Paris Blockchain Week Summit 2022 - Near Protocol

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

1. 0:09

   hello super nice to be here it's the city in which i studied so i have lots of memories everywhere in every corner it's quite weird to be back in a different environment but super nice to be here thank you so much to atka for helping us organize this event um around nft day in paris but also around the paris blockchain conference i think it's always great for us to also have access to our community and to have more the opportunity to be with you guys

2. 0:35

   and to mingle with you guys um there is quite a few of us actually from near whether it's the foundation or whether actually it's from pagoda or other ecosystems and maybe a quick show of hand of people who are i'm being told to move here i'm moving here good now we're good maybe a quick show of hands of people who are actually working near foundation or near related anton you should raise your hand thank you very much

3. 0:59

   excellent okay so you'll have lots of people that you can mingle with afterwards um what you'll hear from me is basically an introduction uh on near the ecosystem and what we're about and then we'll get into the meat of the topic uh so you'll have anton presenting actually our regional hubs and in particular focusing on ukraine which is now as i'm sure you guys know uh not possible to be physically in ukraine but it's in exile in portugal and wanted to share with you

4. 1:24

   some of the things that we're doing there we'll have elia who uh is ilia around i'm like where is ilia okay elia is around okay we'll have ilya talk about the protocol and then we'll have a great panel after that so at near um what we believe in is a world where people can control their asset their data and their governance and that's the definition of open web world whether you

5. 1:50

   call that webstreet or whether you call that open web world that's what we believe in and our mission is to think through that and think how can we actually attract billions of users to come and build and ultimately be on the near protocol without necessarily having to know that they're on the near protocol what we focus on and the near protocol is a layer one protocol which we like to

6. 2:12

   think is actually simple secure and scalable so these three things are actually the focus of what we do simple because it's simple for users and i'm i hope most of you have actually experienced the usability that a name and an account can give you just being for example maric.near or just having your first name dot near the usability of this account the usability of having the possibility to get link drops and to basically receive immediately nft or

7. 2:37

   actually tokens it's also very simple for developers and we believe that actually to get to the next stage of adoption it needs to be simple for developers and not only for ninja developers that you know know rust and solidity but also for javascript developers and to open up to more community so simplicity is a core and a focus for for an air protocol extremely secure so written in rust

8. 3:00

   our fully decentralized validator set is enabling to actually secure constantly and continuously the network and the cutting-edge nightshade algorithm which i think ilia will talk about a bit more later and last but not least the scalability we live in a world where actually having blockchains that can remain cheap as they scale and grow is extremely important and so that's one of

9. 3:23

   the things that we focus on this is a map of the new ecosystem which to be honest is difficult to keep up with because every day every day every hour there are new things that actually are launching on the near protocol which we find pretty exciting at the core in the center you have the protocol which is open source and so on the protocol and around the protocol for example aurora or evm or

10. 3:47

    actually pagoda tools for web street developers but different tools that can be actually built and that are continuously helping develop the protocol on top you're seeing the three ecosystem that we focus on so defy is quite an important ecosystem and growing on near the creator economy whether it's actually gaming's or nft also growing and digital cooperative let's call that dao's for those of you who know that name but just helping reinvent what does

11. 4:12

    it mean to actually have a different job and work differently on air the foundation is the block that is at the bottom and so i'll get more into like the foundation because this is the part that actually i lead and what do we do as the near foundation and how do we actually help the ecosystems thrive but it's not only the foundation that you have around the ecosystem we have also astrodaw which is our platform to enable the launch of dao extremely simple for anyone who wants to

12. 4:38

    launch a dao and we do have actually labs and guilds that focus on certain ecosystems so for example proximity labs is focused on d5 ecosystem human guild is focused on gaming and regional hubs we'll get into but like we believe to be global you actually need to be very local and have a regional footprint a couple of numbers um so transactions per second but also one second finality uh over a thousand active developers uh 500 projects 300 dows millions of accounts five minutes of

13. 5:09

    accounts and i'll let you read the rest i hate when people are reading slides i'm not going to do that but tbl has been growing also quite substantially which which is good to see so the near foundation what role do we play in the ecosystem uh we are here to do three things the first thing is actually raise awareness and what that means to us is actually education we believe and i'm sure all of you guys know that but to for the entire web street space to actually thrive there is a humongous amount of talent that is

14. 5:42

    needed and i'm sure you also see that but the amount of conversation that we're all having this space is very intimidating and actually i think it is our job and everybody's job to make sure that we can welcome more people who want to understand and want to build on our ecosystem but also other ecosystems so raising awareness for us means education raising awareness for us means actually showcasing projects and showcasing actually use cases that

15. 6:07

    enable people to understand the power of the technology the second pillar is supporting projects that's one thing that as a foundation we focus on we have a very large grant program whether it's actually to help distribute fast grants or actually distribute grants that are specifically focusing on an ecosystem for example looking after gaming or nft but we do have a large program of grants to help builders who

16. 6:31

    are committed to near and the last part as a foundation i can't i cannot not talk about actually the changing regulatory landscape and the fact that it is actually extremely important as an industry but also as a foundation that we do have a voice for that that we can actually help steer the ship in the right direction for our ecosystem but also for the entire industry um i wanted to showcase light on

17. 6:55

    therefore three sub-programs that are from the foundation the first one is near university and so i encourage you if you actually want to look at what does it mean to become a certified analyst or a certified instructor or actually a certified developer we do have a tool and a suite of programs and projects that you can actually get involved on on near the university uh our funding platform uh is as i've mentioned very large uh there is different angles to our funding platform so

18. 7:24

    as the foundation sometimes what we do is actually help route people into what's the right place to get the funding for example for builders on d5 that would be proximity for builders who are actually focused on a certain geography we do tend to redirect people to our geography and for example our regional hub so a great place to go to near.org grants we do also have a large network of backers um and we see that as part of

19. 7:49

    our job to actually help builders get their next round of seed funding where needed and we can make those connections and the last part um so regions i've mentioned that but we we are in a world where actually everything is about being very global and yet it's never been more true that actually you need to be extremely local you need to speak the local language you need to have documents and material translated

