NEAR Town Hall (July 2021) | Part 4 Proximity Labs

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1. 0:00

   and this next speaker is really kind of uh he represents the kind of innovation laboratory that's building on top of the near ecosystem uh in the name of proximity labs so kendall is going to be discussing what proximity labs is building and kind of what additional products or services they're going to be bringing to the near ecosystem to complement this world of dapps and universe of chains welcome kendall thanks ozzy hey everyone uh thanks aaron and alex for great presentations

2. 0:30

   i'm pretty excited for both octopus and aurora uh and i'm also excited to tell you guys a bit about proximity and and more important really because the focus of this is actually gonna be just defy on near to tell you about what's been happening um all right great uh so yeah thanks again everyone um so i'm here to introduce a well briefly introduce a new organization in the near ecosystem and tell you a bit about what it is that

3. 1:03

   we're going to do um really this will be this will be kind of high level uh and what i recommend is is kind of following along on twitter and seeing a lot more information about what we're building what we're working on the teams we're working with over the next couple of weeks uh to keep it pretty simple here proximity is about supporting d5 on near uh so our purpose is pretty straightforward um we want to establish near and aurora

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   as the top choices for d5 blue chips these are the big projects that you've heard about uh and new boundary pushing projects these are the ones that are really innovating really trying to do new things trying to do new models and trying to bring d5 to new people most importantly um that's that's pretty much the the long and short of it as far as how we're gonna do this and what we're actually gonna do it's really three major categories so we

5. 1:53

   will be building we are a team of builders uh all six of our our initial team are builders and and and that's you know that's sort of the core of our dna so we will be launching some open source software and applications for the near ecosystem uh most of these will be kind of you know defy applications we'll also be building on the community side um you know this will be building out communities for the different projects that we launch uh this will be participating in dao's

6. 2:19

   in the ecosystem especially the ones that are related to financial uh you know protocols and uh you know building out more on kind of that sort of like softer um you know community side uh we'll also be researchers uh so three major kind of areas that we'll we'll be investigating on and things you can expect from us we will be uh publishing fairly regular reports on the state of near d5 you know we want to be probably the best source for what's happening on near d5

7. 2:49

   um we'll also be conducting some audits and in particular code reviews of new applications that are being lost in the near space you know we want to make it very clear uh you know when there are new d5 projects that these are these are you know trustworthy that these are you know they're doing what they say they're going to do um and that they're going to be value add for the community and we'll also be identifying opportunities for new projects uh you know we think that near is is one

8. 3:14

   of the best places to build any of these kind of applications what's really exciting is that the ecosystem is just starting to emerge so there's going to be a lot of opportunity and we want to make it clear to the entrepreneurs and builders in the ecosystem what's out there and also help them do it and that gets into this next point which is support so we're already helping several projects with their go to market uh we're gonna continue to do so and

9. 3:37

   that will be one of the big focuses of our organization um and we can also help with you know introductions to the broader community to investors and to people that can help your project um so that's pretty much the the long and short of what proximity lab is going to do i know that's pretty high level but like i said there'll be a lot more coming soon if you're working on a d5 project please do reach out to us

10. 4:02

    uh there's our email right there projects at proximity.dev um and we'll be happy to hop on a call pretty quickly uh we really just want to get in touch with any builders that are out there so that's a little bit about proximity like i said a lot more coming soon hop in there oh no i just want to kind of summarize real quick so if you could just go back aside real quickly if i understand you then correctly

11. 4:26

    proximity labs is kind of just a juggernaut that's going to be providing kind of all-in-one services for getting these new emerging d5 projects out in a very kind of thorough and technically you know refined manner is that is that fair to say that you know the the products that are going to be launching are going to be as you said audited ready to go fully developed and kind of uh trying to be the next generation of blue chip d5

12. 4:51

    exactly and also you know we want to work with blue chip d fight you know but yes we want to build it natively on near uh so yeah that's a good way to describe it sounds like a very broad scope it is uh i think over time will evolve you know in each of these areas um but yeah the long and short of it right now is uh is yeah we wanna we wanna help these projects launch and be as complete as possible when they go to market

