NEAR Town Hall - March 13, 2024

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

1. 0:01

   all right GM everybody thank you all so much for being here shout out to tomago for the tunes um let me first go ahead and share my screen get the deck up and we will get started all right everybody I'm Marcus with near foundation and I'm excited to welcome you all here to either your first town hall if you're new welcome uh or to another town hall if you've been here before um there's been so much happening in the near ecosystem these past several weeks or even months it's super exciting to see all of the new

2. 0:35

   developments um amazing to see what the uh community's been up to um there is definitely quite a bit happening uh I've curated quite a packed agenda for today's Town Hall uh but I am very confident that we'll get through all of it um so what we uh hear about today we'll get an update on near Foundation Focus for 2024 uh from Ilia himself um we'll dive into chain signatures and get an overview from Filipe on the pagota team we'll get an uh e Denver recap from Kiana and then Maria will dive into the

3. 1:07

   hackathon side uh we will talk a little bit about uh the ecosystem empowerment initiatives and focus items uh for transparency just so everybody's aware of uh what to expect uh and then we'll get a couple of project deep dives from some exciting projects um coming out of the most recent Horizon cohort uh hcm2 we'll hear from Plato and supercharged and then we will close it out with some

4. 1:30

   ecosystem highlights from the near week team to talk about uh all the exciting things that have been happening in the near ecosystem so I'll go ahead and hand it over to Ilia to get things started hello hello uh thanks Marcus and yeah let's dive in uh this is just some high level updates uh so kind of we keep everyone on the same page uh we'll be talking more about this obviously uh in subsequent conversations but in the interest of time so for

5. 2:02

   2024 um kind of in contrast to 2023 when we were really focused on user acquisition and really bringing kind of this Mass user um like projects with massive user bases really focused on uh kind of monthly active users uh and achieved really kind of uh great results was over 10 million monthly active users um pretty much consistently active on near now uh Switching gears to kind of interconnect web 3 and unlock new opportunities for those users right like now that those users are here many

6. 2:46

   of them don't have much to do beyond the initial kind of interaction with catching with sweat with hot how do we really interconnect this how do we bring these users to all of the near applications as well as applications across other web 3 uh kind of ecosystems and then make sure they have a way to you know make money um you know learn something figure out uh kind of how to engage with the economy of web 3 and that kind of you know in the steps we're making uh really

7. 3:19

   allows to kind of start growing the not just user base but also the econ economy of of web3 that uh is powering this so if we go to next slide and the outcome we want is a productive economy on near and other chains right not just kind of reification of the same Capital but actually creating new value creating uh kind of uh way for people to interact with real world be that you know uh paying for things e-commerce uh able to create new for

8. 3:53

   example data that is valued by other parties uh as a train their machine learning models like all of that path of new economy that uh blockchain can be powering now as near we also want to establish as a leader of chain obstruction movement right we started this chain obstruction movement uh and uh it's been a kind of a goal of ours to like how do we bring everybody together to uh to really work on growing web 3

9. 4:26

   together instead of kind of in this competitive environment that um I would say layer ones had before and near is you know driving this forward and kind of uh becoming you know a leading voice in this and so if you go to the next slide for near the chain abstraction is not a new thing when we started we really were always thinking how do we abstract the blockchain in such a way that as a developer and as a user you not need to think about specific

10. 4:59

    specific implementation details like the example I use you know you go to Netflix you need to choose which data center you're going to be watching the movie from and then you know that data center is busy so you need to like move your money uh like pay more for that movie that's kind of the web 3 state right now um where you like exposed to internals of the application and so how do we

11. 5:23

    really abstract that out provide a kind of very straightforward experience for everyone and let people to actually uh enjoy uh kind of the benefits now we started just focusing on near right how do we design near to do that how do we design all the servic around it but kind of this transition over last year was pretty clear that we should expand that to all chains right and so kind of chain signatures and other products including decentralized front ends we all pointed

12. 5:55

    at this direction how do we build tools that allow Developers to now have chain abstracted applications that don't really uh kind of feel like they're just on one chain they can be anywhere they can be accessed by anyone and uh really kind of pine together this space so that's kind of as near this you know we went through the transformation we focused on chain abstraction and we kind of bringing all of the chains and applications together uh next

13. 6:27

    slide now this is kind of the question like the answer to the question what we're doing now it's important to understand that like longterm all of this going to be continuously uh you know changing and so one of the things we've been talking last year a lot is about operating system I have published this um kind of longer term Vision which really outlines the idea that as it Technologies evolve right and AI is another piece of the technology that will be kind of changing we have you

14. 7:00

    know personal data private data kind of Novel way of experiencing things all of this together will form this new way of doing things which I call Self SAR operating system on a high level this is idea that as your kind of self sovereignty becomes stronger because you know so chain obstruction various application that you know people are building in across we3 ecosystem through

15. 7:28

    AI that's really uh starting to actually um allow to interact with with you know Computing and experiences in a different way right in a more direct way all of this is changing how we actually interact with Computing and kind of the I would say the power centers around right like instead of having a singular you know application that you need to go to to use uh actually the applications will be living on your side the because the data is now staying on your side the assets

16. 8:00

    belong to you and so the experiences now like everything from you know use scroll the feed to the application you're interacting with all of that will happen on your side as well and you have this user owned AI that will be kind of your you know your assistant your facilitator uh it may actually act on your behalf in some blockchain interactions as well so we are working on this kind of you know making each of the piece more specific um uh you know just to mention like on the data side right we have cero that's

