Protocol Innovations Powering the BOS - Bowen Wang - Near Day at ETHDenver 2023

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1. 0:00

   cool I hope you guys uh already heard a lot about the boss and uh hopefully this talk is going to uh reinforce this concept a bit further and also talk about um uh what the what we're doing on the protocol level to actually support the boss uh for people who don't know me and Bowen head of protocol Pagoda and today I'm going to talk about protocol Innovations powering the boss and uh if you uh missed elia's talk on what the boss actually is uh don't worry

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   this is uh one slide the refresher uh so the blockchain operating system aka the boss it's a common layer for discovering um and browsing open web experiences that is compatible with all blockchains so it goes from the compute layer where we have blockchains like near and ethereum up to the data platform whereas people can get access to data to the Discovery layer where people can have

3. 0:58

   access to front end that give rise to all the experiences like search recommendations uh chat and Discovery and all of that so since uh near protocols idiot side is one of the uh core to the blockchain operating system I'm going to talk about how the protocol actually support the boss so first of all on the high level there are several defining features of near protocol that make it a very good

4. 1:27

   solid foundation for the blockchain operating system first of all the protocol is very simple by that what I mean is that it is simple for both end users and developers to use and this is very important because without the easy to use blockchain without being able to make it easy for developers to write more contracts for users to interact with blockchain no one would actually come to the blockchain ecosystem and if

5. 1:52

   that's the case you can build the best blockchain in the world the most performant one but that doesn't really help so this Simplicity and usability is what we prioritize the most and once it is useful and you have people coming to use it it is also important that the blockchain here so that people can trust the blockchain with your asset and and finally it's very important that

6. 2:14

   the protocol is scalable especially because we're aiming to um get much adoption get to one billion active users uh we have a goal of achieving 10 million uh mostly active users by the end of 2023 and then that number is only going to go up in the upcoming years as well and we want to make sure that the protocol is scalable enough to support that to make sure that the user experience don't degrade uh and also the transaction costs remain low

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   so we shot high-level description said I want to dive into a specific segment to look into how the the Proto actually support the blockchain operating system in a more concrete way so here we're going to take a deeper look at the onboarding experience that comes with the boss but before we do that it is important to first take a look at how the current onboarding experience look like we're using near here as an example so usually uh the experience for new users at the

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   lens in a wallet because that's how they learn about near or they're trying to use an app and gets redirected to your word because they don't have an account and then they can actually use that app then the next step is that they will try to create an account and realize that they actually get to need to get near token first now there are actually several different ways people can do this some words support uh in-app purchase through credit cards and things

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   like that but others don't and in those cases people usually get tokens from centralized exchanges or a friend who is willing to support them and after they go through that stuff they can finally create an account and after that they can finally go back to the app that they want to try in the first place and start using it and while this is this experience I'm describing is um uh based on near it is not actually unique to near it is more or less a paradigm that people have taken

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    for granted at this point in the web series space and um I think at this point people really actually question whether there's something better we can do or whether there's something we should improve upon that but I think just as haseeb said in the panel before me that is actually very difficult for people who are not familiar with web3 right if you're such a regular Tick Tock

11. 4:38

    user uh you get exposure to near through like some kind of tick tock video and you want to give it a try it's very likely that you go through this complicated onboarding experience and you just drop off in the middle because it is indeed quite difficult so what do you think is actually the ideal State it's actually pretty simple this is just nothing fancy and is what we uh borrow from uh what a lot of web tubs today uh do so usually the the flow

12. 5:11

    is that you learn about a web 2 app and you think it's interesting you decide to give it a try so we just open the app and pretty much started using it right away you may at some point later decide to pay for it but that's at least in The Unborn experience it's not the case so that sounds very simple but why are we not able to do that uh in the web series space at least in the context of near there are two main obstacles one is that users have to pay for transactions using near

13. 5:42

    and two is that the users have to have near in their account to pay for the storage and those two things combined means that a user cannot not have any near and start interacting with some application that's built on top of near and those two obstacles that I described are pretty fundamental to the protocol itself while there may be ways to optimize that on the app layer it is