20. 8:16

    in the local language you need to have local meetups where people can actually meet and be in person and create together and co-create and so it's with that in mind that we've actually been strengthening and spare heading what it means for us to be a regional hub we have five regional live hubs and you'll hear about a live example from ukraine and now hosted in portugal but we do have a hub in latam a

21. 8:39

    hub in kenya a hub in china and those hubs actually help not only local awareness and education but also actually are helping with like local product lab project labs and also local funding and you can check that on telegram so that was a whistle tour stop of you know near like at a glance and and what we do and more specifically what we do as a foundation i'm going to hand over to anton to talk about ukraine as a hub

22. 9:17

    thanks marik so actually maybe there are any questions for you no questions great okay so um really glad to see you all i wanted to to greet you in uh french because like we were building regional hubs and it's like importance of having something logo is really good but i've understood that i've been uh learning french for seven years in the school and they know like 10 words so i've better not not do this cool so yeah let me uh let me start

23. 9:51

    uh i will talk about the near ua like original hub and uh let's go so a few words about myself i think the clicker is not working and it works so uh right now i'm i'm leading the near ua the original hub uh before this uh like in parallel live i've started the project named datrix which is the noko 2 for analytics and machine learning um like we've been doing this for for a couple of years against this through y combinator like my partner kirill is here somewhere he

24. 10:28

    hey crew uh like i'm also a gp seed venture fund which is a fund that supports uh like ukrainian founders so we are kind of working with ukrainian founders and ukrainian community for quite some time and uh before this i've been working as a data science manager and consultant so um here we go so before i start talking about the regional hub we are building like for ukraine let's talk a little bit about why do we need regional hops overall

25. 11:01

    so generally saying uh there are a couple of things we are talking about like the shared goals which marik just shared with us like about uh like bringing more people about like bringing more people to near and bringing awareness but at the same time we're talking about this for each of the places we're building we have like developers in in the uk in asia in ukraine in the us here in france so and each community is a little bit different and we understood that it is

26. 11:32

    really important to have uh you know uh something local for example like local uh office hours like where the developers can discuss the topics in their like uh like in mother tongue in their languages and that's what we are doing like having the decentralization while going to the common goals all together and um that's exactly the reasoning behind uh having the regional hubs overall and also we need to to include the specifics of each region

27. 12:04

    for example in ukraine traditionally we have really good developers like previously i had like the service company which works for like blockchain for ai projects and there are a lot of talented developers and like ukraine is good for developers uh so we are mostly focused on these parts of things while some in some areas in some countries there are different you know expertise or different uh like

28. 12:30

    set of uh skill sets which are wanted to be like highlighted um we started this uh near near ukraine hab and uh actually we started in the beginning of the year we started working on this the problem here is that um like the war started in ukraine and definitely it has like a huge impact on what we are doing so i cannot avoid this topic uh speaking about like ukraine and hap as it uh like influenced boasts like

29. 13:03

    the team the uh like mind of what we are doing why we are doing and so on so there are two two main uh things which that are changed first one is that uh like we cannot be physically based in ukraine for sure and what we understood is like we we need to go on we need to proceed what we are doing despite the war and like we need to do what we can do the best like building the products shipping the products and actually

30. 13:33

    supporting ukraine as we have as we can that's why we've actually uh amended our mandate let's say and build the ukraine and portugal hub so we are physically based in portugal and lisbon and like we are supporting ukraine and doing some online events and talking with community online and having a lot of people coming to us in lisbon and joining from ukraine everybody who can evocate

31. 14:03

    and the second thing is like we're building the products and doing some social initiatives and helping ukraine as we can for example like creating the official like top-level wallet for ukraine to support this so this is the impact of what we are doing so we are physically based in portugal and like we proceed doing what we do so what we have right now is around like 50 people uh even even more including the people who

32. 14:27

    are um who work in the companies that we started earlier such as detricks and overall we have like a number of initiatives or number of peers uh within within uh like the hub so we have first of all like and the most important part is the community like uh the people which ones that we have uh but there are some particular things we are doing like it's a fund it is a like project accelerator and the platform uh which is a product lab or like venture lab where we start the project where we

33. 15:01

    think uh are missing in the ecosystem or like we think that they are important to build right now so we start them and uh like uh let's say build them as soon as they they can can be separated in a separate legal entity we are doing this and like for sure we are we are helping to to uh to hire the people to support the people do like events do like hackathons the marketing around this and like to support and gather the whole ecosystem

34. 15:33

    uh in in one place so uh i will talk a little bit about what do you have as a part of this about these pillars and give some examples so we have the venture arm which is which has like six millions in funding already and two already committed investments and we've just started we have this ecosystem development part which is like a grand program uh which are particular like as a part of the global idea we are particularly concentrated on uh like ukrainian founders or like uh

35. 16:06

    the founders who are um near nearby in portugal we are doing the hackathons and like uh genie who's here is leading our part which is related to events in marketing we are doing the conferences education we are going to kick off in h2 i think and and these office hours which i mentioned like meetups and actually the first meetup is going to be in lisbon this friday so if anybody is going to be there please join us um it's a product lab maybe i will talk a

36. 16:40

    little bit more about this because it is maybe the uh the largest part of what we are doing at the moment it's uh it contains a number of uh number of projects first one is like central bank digital currency uh i will also say a few words in a separate slide which is like web3 web 3 analytics crypto salary projects like acceleration of overall like helping the companies who are

37. 17:04

    in the community to build on here to to support them both from uh understanding of the ecosystem and providing some uh support of uh for like uh receiving investments and overall and like maybe a couple of last slides not to take too much of your time is like a few words about the uh about the projects we are building like as i mentioned like this is a central bank digital currency or cbdc for short so we've already working on the pilot with ukraine who is surprisingly doing

38. 17:38

    this pilot during zvar and we've started it before the war um so we started in february the war started and surprisingly we've realized that we are keep moving there um like and we are doing the same uh the same idea and the same pilots in like a couple of other countries we're talking with the uh there's portugal as well but uh like ukraine is the first one um and um like maybe the second project i wanted to talk about a little bit more is like user analytics for web 3 which

39. 18:15

    is the uh like which is named bombi uh so uh the idea is that there is no no two for uh for web street to to to bring like on chain and like off-chain data together and that's exactly what we're doing uh so uh that's it for sure like we are hiring i cannot mention this i cannot not mention this but uh this is it these are our contacts please get in touch and happy to answer the questions if you have the time for this don't know