17. 8:33

    working on private data we have um partnership with uh um herbit around it as well uh on user own data there's a lot of kind of work happening uh sorry on user own AI there's a lot of work happening everything from how do we build Edge models to how do we interact with Computing in new way how do we interact with blockchain through natural language uh for example what mbase is doing how do we build experiences from scratch uh

18. 9:01

    kind of in natural language what jutu is doing so kind of a lot of work happening there the trustless in interaction blockchain that's kind of where the chain abstraction sits and really creates this kind of interface to use all of the web three and experiences is really what things like dab dab you know and uh kind of neor you know social are providing where you aggregate a lot of

19. 9:24

    different applications in a way into one uh place where you go and kind of in with lots of uh different experiences now all of these things are at different stages they kind of all progressing uh but that's again rut it in into a singular Vision that really ties it all together uh is where we're going again on the on the longer term kind of three to five year Horizon uh right now chain abstraction really gives us a very clear you know guiding post it allows to launch new types of

20. 9:56

    applications it allows for applications who want to launch to not limited thems to any singular ecosystems user base it allows to join kind of the liquidity join the user base join the kind of functionality for compatibility of the apps and so that is kind of primary focus and then the rest is really been built in the ecosystem to kind of fulfill this longer term Vision so with that I'll I'll pass it to uh for a demo of uh chain signatures

21. 10:28

    yeah and you if you want to learn more on this kind of longer term Vision U mie linked the main Denver talk uh where I kind of was focused more on like why are we doing this and and how and kind of few pieces on how hey everyone how you doing uh my name is Philipe I'm a frontend developer on the emerging technology team and I'm here like to share with you a small demo deute on top of the chain signatures um uh so first let me give you a brief introduction uh why we're doing that

22. 10:59

    because like one of the main issues of web 3 that we were talking a lot it's that um when you're using web 3 you must create an if when to use like D app on ethereum you must create an account in ethereum if want to make a transaction on bitcoin you must create an account in Bitcoin so that makes like the user experience on web three not that good because then you have to manage best rases manage multiple accounts know

23. 11:21

    which CH you are using and U uh so what you're working now uh basically in the past months is abstracting this from the user uh using the chain signature so basically uh what we are able now is you create a single account on year and then you can manage assets on different chains you can manage assets on ethereum you can manage assets on bitcoin or other chains using a single near account

24. 11:44

    so I'm going to showare you as the small demo that I built and uh yeah let me share my screen here uh oops Yeah okay I think it's good um so okay basically uh we have a an here let me just erase my data here that I was testing and I can explain everything here so basically what we have here you can select the chain now this demo supports ethereum Bitcoin and B&B and uh how it works it's basically you're going to provide a path for the key that you want to use the that we were talking about is first you type the chain that

25. 12:19

    you want to use so you can put e eum and then you put the domain that you want to use the key belongs to so let's say this one that's one I was testing so it's going to have some balance here uh but let's just change this so we can have like an empty balance let's put a AA here so here we have the derived address that you can copy and I'm going to add some funds to this one uh on ethereum I'm using sepolia here let me

26. 12:44

    just add some uh let's say three here oops let's wait a bit for the transaction to finish let's just wait it's taking a little bit of time okay it's going to take a little bit so I'm just going to do the Dem the other one and later we can check this so yeah we have some the here and then we can make a transaction out of this so let me let me just copy my address here and we choose the amount that you want to transfer let's say you want to transfer

27. 13:36

    0.03 and we can send it yeah now we're calling a smart contract uh that's developed by us it's only running on testet now but by the end of the month we should be have this prodution and um yeah let's just wait for the confirmation here okay so then we have the transaction here so this is the key the address that we derived by this key here so if I copy this and you can check this here it's the same address and this is

28. 14:09

    my wallet address so my metamask I should have got like zero this my transfer out so maybe it's not here yet not finished but you can see it's un chain so let's do the same thing same thing for other chains let's take BMB here so what we do is change the chain here we get a new address here I'm going to add some funds to this one here so let me come to BMB testet I'm going to send let me pop up this 0.1 I hope BMB goes faster so we can

29. 14:41

    really test with a new address instead of one that I would have some funds there okay there you go so we have the cash here uh and then let me just pick another address here uh I'm going to the same one so that's my address going to be the same one because yeah same best phrase and I'm going to send 0.1 here so now I'm going to send a transaction on BMB it's processing here on the RPC let's wait for

30. 15:21

    confirmation okay there you go so then we have a transaction done on BMB and if you copy uh just to make sure so if you cop this address and come here they're the same address here and it transferred to my wallet so you see like ethereum and BNB both are working and those are very easy to implement because both are evm so it's easily to extend for other evm CHS we basically change the uh the

31. 15:45

    provider URL and also the chain ID and it's done so it's very easy to change from ethereum to to BNB and other evm CHS but Bitcoin was a bit trickier because it works different so let me just get this one and wallet for Bitcoin it's on my phone so let me just transfer some funds to this address here and uh yeah just a second so I'm going to send uh 0.003 yeah okay it's sending and now let's wait for the

