also dove in and he rewrote Open Claw with a focus in Rust uh focus on privacy and security from the get-go. Okay. Ironclaw. Ironclaw. That's right.

89. 40:02

    In Ironclaw, we trust. Nice. Gonna have that. Okay. So my to-do list is just getting longer and longer sitting on this call with you. I know, right? Almost wish that you had your open claw open. You could just Yeah. Yeah. Give it to it.

90. 40:21

    I do. I do. But anyway, um cool. Nice. So projects that kind of uh so for that track, yeah, focusing on autonomous agents that kind of do a job really well applying it to the uh agent tech marketplace. So anybody that is applying to that track, uh I would definitely encourage you to check out the marketplace and understand how it works and if you can make just minor tweaks to your project to kind of see, okay, how

91. 40:50

    can I make this AI that works for me to be able to claim jobs on the marketplace? It's it could be as simple as just adding a skill to it, you know, but that that'd be a that'd be a good thing to prepare for, I think. Nice. And then of course this ironclaw. If you were if you were deploying Ironclaw specifically for this project, for this hackathon track, that that'd be pretty that'd be pretty good, too.

92. 41:19

    I want to just check to see if we got any questions through any of that part. Prepare for the agent economy. Uh, cool. Okay, let's move on to to the last track. Okay, so then the last one was open society from finance to the real world.

93. 41:41

    So this was kind of focusing on uh real world solutions. So these are uh RWA's tokenized assets leveraging near intents which for anybody it's uh you essentially you create an intent and then this network of solvers solves for it. you say what you want to do and then near's network of intents solves it. It really focuses primarily on uh tokens.

94. 42:08

    So you can you can trade uh you can swap from Bitcoin all the way to Salana and takes less than three minutes using this this network of solvers. But if you look into how it works and all of it, this architecture can expand and it's meant to expand to all types of tokenized assets. uh so it's not limited to just native coins at all. So that was that's that is one thing to explore in this track as well as things that turn real

95. 42:39

    world facts into reliable onchain outcomes. So this is really talking about oracles on near oracles you can really build oracles really well. We have a feature called yield resume where inside of your smart contract you can yield execution to be resumed and called back at a later block which is great.

96. 43:01

    You that means that you can essentially have external services that listen to something that happens on your contract and when that happens your external service can ping and hit the contract to resume it. Maybe that means resuming it with uh real onchain data or uh real data from a trusted source. So those are your oracles.

97. 43:26

    I think a project that if you're using any to if if your project is rooted in real world knowledge um I saw somebody had like a vehicle marketplace um that they shared with me earlier and uh prediction markets and everything like that definitely do make sure that you are looking into and you understand how this yield resume works and leverage it if you don't want to get all the way into the weeds of it

98. 43:56

    Out layer is a project on Near where you can take advantage of this of this capability for secure offchain computation. Um it has a playground. It has a ton of different examples that you can use like a ton of examples. Um and so your your your smart contracts become superpowered with this. And so if you need if you need to tap into it, it's an easy integration. You could definitely get it in within the next four hours, but uh leverage it and and that would make it a a good submission

99. 44:31

    for this open society from finance to real world. Oh, sorry. Somebody did you need a screenshot of that? Uh that was me. Excuse me. Yeah, that was real loud. Okay. Okay. Good to know. Good to know. Did Did you need this? Did you want this though?

100. 45:02

     No, no, no. It was something else. It was something important. All good. Yeah. Yeah. All good. I'll uh moving on. So, um you know, just so everybody knows what we're what we're aiming for, there will be some prizes. So, it's going to be 300. It's going to be $3,500 per track. The three tracks I just talked about, there's going to be a $2,500 only on near bonus, which I think is really important to think about right now. There's a lot of

101. 45:34

     really unique capabilities on Near. I'm talking about that yield resume, chain signatures, um, the account model. The account model is so unique on Near. The projects that you that leverage these unique capabilities to the best of they showcase them to the best of their uh ability are eligible for this only on near bonus projects that can only built be built here.

102. 46:00

     So that will get $2,500. There's going to be two cross track bonuses 1k each. And then of course there are the ecosystem bounties. Nova hot paying. Nova is a ST SDK that you can integrate for agentic memory. You can essentially like have encrypted memory shared by a group uses smart contracts on Near. Hot pay and ping are very similar in the same in the same way they deal with payments. Hot pay has the nearkit and or their hotkit and their

103. 46:33

     hot connect. So they're looking for projects that will imp implement hot pay itself to pay for services and then ping is in the same is in the same boat. So using ping to uh create a checkout or they also have ping links which is when you send a link for a specified amount or a donation and have them fill it out. And there's also the on-ramp. So the on-ramp is this really easy to integrate. uh you click it, it opens a modal. You're able to onramp directly.