40. 18:56

    do we have some times for questions cool so who is going to take the scene next here so hello hello everybody my name is uh florian i'm the ceo of anima so i never thought i would do that in my life but could you all raise your hand yeah and uh if you actually if you hate kawasi you can uh put your hand down okay so we are yeah so we are launching a decentralized identity protocol where the idea is that you can do your kyc one

41. 19:42

    last time with us and then you'll be able to reuse it everywhere but on centralized platform but also on a decentralized platform but a bit of background before we actually launched anime we launched synapse a few years back we decided to tackle what we believe is one of the biggest issue in term of adoption which is like the kyc in crypto um and so yeah we decided to launch a first solution and to start understanding how osu works to give you

42. 20:15

    an idea in 2021 we worked with over 250 projects so some of them would be like terra labs that we helped recently raise like 1.5 billion we also work with plenty of other projects like gem trading signum which is like the swiss bank but also with a polygon and other layer one and with this understanding on how to do kawasi we actually wanted to release now a decentralized identity protocol so you

43. 20:46

    can be done with us you actually use us last time and then you can forget about us forever so how does that work is very simple we don't want you to download an app we don't want you to download the wallet you can simply do your kyc and at the end of the process you'll be simply able to assign a few messages with your metamask and by doing so what really happens in the backend is that we are going to encrypt the data we are going to create a copy of your kyc encrypt the data with your wallet so only you can then own

44. 21:18

    this data and we are going to store that on a decentralized data storage and so next time when you need to do a new kyc rather than doing the entire process again you can simply sign a message with your wallet and your you'll be you'll be done and you'll be able to access the new platform instantly and so yeah so two use cases that we believe are very important is that the first one obviously is for crypto exchanges we want to be able to work with a compliance with

45. 21:51

    use cases to solve the compliance issues so you go on binance you can share your kyc you go on ftx you can share your kyc very easily but we also want to tackle another issue is uh we want to be able to work with a web three projects so you know we have like one client that is like an injective protocol and for them compliance is maybe not as much an issue as for binance for example so you could imagine that you go on a on

46. 22:15

    the exchange and rather than sharing your full information you can now simply share that you are actually not an american you are over 18 and your email is clean you actually don't need to reveal any information about you and you can keep full privacy on your data so i'm pleased to say that it's actually live today so we just launched so that's my first pitch so that's why i'm busy and we also launch with aurora so you

47. 22:49

    can actually so now you can actually go on a animate.io decentralize your identity with aurora and next time you actually don't need to use it we actually decided to work with uh with neoprotocol because we believe that the user experience is key we actually believe that blockchain has been way too focused on trying to explain the complexity of it and now we are at a stage where we need to focus on use case i'm sorry i'm using like a microwave every day and i have a bit of an understanding on how that

48. 23:26

    works but if you ask me in detail there absolutely no clue and i believe that users should basically be able to use blockchain solutions the same way and when you think about decentralized identity what i just you know i just talked to you about user experience how is it it's going to make your life easier and simpler but also if you think about it it's your privacy it's way more secure so it's a way of selling this privacy and this security

49. 23:58

    but by user experience and so that's why we actually love the near vision of making like blockchain very easy and very accessible for everybody okay thanks amazing we all need to sign up for this right now one last kyc please all right well uh great to see everyone here um i hope everyone had a good nft day and i'm gonna have a boring talk compared to what we had before so i'm gonna talk a little bit about

50. 24:43

    what's going on near infrastructure level um and so if you're bored into your mind never mind 20 minutes and we have drinks and everything so it should be oh there are more talks never all right you need to keep keep going all right well let's go so you all just seen marik showing this kind of graph and really kind of high level the general idea is that like there's a new protocol in the middle right this is an open source protocol it has kind of lots of use cases it's

51. 25:18

    not really a you know specifically designed for some specific function right um and so if you're familiar if you're developer you're familiar with linux like linux is something that you know we use for you know on my phone you use it on a server use it in a car it's everywhere and so to actually get it in front of the users in front of developers you need lots of companies lots of infrastructure that actually delivers end user goal at the same time kind of marie quench through the whole hub of

52. 25:48

    support functions right and kind of education and funding that go into this so i'll zoom in into the infrastructure piece right so there are kind of few major players already that uh that are kind of contributing to near protocol and using it and giving it to the users and uh you know if you're sitting here you probably are aiming for this one right all right um so let's start with uh kind of the protocol itself right so

53. 26:19

    like the evolution of the protocol and kind of the goal of it has been always to abstract out the complexity of the blockchain from the developer and the user right as a user when you're using netflix you're not thinking about hundreds of services that they run across you know tens of data centers at least maybe i do but mostly people don't and so similarly when using blockchain

54. 26:43

    you should not be thinking hey am i on that roll up or do i have money to pay gas on this part chain is this gonna take like 10 minutes to go to this other you know chain to the bridge like you want to just use applications you know send your transactions and be done with it and so kind of the idea for the sharding the idea for kind of nearest design has always been to remove this need to

55. 27:07

    understand what's going on underneath which also has a benefit for us protocol developers that we can do whatever we want under the hood because as a user and developer like it's abstracted out it just works and we can keep switching and innovating on what's going on behind the scenes and so because of this we have not released you know the greatest protocol for all of all time at the moment uh when you know when it just came out we released something that works and

56. 27:35

    allows to continue innovating and so in general for me kind of like what i believe near is going to continue innovating continue changing because well part of it it's in name the other part is like this is how uh if we're talking about software but also if we're talking about you know communities they continue changing we cannot become static and kind of uh live with what we have and so here's

57. 28:00

    few kind of upcoming releases right so we're already at simple night shade that's been released uh we have four shots running we kind of have you know changing number of shards had zero impact on users had zero impact on developers like you've been doing stuff as you want it and you know it continued working the next thing that's going to happen is actually there will be a lot more uh

58. 28:23

    validators on the network right so i mean this has been one of the kind of complaints about near hey you only have this many validators which is true that allowed us to have really fast blocks really fast finality but the next step is to bump it up and so to do that we launching chunk only block producer so if you're into running hardware and excited about writing blockchain sign up it's near.slash decentralize and you'll be you know can be one of the first chunk only producers which require way

59. 28:54

    less hardware way less stake and you know can continue securing and scaling the network now this is kind of step one we have step two which is uh kind of removing the need for the block producers to maintain kind of the overview of the whole network so this is where we enable challenges which allow like if some validators do something really bad right like uh try to mess up with the state they're able to be slashed and so as

60. 29:20

    soon as that's enabled we don't actually need to have any node in the network that maintains all state which really means we can actually have as many shards as you know the i would say like bandwidths of the internet can hold there's some other physical limitations but in general this will allow to bump up the number of shards to potentially 100.