13. 5:17

    all right so that's not all i have here for you guys today so we're going to talk about um about what's actually been happening on d phi on near uh so we're going to cover two of the apps that are live and i'm also going to highlight a few things that are that are coming soon so rev finance this is a project that somebody in the community may have already interacted with you may have you may be aware of it what is ref it is a decentralized exchange and an automated market maker

14. 5:43

    uh for those of you who aren't familiar with an automated market maker uh this is essentially what unit swap does you may be familiar with that the the very quick description is that it's a it's an exchange that could always give you a price there's a few unique ways in which they do that uh so yeah this first product that is live you can check it out now it's at app.ref.finance uh so it has a few differentiations from some of the other automated market

15. 6:07

    makers that are out there uh it can support multiple curve types out of the box the first curve that is live is that kind of unit swap style curve but there's a few more that are in development it can support trades across pools which is pretty interesting you could have multiple pools with with different prices maybe like different amounts of liquidity and trades can actually be routed across these pools to give the best price and it also supports

16. 6:31

    customizable fees you know i think this team has realized that um you know there's different risks that are associated with uh you know providing liquidity to different markets so they've allowed you to choose uh choose your fee based on what you think the risk of that pool is so we've seen some early success in this project with some of the nearest specific assets in particular i guess there's surprise there

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    skyward project that we'll be talking about just a second and also cucumber for anyone to use berry club you're probably familiar with cucumber so since launch there have been 134 unique pools that have been created uh there's actually several thousand in total but these are 134 unique pairs which has been pretty exciting to see there's over 1.5 million in liquidity that's been added to the pool and maybe most impressively uh we saw this skyward near pair recently eclipsed a million

18. 7:26

    in uh in liquidity just just the other day and uh so far is the most successful pool on this platform and i think what that demonstrates is that there's clear demand for near native assets and ways to ways to kind of you know get and provide liquidity for these near native assets imagine we'll see a lot more of that very soon there's also a fully operational dow which is pretty cool like in the you

19. 7:50

    know early life cycle of this project they were one of the earliest sputnik v2 dows and actually their first proposal was to create a a token which i imagine we will we'll learn more about about how that community plans to uh to use that token uh but i think what's fascinating is that they've clearly shown um you know a commitment to be to be community driven uh from the early days which is something we encourage for all of our projects building

20. 8:14

    that are building on near uh so if you want to learn more about this project i recommend following them on twitter and if you want to see how it's doing there's a really great community built project a community member named dda who built sudaki.com which is uh analytics for ref um pretty exciting stuff to see that in the early days and that's definitely a useful product for the space um all right so that's ref um real quickly kendall before we go on

21. 8:45

    around correct me correct me if i'm wrong but the swap fee on ref is 5 000 of ascent is that right it would be it's it's up there and being one of the cheapest transaction costs that you can find right now in all of crypto and i believe there's also a one to two second finality on those on those swaps anything to add on that front nothing to add that's those are great points uh that transaction fee yeah that's referring to the transaction fee it is uh extremely low

22. 9:16

    um i think one thing i would add uh that i think is really cool about rev i find it to be one of the easier um dexes to use from from your phone um the reason being that i think part of this is you know the near wallet being pretty mobile friendly uh you know you can just go to a few websites and interact with it uh which i find to be pretty elegant so excited to see how that develops if you know there's there's unique trading from your phone

23. 9:40

    um but yeah like you mentioned very cheap fees pretty quick um one of the you know strengths of the near blockchain is fast finality so you don't have to worry too much about about your trade being reverted which is you know something that's starting to creep in on some other blockchains um one final thing we can just say is ref is emerging but the technical design of it and the capacities as you just heard are next level for what's coming in crypto

24. 10:05

    so you're going to definitely want to keep your eye on the ref dao on the token economics as it emerges and kind of the overall growth of this specific project because there's going to be a lot of d5 legos built on and around it most likely uh in the coming months so uh kendall i think you said you have scott you're bringing you're going to be discussing another project um would you like to get into that one

25. 10:29

    yeah absolutely so we've talked a lot about skyward in this i mean it's clearly been you know one of the the earliest uh early projects in the d5 space so let's jump into it a bit more uh so skyward's fascinating because it's a it's a it's a auction protocol i think they're they're really focused on price discovery for new uh you know new kind of assets tokens etc on the near block chain um i put the