32. 16:30

    confirmation and we should see the balance here updating okay there you go so now I have some Bitcoins here let me get my address of my wallet okay there you go so I can paste it here and we going to transfer z00 uh one and then we can send this okay there you go so the oh wait maybe wait a bit okay there you go so um yeah there's some missions yet I still have to optimize on this side as you can see I'm spending more than I should uh if I use segt we can save some money but

33. 17:33

    this is my wallet address and this is the change address that's basically the address that we sent from here so if I catch this it's the same as here so as you can see the Bitcoins were transferred to my wallet I cannot show you the balance because it's on my phone but that's it and uh yeah so our plan is to add more and more support to this chain evm is as I mentioned to you it's easy but other chains like BTC or other chains we have plans to to extend on

34. 17:57

    this side and let me just stop sharing my screen I don't know how to do that okay I'm just GNA keep talking later I yeah so yeah and also coming with this we're also adding support to um to the fastop signer so the apps that are already integrated the Fest up CER are going to have this out of the box it's just calling a new endpoint that we're creating and then you can send a yeah change on transaction another chance to and uh yeah this is live on testnet uh my testing was all done on

35. 18:27

    the testnet and uh we uh releasing this production on March 27 and if you want access to the demo repo you just like scan this care code and uh that's it you have access to it and the contract that for calling it's written on the slide and if you want to call it by yourselves and Implement something on top of it uh yeah just call it by yourselves and that's it hope you like it if you have any questions just let me know and yeah I hope I can answer

36. 18:53

    you awesome thank you so much for that demo flea that was absolutely amazing um crazy to see that super excited um so next up we have uh ethena recap from Kiana and then like I said Maria should be jumping in at the end to cover the hackathon side all right thank you Marcus next slide please so on behalf of the marketing and events team at the foundation we'd like to provide an update on our presence at East Denver which we called near in ether land next slide

37. 19:24

    please so hopefully you saw it on social or saw it in real life life um but we really leaned into an Alice and Wonderland theme where you know users have fallen down this web 3 rabbit hole and they've come up in this place where the promises of chain abstraction are delivered so of course instead of the traditional follow the White Rabbit this is one of our um key creative assets and

38. 19:47

    it's more of a follow the black dragon next slide please so the week kicked off with our first ever chain abstraction day in partnership with Frontier research and agoric the day started off with a builder's breakfast followed by really really strong programming and ended with a happy hour so Frontier research kind of displayed or you know launched this um cake framework which uh stands for

39. 20:11

    chain obstruction key elements so throughout the day the attendees were taken through if you look on the right hand side this um this image of the cake they were taken through the different layers throughout the day through the programming so um we had different speakers covering the settlement layer solver permission and application layer in terms of attendees we had over, 1300 registrations which is really strong and

40. 20:34

    even more strong we had over 470 people check in if you think of the competition levels at an event as popular and well attended as East Denver these numbers are really really strong um and not only did we have a high quantity of attendees we also had really really high quality um of people that were invited from of course our team as well as Frontier research an aor so just a quick shout

41. 20:58

    out to those groups and additionally wanted to quickly plug that we are continuing to do chain abstraction days they will become a series and our next chain abstraction day will be on the 26th in Soul as part as as part of the eth soul and bidle Asia week so if you will be in Soul make sure you stop by and apply to attend on our Luma page next slide please okay great so now jumping into

42. 21:22

    our presentence on the actual show days of eth Denver if you take a look at all the images on the right you can get a quick glimpse into what our booth looked like all the time completely packed um shout out to everyone who worked the booth because it was a labor of love to make sure that everyone got their questions answered got the swag that they wanted and um you know just interacted with us in various ways so we

43. 21:46

    had 17 speaking opportunities through Main and side events we had 13 near Affiliated side events $35,000 in total prizes across five near bounties and we had 482 leads generated um via our Shard dog Activation so shout out to Marcus and shout out to Jared from Shard dog for putting that together this is a huge increase from last year if you were at eth Denver last year there was no WiFi

44. 22:10

    and so it was really really hard um to Garner and generate leads so this is a really a standout kind of uh kpi for us um we had six tea parties so if you were lucky enough to attend one of the tea parties you are able to experience that experiential moment um with our in-house f Ian David Morrison thank you so much for all your efforts beforehand putting those videos together and at the Tea Party itself um everyone that I spoke to said it was the best experiential moment that they've seen at a booth and they've

45. 22:40

    been to a million crypto conferences um so that was really really um well regarded and well reviewed we also had two bespoke creatives launched so we had our black dragon video as well as our chain abstraction video both of those can be found on social media if you miss them um on the TV screen at the booth itself so thank you to everyone who participated and worked to Booth shift we really couldn't have done it without you um next

46. 23:06

    slide and just to finish off thank you so much for everyone who has submitted feedback here are some um just anecdotal pieces here on the slide um as I mentioned just overwhelmingly positive feedback about the presence our entire week mentioning our booth mentioning different talks and mentioning chain abstraction day so if you interacted with us at all at any point within the week and you have submitted feedback

47. 23:29

    please do it really really helps us to continue to inate iterate and improved um and overall this is probably one of the highest MPS scores we've had to date so thank you to everyone who helped make this possible and made and made our presence at Ethan we a really successful one so now over to Maria thank you oh thank you Kiana uh jumping into the slide without any hesitations so uh it's been an amazing heon it's my third I think