61. 29:42

    but even more interesting is as you know if you are a developer and you've seen and you've or if you lived through cryptokitties craze right where one app just like took over the whole network you realize that you know yeah starting is cool but if i'm on the chart with somebody else who is really going nuts right like somebody launched an app maybe somebody in this room who has a lot of users and gonna spam the

62. 30:06

    network with their transactions um the like you don't want to be on on that chart right you want to get out and run your applications on it the thing is near abstract it out you don't need to think about charts and so the kind of the next step will be to have dynamically moving your contracts between the shards and so again if you're from web to world this is the same thing where

63. 30:29

    aws actually doesn't tell you which computer they run on they actually move your like computation between nodes between physical computers without letting you know and so kind of going to that experience where you just say hey i need this much compute uh or in our case you know this many transactions and based on the resourcing it actually like adds more shards move stuff around make sure you you have pretty much resilience to

64. 30:54

    spikes and usage you have resilience to kind of some apps becoming super crazy um used and pretty much still hiding all of this complexity from the user developer right like as a developer you still don't want to think about it and so this is kind of the you know i would say this year optimistically probably a year and a half of development but we have an amazing team working on this and continue hiring so if you want to build some of the coolest stuff in the blockchain space hit me up

65. 31:30

    and technology so kind of zooming out right there was like a bunch of stuff i want to talk about pagoda because um kind of historically right everybody when they're starting a blockchain project they're trying to scramble together a bunch of tooling to you know actually launch something that does not look like a you know a high school project right and so when you look at like web 2 usually you have you know like hubspot for crm you have

66. 32:02

    you know analytics you have some kind of like lots of different options for logging for uh you know triggers you have you have back ends you have marketing tooling you have you know campaigns emails all the stuff right like there's like hundreds of sas software services that exist when you're building startup and there's almost none exist in web3 and so pagoda has been building so like

67. 32:28

    a lot of the protocol development are is happening in pagoda it also providing already a bunch of blockchain data right so similar to infuria you know providing rpc services indexing data a lot of information but then kind of the asks being okay well i want to know what's happening with my app i want to know when you know a lot of money moves from my app out i want to get a notification i want to get sms right

68. 32:52

    and then beyond that like well my users also want to get an sms when something's happening with their account and so there's a lot of the services that you we take for granted in web 2 right some of them because they like ios provides you some of them because they've been existing for so long that don't work and exist in the web 3. and so pagoda is really focused on building this kind of startup stack for for the web 3 startups and it includes actually launching nft

69. 33:19

    campaigns and kind of airdrops directly from your thing having like directly from a dao issuing a token creating campaign you know sending it over email or or through some kind of web3 uh portal as well and so it's all tied together in developer console so if you go to pagoda.com click on console try it out it's still in development still still early but kind of tying it all together it gives you this ability to build your startup really quickly and have all those tools in one

70. 33:49

    place and actually have have kind of instrumentation and the cool thing is because it's web 3 it's not one company that builds all of these tools right the analytics is coming from zombie the dows are coming from astro right the tokens are you know just some open source smart contracts that are laying there so it's really about kind of tying it all together in one flow and so you have like a multisig you have governance for your dows you are able to upgrade your

71. 34:14

    contracts kind of all those pieces really coming together so this is cool but you know there's people who like to write an evm i don't judge them i do a little bit um there's also people who like to write in substrate i do judge them and some of them are here but why am i to uh you know to take my opinion seriously anyway right if people want to build something in whatever language they want being developer friendly means supporting that and so because this new ecosystem has aurora it

72. 34:47

    has octopus it supports you know you running evm code really easily pretty much like exactly carbon copy of what you would run on ethereum like for example one of the really interesting feature which is underrated is the base token the the thing that you send around with normal transactions is actually eth on aurora which is the only evm chain that does that and so an octopus really allows you kind of out of the box get your substrate chain run it really quickly plug it in connect it

73. 35:19

    uh to the near network issue token get it through the kind of process of governance on spinning up and you know have it like kind of have ten tens of thousands of them for really like i would say what is it ten ten thousands of a price of uh of what it is on polka dot all right so all in all kind of uh and tying it all together right it's like near doesn't exist in kind of in isolation right there's a lot of networks um and i mean ethereum being

74. 35:50

    one of the biggest uh rainbow bridges specifically connects kind of in a trustless way near ecosystem to ethereum there's like in development i think bsc and polygon there's also a lot of other bridges right now that have been built and so kind of in general yes we have and like i have an opinion on how people should build i believe everybody should learn rust even if you're not developer

75. 36:16

    but um not everybody agrees with me and so you have all these options you are able to build really easily kind of with whatever option that you prefer or make sense for your use case so check it out so kind of to finish off i want to talk through security so marik mentioned kind of simple secure scalable you know scalable easy we don't want things to like uh cost a lot and to break when you know there's like another five users show up to the network

76. 36:49

    simplicity makes sense right the user experience should not suck this is just like not not it's not something that anybody would argue but security is something that you know we're like hey it's blockchain it's secure you know easy no problem and for people who are like developers and who you know been in space for a while like yeah we know how to you know store our sheet phrases we have like multi-sigs we have you know ledgers we have uh maybe some ways to like

77. 37:14

    decompose our key into multiple pieces with recovery and pc all the cool stuff nobody understands what the words i said right the point is like if you talk with the normal people right um they don't really want to self-custody stuff they they want the properties they want the ownership but they don't want the kind of the scariness of losing the seed phrase and losing all of the stuff they

78. 37:39

    have right and so at the same time like the space being kind of just like insanely as it explodes like it's exploded in usage it's also exploded in hacks and you know red pools and vulnerabilities and like people forked contracts with issues and then every single one of them got hacked right so like at some point immunify actually they found a found a bug in the contract that that project uh fixed it