104. 47:12

     That's that only on near bonus bounty we talked about. And then we'll sit here on how projects are evaluated. Again, we're sitting here. Uh, we'll probably be on here just for a little bit longer. But if anybody has any questions, maybe we can review a project together if you want, James, here in a bit. Sure. Yep.

105. 47:49

     Let's do it. Okay, let's do that. And we'll uh we'll we'll we'll review this project so everybody kind of gets a sense of how we're looking at things. um what what uh what is a good submission and then uh and then we'll leave it there. So if anybody has questions do do try and get them in within the next 10 minutes. I'm looking for that link right now.

106. 48:19

     There it is. Strauss, you still on? I hope you are. Here let me I'll share this link with you too directly. Cool. All right. Good. Sab is here. All right. That's totally okay that your demo is not Y cominator level. I think this is this is perfect. Ideally, this is a project that everybody can agree with, that can relate to.

107. 49:03

     Yeah. So, there's a video there, huh? I like that. I like that, too. Embedded directly into the readme. So, we're scan the QR code. Yep. Oh, that's cool. Right. Looks like he scanned a QR code and and uh navigated directly into a private chat. A verifiably private chat.

108. 49:39

     Uhhuh. Nice. He's able to verify the proofs of the chats that were shared. Cool. Nice. So, that was a I I you know, that demo didn't necessarily follow the uh type of strategy that we were talking about earlier in our conversation. James.

109. 50:15

     Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't even call it a demo though, right? Like it is a demo, right? Um but I like for me I would I would give it more, you know what I mean? Like I would do a like as I said, you know, this is me, this is what I built, this is the problem, this is the solution, this is and then this is how it works, you know, in a kind of a way. Um I really love that it's here in GitHub. I think that

110. 50:38

     that is that is I haven't seen that before to be honest. um done this way and I really like that. I think it's very effective. Um but I think that that's potentially different than, you know, a submission video that you might want to submit with, you know, in a kind of a way.

111. 50:56

     Yeah. I guess like the things about it is that we're piecing it together on our end where like we, you know, I made assumptions here of how it worked and what it was doing. Yeah. Wasn't necessarily Yeah. Yeah. I do think that the read me could be also improved. I mean like I think the text is quite succinct and um yeah there we go. Look, it's always striking how the most transformative technologies are adopted last by governments. Okay, that's some context.

112. 51:28

     Every day millions of public officials collectively waste countless hours on repetitive menial tasks that could be dramatically streamlined or even eliminated with the right tools. Okay, so that's beginning to sound a bit like a problem, right? um could be more explicitly a problem.

113. 51:44

     But you know um while some individual employees may quietly use large language models to boost their personal productivity, this approach lacks transparency. There's no record of how AI was applied, which model was used, what prompt was given, or how decisions were influenced. Okay, there's a problem right there. Took a while to get there, right? But I mean, we got some context

114. 52:08

     up front and then we got a clear statement. Like for me, I would like structure this with headings. Like I mean, I know it's a GitHub read me. Um, but I mean, for me, I would be like, yeah, I would just put headings on there because like it's it creates a structure that makes it easy for the person to digest. Like before you read that text, you know that you're reading a problem and you don't have to read three paragraphs to get there. You know what I mean? Um, and like we spoke about

115. 52:33

     earlier, like it's nice to, you know, if you know the structure, then it's easier to kind of absorb uh absorb that when you're exhausted from looking at tons of submissions. Um, okay. A test AI is an attempt toward integrating LLMs openly, transparently into the machinery of governance. Okay. So, this is what we're talking about, right? like we're talking about solution um and then we start talking about okay the tech stack it's using private inference QR proofs audible chat

116. 53:04

     receipts download yeah features okay nice nice nice this is cool that he he did a desktop download specifically this private web and private life there was a section on here that was kind of like emphasizing these desktop apps or something you know something that is a consumer or local focus Yeah, that's that's a really cool feature that you you have here.

117. 53:28

     I like that also. I mean, one it actually it reminds me of something I should have said earlier. I think that storytelling is really powerful. And if you can like tell tell this in a way that's a story that's it could be a motive or it could be just easier for people to relate to or it could be easier for people to understand the problem. You know what I mean? And um I don't know if I could pull one out of the bag right now because I don't know if I have the proper context exactly, but you know, let's say like Mr. Let's

118. 54:00

     say like uh Mr. Private works has a job at public institution XY Z and he doesn't like using blah blah blah because he doesn't know what he doesn't want everyone to know how he's making decisions and what he's doing. You know what I mean? In the meantime, we have this other person over here, Mr. Transparent or, you know, like if you tell a story like that, I mean, like, please be a thousand times better

119. 54:24

     than that terrible example. But especially if you can tie it to like real world use cases, do you know what I mean? Like when you talk about internet freedom, if you talk about Iran, like people get it. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, I never thought about that. You know what I mean? Sure.