48. 23:58

    East Denver throughout my my whole time at New yor ecosystem and I think this was the the biggest and the uh developer yes so uh it consisted um of two side events kind of build wig uh that lasted for seven days and we're really happy with the number of submission and most importantly with the quality of submissions uh because the builders had seven days instead of traditionally having 48 hours and we also attended pragma a great conference that's going on actually tomorrow as well in London

49. 24:30

    we will be there as well um and we hosted a small and geeky Side Event if you've been there just give us a shout out um we provided the first chain obstruction Bounty ever it was a labor of love and and Shard do jaw SPO helped explain it for the developers because collectively we tried to translate everything that we knew about chain obstruction into more accessible language and if if you're also working at heckadon trying to explain the builders how how it works please scan the QR code below uh we have some

50. 25:05

    talking points to share uh we onboarded more than 100 Builders uh we can still interact with them in the telegram group and actually the official results of the heon haven't been announced just yet uh but on the next slide I will announce our winners it's kind of a teaser so it's not official yet um and I want to say thank you for everyone who supported us near Foundation team events you are

51. 25:30

    simply the best uh proximity thank you so much for preparing the Bounty along with us sh dog team Horizon team Jutsu and all the community members who helped us out interacting with developers and driving great projects and great submissions towards us so we received 17 great submissions which is uh twice higher than polygon received which is I a point I'm really proud of uh so yeah

52. 25:56

    we can probably go on to the next slide uh and I want to present our winners can we switch to the next slide please yeah so you can see all the submissions if you scan the QR code there is a def folio page with all the gallery I think there is 600 submissions in total uh so we had one uh really great submission for the chain obstruction Bounty called agents with Benefits uh two great submissions for the near native event

53. 26:22

    plat platform Bounty and one great submission for the Horizon Bounty the near smart contract playground uh so we will create a Twitter threat as as soon as the results will be officially announced but east Denver but if you're curious if you want to meet our Builders and our winners just scan the QR code and go ahead and see all the submissions and if you give them a like on T follow they will know about it and they will be

54. 26:47

    proud of their results even more so I think that's that's the heon recap and uh we are supporting e Global London this weekend if you're around drop by drop by the booth say hi to to the dev Hub folks and looking forward to see you at our next events thank you awesome thank you so much Kiana and Maria amazing overview and recap of eth Denver it was absolutely surreal um huge huge difference from a lot of the previous um events super exciting uh the

55. 27:19

    next section I just want to dive into this would be very pretty a pretty brief section just ecosystem empowerment efforts uh and focus items from near Foundation just to make sure that we're transparently communicating um just how we're kind of working more closely with the ecosystem um so I'll I'll hand it over to yira just to quickly go over the near Foundation marketing uh and near week efforts thank you Marcus and thank

56. 27:43

    you again Maran Keana that was really incredible work I think part of the success of all of our events are creating those 360 degree experiences bring in members of the ecosystem which brings us to this slide of bringing in near we to our marketing efforts it's definitely in practice that we want to start spreading as far as getting chain abstraction widespread pushing that narrative thoughtfully bringing in ecosystem projects so with near week we are going to continue amplifying near

57. 28:14

    week strengths really fostering more newsletters into the ecosystem they're so beloved they really highlight and amplify all of the projects really curating more Twitter spaces and also as I mentioned thought aul amplifying projects so whether those are in Twitter spaces whether those are in long form Twitter threads or in the newsletters or even blogs to be to come up uh we're really thrilled to be partnering with near week as we move forward into this

58. 28:43

    next year and what we'd like to see more of and this doesn't just apply to near week but also for the broader ecosystem is memes memes memes you know we want to see chain abstraction memes pop up so I not only Inspire uh n week to do more of them but also everyone who's tuning into this call so stay tuned for more information and updates but we are excited to continue to expand on your

59. 29:07

    week and amplify their strengths so thanks Marcus awesome thank you so much adir next up um we're going to be covering uh some of the community transition init initiatives um that have been unfolding and what you can expect moving forward um Kus I think that you um are going to take the lead on this one if you're here yeah I'm here can you hear me awesome perfect yes okay uh so perfect so some few words about inep transition uh tobc

60. 29:37

    so we are currently working on three uh different uh directions it's first of all if it's U moving the moderator moderator team from near Foundation to uh service Dow so it's new decentralized way of moderating the telegram discort rated and uh gol Forum of course uh we actually finished the moving and we have right now the team of the six people from the community who are like asking this hundreds hundreds of questions about how to deposit the near from sex and where I can buy hot and many many

61. 30:08

    other questions uh so Cong quos to uh de and shaho and Marcos potato everybody from the New Foundation who help this the second transition is transition of the governance framework we are working on a new decentralized uh forum and uh propos and repering uh via NDC uh so it will be a new boss pages to handle all this kind of things uh to make the process transparent and make the uh communication of the important topic for

62. 30:40

    our community on chain uh and the third thing is a need unified funding flow so what is this this is like the support for our awesome projects and startups to receive the support because right now it's kind of you know uh kind of unclear where you can receive support who to to write and everything so we are building like the blog schemers we building the website uh to make this process unified across all ecosystem so it's kind of you know huge thing yeah could we move to

63. 31:11

    next slide please yeah and few words about the NC IND is uh near digital Collective is a decentralized governance of the near protocol system we have 29 people three houses and 6,000 awesome members who are making decision on where the money should goes we have around like uh 4 million near at the moment and we are deciding the community deciding where this money should go at the moment we found in 36 projects it's like different funding it's not only the funding for