79. 38:08

    and then there was like 40 forks that had exactly the same bug and all of them were add-ons none of them could be found all of them got hacked so all in all right we need to go beyond this kind of haze the seat phrase is the only thing that stops kind of the you know between you and the money right this is just not like there's a lot of things we learn about even passwords in that too

80. 38:32

    that you know prevent if somebody stole your password password leaks all the time how to prevent that right so kind of progressive security where you know when you start you don't really have enough kind of assets and funds you don't need the all you know complex experience of custody but then over time as you go you can actually add more security you can add you know two second factor you can

81. 38:56

    add you know multi-sig you can have custody providers to actually co-sign with you even if they don't able to initiate new transactions and so i call this active custody because it actually has a little bit more activity on the other side but it's not the full custody right you're not giving up all your money to a bank your a for example banks or maybe a set of friends or whatever can start becoming your cosigners and transactions

82. 39:20

    they maybe will stop if something happens maliciously at the same time if you're talking about contracts having an on-chain registry of contracts and their audits would already allow us to keep track of what what are the things that have been audited like indirect directly in the wallet you can actually see hey this contract was audited by this uh provider right or you will see

83. 39:44

    this contract was not audited and this is you know you should be careful with what you're doing and obviously because of this you can start having like bug bounty systems directly there right you can have funds deployed you can have security experts who are putting out notices like this is a totally normal thing in web 2 where if i'm a security expert i can actually raise a kind of notification to everyone who's using

84. 40:07

    some kind of library or a protocol and everybody will receive a message this does not work in web three we need to fix that and so really kind of focusing on detecting and surfacing vulnerabilities to end the end user to developer making this information more kind of you know organized which we have the blockchain technology for to do is really what kind of pushing the next wave of security and in turn actually attracting more users who will feel more safe and you know reducing number of

85. 40:37

    hacks reducing number of stolen funds so that's pretty much it this is my pitch and yeah hopefully it wasn't that boring all right it was not boring at all actually okay i hope everyone is okay no brain melting and so on so um so now uh so just hang on like we're right on time uh after the panel there will be champagne and food for everybody i guess and uh and uh before that so i wanted to introduce like the the key uh developer builders

86. 41:20

    on near so i'm gonna ask to to come on stage like a dj from refinance okay cool you can have jasper from flux anton from aurora engine from artera uh okay i think there's a mic here so yeah first uh i think it would be great if you could introduce yourself tell us a bit about yourself and um and your project of course i will start hello everyone i'm anton i'm working in aurora and uh i'm making sure that uh everyone who

87. 42:07

    is doing uh who is deploying honorary and integrating with aurora has as best experience as possible from the technical standpoint and that being us uh satisfying all the expectations of how ethereum would work and for more novice applications that actually care a lot that it's near under the hood of aurora that they also utilize all the functionality and the features in the in the best way possible so we've been

88. 42:37

    uh enabling like we've been on the main level we have launched the maintenance in may last year we had a very interesting journey so far and it wasn't very uh smooth at times but we uh we're at one billion tvl right now and like stuff stuff's working so yeah that's that's about yeah um i'm jasper i'm the cto and co-founder of flux protocol we are a decentralized oracle solution uh mainly uh focused on the near and aurora

89. 43:10

    ecosystem right now of that 1 billion tvl we are securing around 700 million right now i think um for the people that don't know what an oracle does we basically bridge real world data on chain which basically allows people to build defy applications or dynamic nfts or what else are we working on yeah mainly d5 hi guys uh super happy to be here my name is dj i'm the product manager of ref finance which is the first fully permissionless crypto exchange

90. 43:42

    built on the buffer so just one question who is who is using finance here okay not too bad my name is uh john worthen i'm the ceo and co-founder of artera labs and we are building uh the infrastructure for fan engagement for esports organizations and gaming content creators and we just launched about two weeks ago did a soft launch with a few of our early creators okay very cool so first question actually for you guys

91. 44:14

    let's talk about the developer experience and um so at the moment there are many theorem challengers or and you could as a builder on on in you could you could build on ethereum as well of course uh what made you choose build on on the on on near protocol or aurora well for you i guess it's a bit obvious but what maybe maybe for you like an additional question would be uh why did you identify the need for to create like an evm compatible chain uh on aurora

92. 44:49

    i think that uh as i mentioned just before whether it's uh all about enabling uh blockchain on all levels and of course like we all aim for people to build a new native because like it's cool stuff to do but for all existing applications and there's been a lot of time and money put into building stuff on ethereum and the theorem is though the og right so we just make sure that

93. 45:15

    everyone who does that and one just wants to continue to do that they will have the that's cool new experience with the familiar interface so it's like we're just here to help scale ethereum because we know that there's a problem yeah for us we actually i think we are the oldest project to build on near native uh that's life like we started before near had a testnet in 2019 to

94. 45:40

    build there back then was a different product but it was still oracle related we made the decision i come from layer 2 ethereum scalability research and i knew that the path to rollups was going to take very long and that the breaking of interoperability would be pretty detrimental you can see it on the sort of like adoption of optimism and arbitrary it's lagging behind pretty bad

95. 46:04

    with comparison to other layer ones and dynamic sharding and linear scaling that it enables was just too attractive for me personally and after reading sort of like all of the white papers from all of the later ones that were popping on back then like the night shade just make the most sense it was just an aggregate of like the most promised promising technologies into something that was actually managed like

96. 46:26

    launchable um instead of like relying on sort of sort of like ck magic which is always lagging behind right like uh yeah so that was the main reason for us initially making decision to build on here and then the devex even back then was already pretty great like it's getting way better but even back then the devex was actually pretty good like just building in rust is already like a huge step up from solidity so well

97. 46:50

    yeah i would say three things the first one is access to documentation and libraries i find it very easy on here to have access to those kind of information and yeah and it's pretty crystal clear the second one is maybe accessibility to to key people so access to key people within the different you know groups you you you have a question and elia is probably going to answer it or some you know key

98. 47:21

    developers so and the third one is uh community uh i think there is like a really strong gift first culture uh oh you you're gonna build that i'm gonna help you i'm gonna introduce you to key people uh you can find this information at this place so yeah i would say those three things yeah for for us the first reason and really the most important in the beginning before we even got to meet the