26. 10:54

    term fairer there because they they have kind of a novel way of doing this um where basically they run an auction every single block uh and you can you can essentially deposit some of the whatever token the that team is targeting um and then participate in these auctions over every single block um which is sort of a new way of doing things and you'll kind of receive like a pro

27. 11:18

    rata amount of tokens depending on how much you put in so to make that really simple if you have you know half of the tokens that are put into into the pool say there's you know 100 near and you put in 50. uh if they're distributing you know 10 tokens every single block you'll receive five of those and then you know as that pool grows or or shrinks uh your distribution will change um but what's really cool about this is that um you know you kind of can get rewarded

28. 11:44

    for being early for being late you know really just depends on how uh the attention of this pool changes which is kind of an interesting in a different way than we've seen of doing this than other protocols uh they recently completed their first auction um here's a screenshot i took from the treasury as you can see there there's over 1.2 million anticipated in that which uh which we found pretty exciting you know that's a

29. 12:08

    that's a good percentage of of the year out there that clearly was interested in this and there were over a thousand unique participants and i think that's the the thing that i found the most exciting uh you know that's the kind of engagement that we like to see from these early projects what's pretty interesting here too as you can see this is this is the skyward treasury um so skyward that token can actually be redeemed for the tokens in the treasury um and in this first sale the the

30. 12:32

    treasury uh balance is actually higher than what the the like sort of aggregate price was for the sale which means that anyone who participated throughout the life of this auction uh can actually you know redeem their skyway token from for more than for more than they paid for it which is kind of interesting we'll see if that holds true going forward but found it pretty fascinating um yeah if you'd like to learn more about this project i recommend following them on twitter as

31. 12:57

    well um they're pretty active there and i imagine they'll be announcing you know changes to their protocol and you know new up and coming things as time goes on but um but i think yeah what's also cool is this project worked pretty closely with ref and that uh there was a ref market that was trading as this auction was going on uh which created some kind of fascinating dynamics and definitely excited to see how that

32. 13:19

    evolves over the next few uh weeks and months yeah that's that's a great overview of it and i think maybe uh one thing that that to really emphasize from this is that as i remember there's a million total ref uh sorry skyward tokens is that right kendall there's a million total skyward tokens and then that those tokens are gonna have a yield on the skyward treasury the skyward

33. 13:42

    treasury will be taking a small fee from every project that doesn't ido on the platform so effectively in looking at what is the kind of long-term prospects of skyward you're estimating the number of projects that are going to be launching on the platform um and and every time that a project launches that treasury is going to load up a little bit more yeah that's that's our understanding as well um you know definitely worth doing

34. 14:06

    your own research there of course as with any of this stuff but um yeah i mean we think what's interesting is we're seeing a lot of the early uh early kind of you know near projects have have shown some interest in in getting involved uh and i think that's just showing how early near projects once really worked together uh which is really exciting and i think that's you know one of the benefits of an early ecosystem is these projects can really collaborate uh and kind of create value for each

35. 14:30

    other um that's right that's really well that's uh that's ref and that's skyward two projects that we've seen that are live uh what i also wanna do is leave you guys with a few several projects that are launching soon uh many of these you you actually may have heard about uh or obviously we'll talk a little bit about what's what's coming there uh so this first one is definitely one of the most exciting projects in in the

36. 14:52

    near space and has been for some time uh flux a project i'm sure many of you are familiar with so they are launching an oracle aggregator uh what's exciting is it's an oracle it's an oracle that has kind of its own security model its own economic guarantees uh but they are designing it to be able to pull in prices from other oracles and from a lot of different data sources i i you know i expect to see them

37. 15:15

    pretty quickly evolve to have one of the most robust kind of price feeds out there and even more more than just prices um and that's going to be exciting that's going to open up a lot of opportunities for innovation on your blockchain so keep an eye out for them launching pretty soon uh another one and one you made up but that's by some very very valued community members in this space