64. 31:44

    the Futures and everything we support we give marketing support we give support for the events and everything like that uh we bring new projects like plateau and pip flare or talentum to near EOS system auror ecosystem the so yeah if you're interesting just type near DC or n DC and join us thank you for that time awesome thank you very much for the overview kasses appreciate what you guys

65. 32:10

    are doing there and lastly on the transition side um you know Brandon if you want to come uh do a quick shout out of founder Friday's uh transitioning from Horizon to near at night that would be cool otherwise I'm happy to take it yeah yeah I can do that really quickly uh good morning everyone um just wanted to talk about near at we've been running for a little bit over a year now and it's just a basically a daily spaces

66. 32:34

    Monday through F Friday that we just talk about Community updates and near but mainly we give a chance for projects to talk about what they're building um we have an AMA we run through um various different topics that they want to talk about and we're pretty successful with our views recently we had a spaces with near Horizon they got to talk about what they were doing and we had about 500

67. 32:57

    View use within um a couple days that's where it stands right now and we've been talking with Bianca and a lot of the different projects inside the cohort are really interested in speaking on near at night and discussing what they're building and we're going to be moving forward um THS days for a project from the cohort each Thursday I'm taking over um founder spaces so yeah if there's any questions

68. 33:22

    or anything on that um I'll provide a link in the description we actually have Rob from Plato e to earn tomorrow so yeah that's gonna be very very good one so yeah that's it for me amazing awesome thank you Bren and speaking of Rob uh from ploh he'll be presenting at today's Town Hall so uh without further Ado let's get into project deep diives we have a couple uh from again near Horizon's uh latest accelerator uh

69. 33:48

    cohort hcn2 um to kick things off will dive in with supercharged previously Maps uh so nishal if you're on here um you can go ahead yep thanks Marcus um glad to be here my name is nishal I'm the founder of supercharge uh what we're trying to do is uh we want to build essentially a decentralized network of EV Chargers uh we are part of a cohort of companies uh which work in the Deep In Space um this is typically helium you guys might have heard of helium U which is basically trying to build an iot Network and Rec

70. 34:22

    trying to build the cell phone network as well the decentralized cell phone network as well as most some of the more popular on recently with the aoom there's networks like Akash and render which U do decentralized Compu as well where anyone can put up the gpus on the market and anyone who wants to run AI models can use those gpus to run their models can you go to the next slide Marcus so um mission is basically to uh

71. 34:46

    build a decentralized um network of evb charges there's a few in the other projects that are also working on this type of problem our goal is to eliminate the traditional Zin barriers entry typically for deepin you need to buy a device in the case of helium you need to buy a miner in the case of demo you got to buy a dongle which plugs into your vehicle um and typically there's a wait during the bull market sometimes you got

72. 35:09

    to wait for these devices for over um four to six months at times and at the same time we want to leverage the power of community building so what we is good at is quickly building out decentralized communities so we want to basically super that effort to calc a problem that a lot of EV owners like myself have is um the lack of reliable charging you go to the next slide Marcus all right so why now why are we doing this

73. 35:32

    now so this is from a recent PWC report um right now in North America there's about 3 million 3 million electric vehicles uh but uh recently there has been this bill a couple years back um to kind of give more subsidies for EVS as well as charging stations it's expected by 2040 we'll have almost 100 million EVS on the road likewise for charging stations as well there's potentially

74. 35:55

    around 4 million or so um 4 to six 6 million EV Chargers and then that's going to increase to over 100 million e charges by 2040 now if you look at the graphic the interesting thing there is the vast majority of chargers are going to be at home they're going to be in single family units or they're going to be in multif family residential units only a very very small fraction is what's essentially going to be public charging the equivalent of today's gas stations so these charges typically

75. 36:21

    either in single family homes um or in multif family homes are not accessible only the people that either live there use it for the vast majority of the time they they're lying there unused so we want to try to get those onto the network all right next slide so um here's the problem exact problem that we're trying to tackle and this a situation that's unique in California um when you generate Excess

76. 36:45

    power if you have solar or wind turbine or any type of green power uh and you're generating excess um you get very little for that power when you send it back to the grid you only get anywhere from 3 to 9 C per kilowatt hour but at the same time if you're charging an EV let's say you parked at a local part station here we have you know rapid transfer transit station you're probably paying uh anywhere from 5 to 20 times as much to charge your EV so your car could be ped

77. 37:09

    there for 8 to 10 hours you're paying at least um 20 times sometimes 10 to 20 times of what you know a home down the street is uh getting paid to send power back to the GD so that's a disparity that we're going to solve so in the next slide um you'll see that if we work our goal is to build the Airbnb model where you can actually Park your vehicle for a certain amount of time you have set up a system where you can actually pay the

78. 37:32

    host and then uh it's a win-win situation for both because you can charge for a lot cheaper the equivalent of being able to guess up your vehicle for potentially half the price and then the host themselves can actually um make some money off of that as well way more than what the grid would P them at the same time we're also working on a a second product this is a pretty early

79. 37:49

    stage where we can actually take data from the smart meter when you're sending power back to the grid uh we can actually tokenize that data and this program California that pay up to 2 cents $2 a kilowatt hour when the grid is under a lot of stress so if you have a EV or you have solar and you're sending Excess power to the grid there's often programs where the state will actually pay you money whenever there's a lot of U load on the grid to um to to