120. 54:41

     So, like this kind of like giving people that aha moment and like really seeing like, holy like this is amazing. like this is really solving a real burning burning problem for someone who really needs it and this really makes the world better. It's like a really effective way to tell the story and there's there's really no reason why you can't like weave that in there a little bit and um yeah, you got your AI friends

121. 55:02

     to help you if you're not you're not talented storyteller for sure. Yeah, I think uh this section's I like I like this this including like uh specifically why Near AI's private inference is important here. Why this type of application can't be built without this private inference or at least it would it would lose these capabilities or this trust or anything like that. So that I think that that's another really good thing to include and that was kind of specifically laid out

122. 55:35

     in the track is that these projects that we're building and submitting to these tracks should be you know they should make a meaningful use of near um but they should also be uniquely capable at the problem that they're trying to solve which some projects you can just slap privacy on it and attestation on it but you know it's it's not really relevant to what the project is. But this this this blurb right here,

123. 56:01

     I feel like it it's outlining the relevance of why this uh why privacy is important and why this type of product needs something like verifiable private inference in order to be proper. Totally agree. Totally agree. Cool. Nice. Nice submission.

124. 56:28

     Yeah, that that is good. So, let me just uh so we'll just look at this quick. I like I like the simple demo. Um I do think that you could probably do with a landing page or something like that if you wanted something that kind of like tells a little bit about like this would this was great, you know, here. Um maybe but maybe even having it part of a sharable link because you know the demo is is really what's going to be shared around GitHub is usually only going to

125. 57:05

     be viewed by the uh the judges or any developers that are interested in diving in more. So your website is is is kind of that that share. But this is nice. I like this little demo here. I'm not going to go through it all because it looks like I got to download an app and all that type of thing. But this is a solid submission. Totally.

126. 57:33

     Sabros found it quite awkward to watch us review that. Yeah, man. Hey. Yeah. Yeah. It's It's great. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's really easy for like us like a couple of us to come and have a chat over someone's GitHub repo and like, you know, we're we're fresh.

127. 57:52

     you haven't been down in the trenches and all that kind of stuff. I mean, it's it's all it's all with good intention, right? Like, thanks for being a good sport and uh and letting us letting us riff off of your your hard work there, brother. Appreciate you. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

128. 58:08

     Well, here I'm gonna uh I'm going to go ahead. You know, these builder support and resources, we're in our last four. We're in our last four hours now. You can scan that QR code. You can join in on the Telegram channel. Unfortunately, this is the last office hours. This is the last workshop. Um, so, uh, anything more, you'll have to find us in the chats.

129. 58:31

     Near AI credits, if you need them in this in these last hours, you can scan them and you can and you can get them and we'll come online and we'll get those for you. Of course, I need to tell you that uh, the AI that works for you, if you're submitting to that track, do submit into the PL Genesis track. So, we have a partnership with them um with Protocol Labs for this hackathon. When you're submitting into this um you can submit into that one and get uh exposure into

130. 58:59

     all their other prizes and stuff. I believe that uh I mean protocol lab I'm sorry funding to comments came out of Protocol Labs, correct? You said that's correct. Yep, that's correct. It was spun out. And then I know that you guys actually have a bounty in this one too.

131. 59:17

     Yep, we do indeed. Yeah. Um Totally. I don't have the details on me, but it's there. Yeah. Anybody tuning in, check out plenesis.com and then Yeah, let's get started. I guess let's get going. Let's get finished up. Um, scan that QR code and you should bring it into the notion hub to get all the details that you need.

132. 59:45

     Well, this was great. stop or stop. I'm sorry. We were reviewing his project. Um, this is great, Jane. Thank you for coming on and thank you for being this partner in this whole uh in this whole hackathon. You guys have been great. I really appreciate it. I'm really excited to see what comes next. So, thank you again.

133. 1:00:03

     Me, too. Yeah. Thank you, Elliot. You guys are great, too. Such a pleasure. Thanks for having us on and good luck to everybody. And yeah, don't leave it too late to make that video. Get those submissions in. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. All right, take it easy. Catch you later.

134. 1:00:22

     All right, I'm going to wrap this all up. So, thank you all for coming on. Um, this, as I said, is the last workshop. Do find us in the chat. Okay, that's all. I'll catch you guys later. Bye-bye.