14. 6:07

    likely not going to be perfect because those constraints are placed by the protocol itself and while that is somewhat unique to near other protocols impose similar constraints maybe in other other formats and I think that's a reason why the onboarding experience in Webster in Webster today generally is not as good as uh what it can be so what is our solution in the context of the blockchain operating system on the protocol level we are developing uh

15. 6:39

    two features one is called meta transactions this is a feature that allows sort of parties to pay for the transaction of a user and that third party is already an app and the second feature is called the robotics account uh it means that under certain conditions a user do not need to maintain any minimum balance for their storage and that condition is really true for a new user who just got onboarded onto near and what those things allow us to do is

16. 7:11

    to reimagine the onboarding experience uh for users coming to near so the new flow looks um as follows a new user learns about the application they're interested in maybe Amazon Forum maybe a Serial friend and then they decide to give it a try they go there directly and through this biometric authentication a key is generated locally for them and the key is used as their account on here after that the application can basically pay for the usage of the application as part of the

17. 7:49

    user acquisition cost through my transactions and seeing the user don't really have to maintain any near on their account they can you start using that that account that they just created right away with that application and while this is already good for onboarding onto a specific app compared to web 2 the advantage here is that you have only need to create this account once and you can take your identity with you when you go browse other apps in the near ecosystem

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    so that's what we think the uh blockchain operating system can bring to us and how the protocol can support us in terms of onboarding but that's not the end of it uh there are a lot more things we want to do on the protocol level to make sure we can best support the blockchain operating system uh so due to the time constraint I'm not going to go to the details of the roadmap itself but basically there's two parts to the roadmap experience and core experience basically describe what the protocol can do to unlock on type

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    potentials for onboarding users and developers and core means more like the fundamentals of the protocols such as security scalability and decentralization and while um that's probably too small and also we're running all the time I do want to highlight a few key features that we're thinking about building in the very near future so the first one is account extensions today uh every account on here can have at most one smart contract and it brings a

20. 9:26

    problem with composibility of the smart contract themselves so let's say uh you take a look at the MultiCare contract on here and also the proxy contract and you want to combine them into into one and Deploy on your account so that your account can have more customized control than what is offered in those libraries today the way to do it is pretty much you need to write a new smart contract yourself you have to deploy that

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    yourself that is not only time consuming but also expensive in terms of the storage cost and what the account extension allows us to do is to allow us to have a lot of Global Contract modules that you can directly invoke uh inside your account and they will just compose them together right away it will significantly reduce the cost of managing accounts through uh those contracts that I just talked about and in addition to account extensions another interesting thing that we're

22. 10:21

    thinking about is to scale smart contracts themselves today even though near is very well known for sharding for scalability the fact is that a smart contract cannot take full uh cannot take full leverage of near starting design because a small contract each of them only reside on one chart and if you have a very popular smart contract let's say the near Discovery smart contract gets to 100 million users then the developers of that contract pretty much have to think

23. 10:54

    about how to make sure that they can sure the small contract in a manual way to avoid congestion on a single shot and that is not a great experience and may also cause problems for other users as well so we're thinking about how we can provide Primitives to allow developers to easily share their smart contract when there's need to do so the idea is that the smart contract would be

24. 11:20

    kind of deployed on Every Single Shard and the data will be stored on user account so that the smart contract can take full advantage of near starting model and finally while nearest asynchronous execution model enable us to do a lot of the scaling and a lot of our success can be attributed to that we do understand that for some developers especially divide developers having the ability to compose things synchronously is a great advantage to make things easier to do

25. 11:51

    and also safer to do so those are some of the things that we're looking into in terms of implementation in the future and that is uh a lot about the blockchain operating systems and the protocol and I think I want to leave The Talk which is much that you can try the boss for yourself if you're staying for the hack Zone please show the uh the proximity Gateway bus or GG this weekend and uh yeah that's it for my talk thanks