99. 47:47

    near team was we had to have something that was a very very easy onboarding experience and made it feel like a web 2 interface for us because who we deal with mainly are people that are non-crypto native in in the gaming and esports space which is which is a good and a bad thing so the education is really important there but the near experience for us has been really easy and being able to teach

100. 48:11

     people how to onboard has been very very simple and then i'm gonna have to second him here too because the community is really important you feel like you're actually wanted to be in this space and for us we were really new we're just getting started we started originally on ethereum and you couldn't get a hold of anybody if you needed help on any of the contracts or anything like that but in the near ecosystem what we've come to find is that you can get access to key

101. 48:34

     people but the community is also just very very very helpful and it's kind of an all ships rise situation and it makes you want to keep building and keep building things that not just help your team but other people who are building the space okay very interesting thank you so uh just let's let's move forward to uh to the user experience on here so um you have many ethereum challengers at

102. 48:58

     the moment that are focused on just replicating some key defy or applications uh and migrate them from ethereum towards their uh layer ones so how is near different how is near bringing actually or like the new ecosystem bringing really a specific value for for the user for the crypto users this one sounds like more specific to to me because of ethereum well like the i would say that the key idea is to again from user perspective the division we have it absolutely aligns with the new

103. 49:37

     vision so it's all about uh making like great not bridging the experience but kind of like adapting that and uh um we do like as i mentioned we do have some challenges so for instance like block time on ethereum is 14 seconds block time on year is one second so much less time for communication but we still like work with near protocol directly to basically to get to the point where we measured it and we are already like uh

104. 50:08

     surpassed the point where it was problematic and it's it's one of the things and when you think about it when you think about like the super fast uh transaction time super fast block time all that stuff it enables so much new things in from the perspective of ux and uh being able to like for even like for instance let's say gaming right like it makes a huge difference because it's like you and you are enabled to build things that

105. 50:40

     are much much faster much much more usable etc and so on so basically the the whole uh point here is to enable that infrastructure on aurora and it's not an easy uh thing because like ethereum had a lot of legacy concepts that we still need to fulfill but yeah we're on the bus and uh it's looking like stay tuned for more um announcements soon yeah for us um we sort of like moved away from like end

106. 51:10

     users interacting with our protocol directly our end users are other protocols however coming from a sort of like yeah and user-facing product space originally i think there's sort of like two things and you shouldn't like lose this pro of nearest is that it's super cheap right like ethereum and layer twos are just expensive to use you shouldn't forget that like i take that for granted now but it's like it's so cheap to use um and then also i think that something that's underrated and i've been talking to the wallet team a

107. 51:40

     little bit and there's some big changes coming but the near wallet is already a lot more user friendly for somebody that's never touched a browser extension wallet for example so if my dad would have to use crypto i would first point into near just because i don't want him to get phished on a fake metamask wallet right because that happens all the time so yeah that's that's i think my my take on it

108. 52:05

     i would say there is an advantage of not being the first in the market is actually seeing what has not been validated in other markets right so i'm taking an example which is prediction market for example we know that that's a difficult vertical to take off right so i think there's like a key advantage of not being first and the second one is uh in terms of user experience what we

109. 52:30

     are experiencing at the moment is a bridge across different applications right so the rainbow bridge directly embedded in some applications within aurora is actually a good example so if you need to transfer some assets from one application to another you don't need to have this bridge experience right it's like you're paying with your credit card you don't need to do multiple transactions so i

110. 52:55

     think we are experiencing this kind of uh merge at the moment which is very interesting the new wallet is another one you are using you know a specific user experience and all of a sudden you have like a white screen well what's happening you know you are on a different application and there is also i think a learning curve for the user but i think this is going to be actually hidden in the future so for us i think that the human readable

111. 53:25

     usernames is critical because people just are so scared to send something to a friend if it's 0x something something something and then hoping that you got the right you know chain of letters together or if you've copied it hoping you copied the right one because if you don't you're you're done for and that's scary and like i said we deal with a lot of people who are just not familiar with it so the human readable usernames is

112. 53:48

     extremely important because for the for the gamers i mean they can just use like their xbox live gamer tags or something and make it you know used to what they are but the last thing for for us as well is that the transaction speeds are just so quick so when they send something to a friend send a collect what they claim for free from one of their creators it's fast and it happens in near real time instead of having to go to an explorer and wonder

113. 54:11

     did this go through what does a failed transaction mean what does it mean to speed up a transaction and just that educational barrier is removed immediately when building on near okay very cool so obviously you there there is a kind of a migration of user from the ethereum legacy uh blockchain towards like other blockchains such as aurora or or or even near layer one um on the protocol level or at the application level what are the key metrics to that you take into account when

114. 54:44

     observing this this move this gradle move that's an actual that's an excellent question um for us it's all about enabling the apps like just like for me the main focus for the past nine months was uh to just ensure and you you get various applications you get very application that's built natively like for aurora first you got the application that are migrating etc so um i'm not yet at the point where i could tell you that the metric that everyone was like yes we are going to aurora

115. 55:18

     tomorrow right i mean and but at this point we are ready for that i would say it's money to be made i feel like on aurora for us the um the main metric is i think it's still like total value secured right like how many how much how much value can we secure on these blockchains like how much value can we add with our service um and then there's of course just user numbers i assume but um yeah i think that's it yeah

116. 55:49

     for crypto exchange it's pretty basic so you have a total value locked so how much cash do you have in your contract and then you have trading volume which is the demand right so and then you have capital efficiency which is the ratio volume to tbl so if you have you know too much capital but not enough demand then you might have a problem uh so it's very important to have like a healthy capital i would say efficiency indicator so

117. 56:21

     those are the well the two basics uh um for crypto exchange but we are also measuring um how many active users do we have and how do we do that is how many calls we have on our smart contracts on specific method and then you can have you know weekly daily monthly active users by doing that which is pretty interesting too so for phase one of our launch the metrics that we're looking for are the accounts created of course but also the time to so

118. 56:53

     right now our creators are putting up qr codes and it takes them to our site and then you can create your account and claim your first collectible and the creators that we have right now they're doing three different tiers of nfts and the first one is always free um and they set them in different quantities and we're checking from the time from the qr codes being put up there from account creation to first nft ever received and