80. 38:14

    send power back into the grid uh we want to use blockchain technology to basically do this in real time so that you can actually uh tokenize that Express Energy and you can immediately get um you know the equivalent of usdc or stable coins in your wallet next slide um how this exactly works is uh we we we we setting up guest and host wallets so anyone on the platforms to rbnb you'll have your wallets uh we're going to have this the entire building chain abstraction so no one knows exactly what's happening behind the

81. 38:44

    scene uh we're going to set up escro wallets um I'm sorry an escro smart contract that will split the payments we'll have a smallart platform fee for facilitating the whole transaction uh we'll split that transaction uh we also setting up G equalent of gas station wallets where essentially we cover all the gas fees and the host and guest would never know that there actually blockchain technology in the back end the whole experience will be extracted

82. 39:07

    away um we'll also M certain data as nfts um so there's another project called as Theo which does something very similar any time you know a download comes online or new vehicle comes online they have a burn mechanism or they mint an nft where they write certain data onto the chain so the data that's important for us um initially we're going to write some of that data on the Chain as well all right next

83. 39:30

    slide so the market that we're targeting is um about half the market um this is the equivalent of the gas station market so whenever you Gess up the car about the half the market cares for convenience they want um you know they want to gas up their vehicle as soon as possible the other half is mainly concerned about things like price they want a lowest price gas station or loyalty someone only wants to gas up at Shell or Chevron they have a particular

84. 39:53

    brand they want to go after or the quality of the fuel that they want they really care about it so we looking at the 50% of the market the EV Market that either is willing to sacrifice time for low cost they're okay plugging in their vehicle for a longer time they don't want to get to charge as soon as possible or they care about loyalty this is begin with three where they either getting tokens uh or nfts and the like for for for doing activity on a platform

85. 40:18

    as well as you know some people really care about the fact that you know the energy that's getting in the vehicle is is green it's coming from Green sources and the like so that's our go-to Market uh we looking at approximately half the market that really doesn't care about convenience and other factors like price low quality that matter more uh our business model again is win-win so if you're a host on the platform um you essentially could get

86. 40:43

    anywhere up to 10x of what you would get paid from you know sending for to the Grid at the same time if you're a v owner who's fine you know waiting longer to charge your vehicle you can charge a vehicle for half the cost and the way uh we going to money obviously on the platform outside of the token component and all the incentives we'll get out is by having a platform fee for both guest and host is very similar to the Airbnb or verbo model or a t model where you're

87. 41:08

    putting an exra excess resource out on the platform for sharing and the SOP on both sides which essentially uh will be used to either do token Buybacks in the future or uh it'll be used to pay for um folks that chose to um State their tokens on the platform awesome thank you very much Nelle for coming up here um super uh insightful presentation really looking forward to it I'm actually thinking of

88. 41:34

    converting to e myself and you know we all know the issues of uh of the current um charge model uh so once again I really appreciate you taking your time to come on here um and next up we also have a a second project from the uh recent Horizon uh accelerator cohort hdn2 Plato So Rob um if you're still here please come up and uh present ploh hey there gmgm um can you hear me okay Marcus yeah we could hear you perfect all right awesome awesome let me get started so my name is Robert gal H

89. 42:06

    co-founder of Plato uh actually still go to the first slide um so basically you know what I love to describe Plato is we're building the new economy around food uh through eat to earn and you know our token is fat uh F so I always love to kind of play on this Deen energy you know we're in a going into a BK Market or maybe we're in a b Market already um so it's all about fixing the food

90. 42:31

    economy around getting fat um next slide please so just a little bit about myself um you know basically this is my third time building a mobile consumer startup um I actually uh was you know start started my career building uh blackberries uh for for investment bankingsales mobile related project why playdoh white around food uh I grew up around my uncle's restaurant when I was a kid and uh really this kind of uh started because of me trying to help my uncle

91. 43:06

    getting foot traffic in person uh after covid uh as you as you know most of restaurant were very much impacted by covid and uh my uncle actually you know had to use Uber Eats and door dash for the first time you know after 37 years and so um you know getting those people into restaurant inperson dining helps restaurant helps your local restaurant in their uh sort of higher margin business uh next slide so now that you know who I am a couple of insights I wanted to share

92. 43:36

    with you guys so you know as you know uh we current we used to live uh I like to say we used to live in the information in the age where information as your fingertips right um you know we we we if we have an information we need want to search we go to Google we we enter a search query and through a bunch of long reads we try to gain our own Insight right today we live in a world where we get instant insight and in the worlds of gpts right we don't have to read a bunch

93. 44:05

    of things trdl that's how we get our Insight now what made Google um you know beat out other sort of search engine was their ability to uh come up with this page rank uh in the beginning and basically link to very relevant information based on you know how others website are linking to whatever you're searching um and I think you know this day and age U the Google Supremacy is

94. 44:29

    actually being challenged by any company that can actually capture unique verified data sets so that the llms or the gpts that's got that's actually responsible for feeding us instant Insight um can actually give us the proper Insight uh next slide if you kind of think about that right able to do any general search you know um with that instant Insight um experience it's actually not too far out to say you know what Google Map hasn't really changed in the last 10 to 15