38. 15:38

    lucio and claudio is uh metapool metapool is launching what's called liquid staking for near so what's really fascinating about liquid staking is that it allows you to have your near staked but then receive kind of a sort of like a you know a token that's representing that state position that will represent the rewards that are accumulated and what this means is that you don't have to make the choice between staking near or participating in other d5 applications you know maybe this is like a lending protocol that

39. 16:10

    launches and you want to lend your near be able to borrow against it currently you need to make the choice between unstaking kind of giving up those thinking rewards giving up adding that additional security to the network and being able to you know to take out loans against vermeer uh with metapool and other liquid staking protocols you're actually going to not have to make this choice anymore um you're going to be able to get put in one year get one stake near

40. 16:33

    go deposit this stakes near into some kind of lending protocol uh borrow against it and then still earn rewards on your stake meter uh this is very exciting i think this is going to open up a lot of really interesting d5 use cases um so keep an eye out for them i believe they're actually planning to launch uh by the end of this month uh in a in a soft launch capacity um another really exciting project and

41. 16:56

    one that actually has a lot of overlap or a lot of kind of synergies with the metapool is oin finance so oin is launching a uh which will be likely the first native stable coin uh on near which you're really excited about um so what this means is you can actually you know using near or stake near um basically deposit this and then withdraw a stablecoin loan this will be you know i believe they're calling it

42. 17:22

    something like nusd uh that will be representative of a stablecoin uh i imagine that'll be used in a lot of d5 across the air um and also open up a lot of opportunities for you know for leverage and other you know borrowing opportunities so definitely one to keep an eye out on another one that you might be familiar with this has been um sort of soft live for for quite some time and maybe even

43. 17:44

    already is fully alive is pulse pulse is prediction markets um which has a very broad range of uh of use cases uh we've seen a lot of a lot of interest there um you know to sort of predict the outcome of different sporting events and other and other other kind of events definitely one to keep an eye on and one you can actually you know start to use uh today but i believe they'll be going fully live and and will likely be the first um i

44. 18:10

    believe the first project to use the flux oracle before too long so keep an eye out on what they're doing and last but not least you know obviously alex gave a great presentation on aurora uh which is you know itself is already live but i think what's exciting is we're going to see the initial slate of projects on top of aurora that are watching and we're working pretty closely at proximity with a lot of these

45. 18:32

    um don't want to give too much away just yet but there'll be some announcements coming very soon but just to give you guys an idea of the type of projects that will be you know sort of included in this this initial slate so there's going to be some dexes that you're familiar with uh there are some lending protocols that um that are that are in the works here as well which is going to open up again a lot of different opportunities for both native near g5 and aurora d5 and there's going to be

46. 18:56

    some really interesting derivative projects which is one of my kind of favorite um you know areas of of research and development in this space so lots to keep an eye on there um yeah what i'll what i'll recommend is that uh is that if you follow us for updates uh on proximity phi uh on twitter we have a post up there already that actually like will link you to the the twitter feeds of each of these projects that i just mentioned um and give you a little bit more information uh and i recommend following each of those projects individually

47. 19:27

    because they put out a lot of really good content about you know and updates about what it is that they're doing so yeah a lot of really good stuff that's happening um in the near d5 ecosystem and yeah we couldn't be more excited about um about seeing how the next few weeks and months play out i think i think your presentation made it very clear that defy is alive and well in the near ecosystem and it just to

48. 19:51

    kind of emphasize some points there there is now an oracle play that's gonna be launching on near uh called flux that'll be coming out we're gonna have stable coins prediction markets liquid staking i mean a lot of base level d5 infrastructure that's just starting to emerge that's gonna actually be the foundation for even more complex and sophisticated applications in the future uh and proximity labs is effectively the kind of innovation

49. 20:14

    factory that's gonna help push all of this stuff out uh kendall do you have anything else you'd like to add for the community projects specifically for them to follow or anything more just to tie this up yeah i'd say you know if you have questions about any of this please please come uh you know please come ask them i'll be doing an ama like um like alex and aaron will after this um

50. 20:37

    you know if you'd like to get involved you know please you can you can reach out to us on twitter uh you can you know message us at projects at proximity.dev um but you know we want to learn from you guys about what's interesting to you just as much as we're hoping to put out some content that will hopefully be uh be interesting um for everyone