119. 57:16

     we have just over 400 people right now that have created accounts on our platform and we just launched super super small sample size and over 90 of them had just created their first blockchain wallet um ever so that was it's pretty exciting that it happened and it was easy for them and uh a pretty quick transition okay very cool so you mentioned like the number of accounts like the the total

120. 57:38

     value locked and and so on so it's it's quite interesting so in order to to boost those materia to boost those metrics sorry um so let's talk about the the key trends uh so if we are here it's that we all like believe in the crypto paradigm so how do we attract to this ecosystem the next billion user like what are the missing pieces and how how could you contribute or how could the near ecosystem contribute from my point it's all about the uh mass

121. 58:10

     adoption is all about the simple jacks like literally so from this perspective we just need to enable it continue enable it and continue scaling it yeah i think it's uh definitely a ux problem but in combination with uh security i think that um the worst ux you can have is to lose all your money right so i think that um that's also why aurora is like gaining tvl so fast is because they uh allow you to fork contracts that have been holding

122. 58:43

     billions of tvl on ethereum for a long time and relaunch them on aurora which gives you some security guarantees right so i think i think it's a combination of the two like oh yeah summed it up pretty well actually no i i definitely agree on on the well on the user experience stuff i also think that we have we need to make the breach with the real world right so for example um i'm french and and we have you know the social contract which is quite interesting and important in our culture

123. 59:16

     but if you today if you work in the web 3 how are you protected or what's the social link you know um i think we need this bridge in in the next few years and and how to make this bridge because the reality is that dao's for example they are becoming better at you know organizing uh than real companies for example but we need the link we need the legal uh link i guess so i'm i'm very intrigued and i'm very excited about

124. 59:47

     this breach to come yeah those those bridges are are really really important and i think that what brings us to that next tier and what brings the next billion users in is crossing the web 2 to web3 bridge in general and making it feel similar because i think right now we get locked in an echo chamber of everything it sounds very technical and very hard to approach for normal people

125. 1:00:13

     and that's another reason why i like near so much is that they speak in simple terms so like ilia and all the really smart guys can go handle the stuff under the hood and people like us can go bring it to and get a mass adoption but i think that's what's what's been missing and what i think we can achieve um as a protocol and as people building on that protocol is making it feel like something people are already used to

126. 1:00:34

     okay super interesting yeah also one of the specificities of a web 3 is actually like the level of decentralization can you elaborate for each of your projects like at what extent you are decentralized or there is a path to decentralization or i think sure yeah so we have two oracle products uh one of them is called a first party oracle one of them is called the third party oracle third party oracle is super decentralized uh it's completely built on game theory

127. 1:01:06

     it's gonna get a little bit technical to explain why but let's just say that the time to finality is non-deterministic for the third party oracle so its use cases are less obvious and then the first party oracle is less decentralized basically we just provide high quality data providers with a little software and they push data on chain directly which makes it very reliable and fast but less decentralized yet it's very transparent so smart contract engineers

128. 1:01:29

     can aggregate that data into any way shape or form so you remove single point of failure and you still remain some sort of decentralization but it's not super decentralized and then we're working on the next version of our protocol which is supposed to marry these two ideas together into like our magnum opus more on that soon yeah i would say that we are really at refinance working on

129. 1:01:52

     decentralization in terms of decision process and power concentration making sure that when you when we take a like a very important decision for the protocol that the decision goes through a decentralized process right so not a single person can change everything which is the way i see decentralization right but the team is decentralized too i'm the only one in europe for example so yeah but really working at the dow level

130. 1:02:24

     and and how can we avoid like a single point of failure from one of the members uh for example is uh i think a top priority for us we are probably one of the most centralized people building right now on year quite frankly and we did that because when before we even started building we did a lot of interviewing and a lot of polling with people that we were going to be reaching out to and

131. 1:02:47

     approaching and the things that scared them were managing keys and learning how to use a wallet and how to sign you know transactions and stuff like that but those people weren't ever going away and we needed to be able to reach them so we're doing key management for for right now um and here in the next couple of months we're going to be opening that up so people can actually manage their own keys but we wanted to educate and

132. 1:03:12

     hand hold along the way and we felt that if we did a good job of doing that and created our first you know a thousand or two thousand true fans and um people who really cared about our project and cared about helping esports organizations and content creators monetize themselves and engage fans that then they would become the force that we need to go and decentralize even more and teach people that this nft stuff really isn't scary you just need to know

133. 1:03:36

     how to do it the right way um and yeah so that'll be the decentralization aspect of the keys and accounts will be coming in the next couple of months okay super cool but i i could continue all day but are there any questions in the audience yeah okay maybe yeah thanks uh nicholas from the dap can i challenge you guys a bit uh so all the meet up we are talking about uh yeah near near near technology

134. 1:04:11

     technology technology and we almost don't talk about the person there and i would like you to calculate the amount of kind of women on stage uh to a degree that is kind of patriarchical but talking too much about yourself and not about user their needs because all you're talking about is that basically user that doesn't need web free he needs experience he needs to solve his issues he needs to solve his problems so maybe instead of i don't know adding

135. 1:04:43

     a person there is person great what does he or she or they care about why a person behind navi or a fnatic or another clan um cares about the legacy of the brand of the response clubs they're cheering about what does it mean how webfree could empower and instead of talking too much about the metrics that basically you care but for four years in blockchain development people don't care sorry i'm kind of a bit emotional here because maybe i'm also from ukraine

136. 1:05:16

     do you can i go first that was a that was actually a really good question so for us what web3 does for the creator economy for and specifically for us esports organizations and content creators it is the most global it is besides soccer it is one of the things that reaches the most global audiences in every nook and cranny of the world which is really exciting to us but there's a problem in that space that

137. 1:05:42

     not everybody can feel the same connection level of you know if complexity gaming for example that's based in texas and one of their biggest fans is in the philippines they can come to the you know the us as easily to go and watch them compete and watch them out you know one of their favorite events so they go online and they watch streams or they watch video on demand or vaude like they call it