95. 45:02

    years and the way we search for food AKA restaurant or food near me um is super outdated we don't get instant Insight but instead we get bunch of information thrown at us we have to go through and very similar um it's just you know we we we get a bunch of information that we really uh don't really know what to do and a lot of time we get um paralysis from all the choices that we have next

96. 45:27

    slide so in order for us to actually create this um instant Insight experience around food what we actually identify is that there's a huge data Gap around restaurant data what does that mean well think about the last time you went to a restaurant most of the time you probably didn't leave a review and in fact 95% of us don't leave a review now the ones that that you know do leave a review they're either very happy or really angry most of the time they're very angry um on top of that though is

97. 46:00

    that many you know reviews whether it's on Yelp Google Maps Trip Advisor they're not verified by purchase so it's very easily faked uh next slide and so you know we believe that through e to earn we can actually you know activate this decentralized Army of data collectors right so e to earn is really disguising data to earn and and I think by collecting all this data we can actually build a a much better interface around searching for food and in in turn right the rewards that people are

98. 46:34

    getting rewarded are actually coming from the foot traffic that we're driving into restaurants and we've done you know in the last year or so we've actually you know worked with 30 plus different restaurant to try to test out what uh business model can actually uh make sense uh next slide so in terms of the data collection that we have done so far with our Playdoh eat sta um you know we've

99. 46:58

    actually have captured over $1.2 Million worth of receipt in IRL restaurants uh over you know 60 different countries we don't have a lot of users currently we only have about 20 uh close to 25,000 users um but you know uh in 2024 this is where uh we're going to ramp up that um that that that effort so next slide so in order to kind of e to earn and get fat uh it's pretty easy one you pick where to eat uh whether you know right from Plato eats to check in capture

100. 47:28

     receipt and then really see um see your wallet uh get F so next Slide the business model business model is pretty easy um we know that we're garnering foot traffic into existing uh establishments food establishment eateries restaurants of all sorts and so you know we believe that if if I'm a restaurant and we're spending marketing dollars to get foot traffic instead of spending with trip advisor or Google ads 100% % of what we spend as a restaurant

101. 47:58

     goes to the pocket of those platform but with Playdoh what we actually do is we actually um give 70% of what uh restaurants spend to the pockets of people that actually visiting the restaurant um and so we've tested out a couple of these um business model with the 30 restaurant partners that we currently have next slide we believe this is a huge huge Market it's actually been existing for a

102. 48:23

     long time if you kind of think about um food it yes everybody say it's a huge Market it's probably one of the best product Market fit of anything that we do right everybody's got to go out to eat spend good time but at the same time it has one of the worst margins uh it's a razor them margins and so we believe that if we can help local restaurants um do a much better job acquiring

103. 48:46

     repeatable customers it's going to save them margins that really going to help their bottom line so next slide we know that there are currently existing Solutions out there but like I said I won't beat the the I won't beat the point which is a lot of the data collection that's happening currently if at all um is actually not verified by purchases so again coming back to the data quality of data um you know we believe that having verified purchase

104. 49:15

     and then creating that review um is is really critical uh next slide lastly so um in 2024 we're trying we're basically expanding to 10 different cities over three seasons each season is about 100 days first city is actually going to be in hoian city starting in April and so so yeah we're we're super excited to try to get you know um you know all our users within a few close proximity so that we can create that Network effect

105. 49:46

     with restaurant and eaters uh next slide as a call to action um you know for near users we we love for you to kind of par participate in our season one scan and uh you know you'll get special uh sort of pre-sale of our season one pass and uh and if you have near in your wallet you will get some special pricing just for scanning today and Marcus thank you for your time and uh that is my presentation oh thank you for coming uh on here Rob that was amazing really looking forward to uh the utility play

106. 50:17

     here um and uh I just want to again thank Nish and Rob for coming on uh Horizon is actually hosting the first demo day uh for the full cohort right after this um so be sure to go to near Horizon's Twitter um and it'll be live streamed right on the Twitter thank you Laura for uh linking it in the zoom if you can please also link it in the YouTube I'm currently streaming right now that would be amazing uh and last but not least we will move on to um oh

107. 50:47

     let me uh get to near week slide so ecosystem updates um so Peter if you are on here um I'll hand it over to you I am can you hear me Marcus yep can hear you perfect sounds great so hello everyone as always very excited to be here I want to start out by saying thank you D for the nice words we're looking very much forward as well and we can start the show Marcus please so we we still have three deps on the top 10 of De radar near is still the

108. 51:18

     most used chain in crypto if you didn't know next slide please we have more than 11 million m use we have had more than 850 million cumulative transactions on chain we're seeing millions of daily transactions we're seeing hundreds of thousands of new wallets created daily and a um stat that I'm very excited about is the number of returning monthly active uses has increased tremendously over the past months so it seems like users are getting stick here numbers only going up

109. 51:52

     big up to all the product Builders and ecosystem supporters next slide please and to help all of this happen uh and take place every day we have the uh ferociously working protoc protocol team spearheaded by Bowen and as of yesterday near now has five shots live on Main net so I would say near successfully implementing rearing on the main net is a pretty big breakthrough in blockchain scaling so I want to give a huge

110. 52:21

     congrats to the co protocol team near is getting faster and faster and more robust and scalable with each day that passes and don't forget we've never seen a single outage since mainnet launch Ultra fast speed and scalability is near stateless validation incoming it can only go one way from here next slide please so I'm not sure if you guys saw it but nearest part of the grayscale dynamic income fund the grayscale team is at the Forefront of developments