138. 1:06:04

     that person should be rewarded for that time that they spend and what our platform is able to do for the esports organs and the consecrators is actually truly reward that fan because they spend hours upon hours and money on merchandise and things that they can't really ever besides just representing the merchandise they can't really get anything from that for us we're providing access keys and tools to these

139. 1:06:29

     creators and organizations that they wouldn't normally have and that you know if they can't attend that event maybe they can go in and sell that ticket or if they don't have you know access to get to paxis for example that's coming up really soon to go do the meet and greet which they've always wanted to do they can sell that access too so they can monetize the time that they spend supporting you know their their favorite orgs and content creators so really it's

140. 1:06:52

     truly about the the fans it's just something that's been lacking um yeah so our end users are protocols so it's kind of hard to answer this question but i guess that sort of like in the end the goal of flux is to provide data to anything any protocol but supposedly like it's clear that the biggest uh like market right now is defy and i use d5 for everything myself for being like self-sovereign i think it's a super

141. 1:07:23

     super powerful feeling and it's very weird for me to have money in my bank account now so i'm assuming that a lot of us are having that same experience and that's something that i would like to have the entire world experience i mean yeah well yeah from from a defy standpoint i would say we empower users first because it's permissionless by design so if you want to use the service you don't need you don't need to ask any permission right

142. 1:07:53

     so basically we give you an option let's say a kind of freedom without requiring anything from you so that's the first thing the the second thing is and i think it's a very important piece right because when you think about it two centuries ago access to property was something unique you know you you you had to have the right to i mean property was something just for a few people but now anyone can access a piece of property

143. 1:08:24

     well it's a digital piece of property right but anyone can access it and it's we we take it for granted because we are you know evolving within the ecosystem but that's the truth the second thing is like from a dow perspective i'm working with 26 members we've never asked what's your education background uh you know what's your political status what's your color scheme uh so i think in a certain sense we are working in a like in a fairer

144. 1:08:59

     model uh in in web 3. so now it's how do we make the link with the real world is also an interesting question i'm not sure i i did understand your question 100 but uh that that would be my yeah my take away on that i wanted to talk about that as well but at the same time given it's already like you guys covered it very well i think like i would say that for me it's also very personal and i think about it like it's also in the first place it's all about enabling

145. 1:09:31

     everyone equally everywhere right and also in a secure way and in the way that no one can observate right because in the history of humanity it whatever you build someone will find a way to automate it maybe it will happen again who knows but we will we need to keep trying to build something that is always better and better and better and it's also like think thinking about like in a very simple but like a slightly technical way like in a web 2 space when uh like i was

146. 1:10:07

     advocating a lot for even sourcing even sourcing is basically when you build stuff based on the ledger and on compatibility of events and people are like nah it's too complicated and it's like but it enables you to kind of always be able to rebuild the data properly right then you look at the blockchain you already have that and it's already decentralized and that's what like kind of and you don't need to explain to people why you need that

147. 1:10:33

     because like it's like i i think it's it's pretty cool yeah i i also think that there's a need at the moment within the space which is who is documenting the web 3 culture you know there's the web one you read something the the web two you write something with three you own something so who is documenting this web3 culture because this is happening and this is exactly your question

148. 1:10:58

     basically what's you have access to property and we don't we don't need anything from you so uh well kyc obviously in the future but there is no there is no you know there is no discrimination and that's we don't talk about it but it's it's like a huge step uh in you know uh yeah in society from up from up into you thanks uh my name is taylor i'm the founder of near nordic i've been working with refinance a little bit here and there after the bounty over at gen c

149. 1:11:43

     my question is more in regards to the transition of web 2 to web 3 how many of you are currently working with commercial clients right now or potential commercial partners to be able to kind of graft on to what they already have and grab their community and say hey guys it's way easier over here i'm just curious of everybody up there we do to some extent we work with data providers people that provide data on our network and there's some like i cannot disclose any names but there's some pretty big large web to

150. 1:12:14

     mainstream people that we're talking to either to become validators on our network or to just be data providers on our network so yeah it's a it's like a very corporate slow frustrating process like i wouldn't yeah i'm happy that i'm not to to don't have too much responsibility there but yeah we are doing it like people on my team are working on that but yeah yeah yeah we are working with uh like a few investment funds but i also believe that near stands out because you

151. 1:12:45

     have private child which is the ability to run a blockchain in a private environment with you know like compliance everything uh in the green light and i believe that refinance could deploy its solution on the private environment like ave is doing at the moment for example so just having the ability for those corporate um clients to you know deal with each one of them without touching uh the retail for example and i think private chart will

152. 1:13:17

     unlock this ability for example for us right now i think the people and the corporate companies that we work with the most is on the advertising side of things because there's a lot of advertisement obviously in esports and in gaming space um like slapping a banner down in the bottom of a twitch stream something that we're working on and i can't go into too many details on that but something we're working on is doing like co-branded

153. 1:13:41

     collectibles in the nft space so being able to barcode it and do discounts for you know a certain you know soft drink or something like that a redeem a lot of stores but the reason that they want to do that is they want more engaged eye traffic not just passive eyes watching the bottom of like a stream or walking into a turn a big tournament on a banner so those are some pretty key ways that we're working with corporate groups right now

154. 1:14:06

     okay cool uh amazing thank you a lot so uh i'm gonna ask uh the whole team at near to come on stage if possible so it would be uh amazing to have everyone so that we do it all take care while we do that the two questions that were asked one on diversity yes we do have an issue right let's not shy away from it i think this was world-class panel so thank you guys so much because i think it was absolutely worthwhile

155. 1:14:32

     and um the other thing i would say is that as an ecosystem and that's also why i joined i think near is actually extremely open and we want to make it simple to have more people join so this is all of us we need to do that and the second question on actually what are we doing from the web 2 perspective to attract company to web3 we're doing a lot of that we actually announced recently a partnership with a sailing competition that is backed by larry

156. 1:14:55

     ellison it's a pretty big thing tomorrow we're actually also doing a talk and we're announcing another super exciting partnership which i won't tell a lot but the more you walk the more you basically can get tokens so come and join and see us at the panel but thank you so much i think it was absolutely world-class thank you is means you have near in your name because it's like i don't know what is it

157. 1:15:44

     10 companies organizations foundations guilds some other entities taos i shall also we need to get closer okay over here there you go

158. 1:17:18

     you