111. 52:51

     taking place in the crypto ecosystem and continues to leverage their expertise to create Innovative investment opportunities and as of end of February 2024 the gdif consists of nine crypto assets including that of near lfg next slide please near Foundation has committed 100K USD to catic funding of public goods on near via potlock and um potlock is a catic funding platform run by the banion collective to support public

112. 53:23

     goods services and providers on near and project submissions are now open on the polock platform for the upcoming funding cycle so everyone who's been building or supporting projects in public I suggest you go visit potlock to see if you're eligible for any funding next slide please I'm not sure if you've noticed but um ref can be a little slow these days and it's no wonder why because

113. 53:49

     liquidity incentives and fra has landed on refen burrow Plus on top of that the hot wallet has enabled USD staking natively in the wallet um so I don't want to go too much into detail here but let's to say that the rewards are very juicy and giving these more than two million hot wallet users access to staking n usdc natively is just a GameChanger um they can do that gas free and uh when when they're depositing they're doing it into borrow offering them higher interest yield what's not to

114. 54:25

     like um way to go um defi on near next slide please if you haven't already checked out dep I highly encourage you to do so um more than 50,000 people have done so in in the last month uh and they're running these campaigns um to incentivized users on the platform on currently ongoing is the Odyssey Volume 2 campaign and Par participating you earned some of those sweet points that might make you eligible for a potential dep air drop at

115. 55:00

     some point for those of you who don't know dep is a NE native aggregator and Gateway for ethereum l2s making your defi user experience as smooth as possible I suggest you go check them out next slide please also recently the STA Foundation welcomed near protocol uh on their board so joining in on the momentum of the expanding Bitcoin L2 landscape near Foundation partnered with the STX Foundation as Aigner and within the context of this partnership Mia will lend its infrastructure to bitcoin l2s

116. 55:32

     provide an extra layer of decentralization and contribute to consensus for the for the growing uh BTC elto ecosystem extremely bullish next slide please uh I'm not I'm not sure if you've noticed but I'd say there a it's like a small AI storm cooking on near or maybe it's actually kind of big and there's an AI model Marketplace slowly but taking form um here's your chance to get an early Peak at the near AI Nexus it

117. 56:02

     features a near Yama 7B uh model whatever that is probably nothing and if you haven't already checked it out Shield GPT allows you to Shield meme tokens and then it will automatically execute uh on behalf of that I'm not sure if this is the end I think it's just the beginning of AI taking off on near next slide please so also during East Denver uh and tapping into the chain abstraction narrative um sweat economy they executed

118. 56:41

     their first ever transaction on the B&B chain powered by nonetheless near protocol of course so ol FCO the co-founder of sweat he successfully executed a transaction on the B&B chain using a near powered wallet shows casing a tip of what can be achieved via near protocol chain abstraction this is huge news for our ecosystem and as was just demonstrated earlier in the call we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what this technology is going to enable for web 3 um I think we're

119. 57:13

     looking very closely at the open web being unified so big up to Ole and the rest of the sweat team big up to everyone from Pagoda working on this next slide please so I wanted to include a slide with a with a few bullish tweets tweets sorry so with all that is brewing around the near ecosystem from AI to abstracted multichain deps telegram Bots to meme coins I'd say it comes as no surprise that some of the big names around crypto Twitter they keeping a close eye on the ecosystem the names of

120. 57:46

     T5 Moi Haka trades andm crypto coach coindesk among others are the latest to show their interest not Financial advice do your own res research next slide please and of course all this time we knew it attention is all you need so hosted by Nvidia the conference for the era of AI is the topic that reunites all eight authors of attention and Sol need the ground breaking paper that introduced the Transformer neural network architecture Transformers have since dominated all areas of AI and

121. 58:21

     revolutionize the industry and the technology is now used in chatut Gemini and so so forth among the authors our beloved co-founder IL pugin who will be participating in a live hand panel hosted by no one else but Jensen Wayne the founder and CEO of Nvidia alongside his fellow co-authors to discuss the evolution of AI since their paper and project into what the future might hold for this revolutionary technology don't forget to tune in the live stream of this panel um exactly a

122. 58:52

     week from now Wednesday March 20th 7 to 7:50 p.m. C and the last slide please so 20124 is not only the Year of the Dragon it's also the year of hiding the complexity of multi-chain infrastructure to deliver the web three experiences users as driving for the multichain future is becoming the chain abstraction future on near protocol and so it seems that near protocol is destined to be the enabler of the open web by leveraging powerful technology and unifying a fragmented world of

123. 59:24

     chains into one a user experience now more than ever dear friends is the time to show the world what the near ecosystem is made of 1 billion users here we come I want to give a huge shout out to everyone keep up the good work make sure to help each other out and play it safe remember that none of what I just presented and said should be cons as Financial advice as always do your own research and follow near week if you want to stay up to date on everything

124. 59:49

     that moves near protocol bless you all thank you very much awesome thank you very much Peter um like I said at the beginning a lot of exciting things happening uh recently in the near ecosystem things are really picking up uh to Echo Peter really appreciate what everybody in the ecosystem has been doing um it's been absolutely amazing and I really appreciate everybody taking their time

125. 1:00:12

     to tune in today um until the next town hall everybody have a wonderful rest of your day and uh