Build to Win: Mastering NEAR for ETH [REDACTED] Hackathon

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1. 0:00

   this Workshop is about building with near to win and when I mean win I mean uh winning in general but more specifically for a hackathon and um this presentation is meant to be about how you can build with n to win a hackathon and eth Bangkok I suppose so in uh in today's presentation we'll be talking about our presence at eth Bangkok a few tips on what it takes to win a hackathon from like a a judge's

2. 0:39

   perspective and a general overview of what you can build with near inside of a hackathon So eth Bangkok is happening at next weekend and uh we have 10K in prizes um split over two bounties the first one is user owned AI is near so how can you bring near and AI together that's what we're looking for in this bounty um so basically any integration with near and AI coming together then that's eligible for this bounty and then we also have

3. 1:19

   controlling ethereum accounts and any evm through n you can using chain signatures you can do it for basically any chain but it's it's it's e Bangkok so we're sticking with ethereum and that's for 4K so what are Judges looking for in a hackathon this is a list I came up with the thing I care about most in a hackathon is the idea to be honest like I want to see you building something

4. 1:51

   interesting that's unique and it's not just another another carbon copy of some project I've seen a thousand times I want to be excited I want to laugh I want to cry at your submission all at the same time and it should be somewhat well put together when you're giving a demo and I I go to try and use it then it should have some functionality it should work as expected but I mean it's a weekend hackathon it doesn't have to be perfect as you know um so yeah try

5. 2:25

   and have some functionality in there we don't expect you to have a product that is ready to raise and there should be promise for the what you're building in the future like is there any business model behind it can this be like eligible for an actual product in the future is this something you're going to continue that's that's what I'm looking for and I don't just care about the project I'm also caring about the team like I really care about there being enthusiastic team

6. 2:57

   that are excited about the tech excited about what they're building and hopefully can carry that forward again and I like it when when projects say when projects do what they say it does um a lot of the time in hackathons you have a lot of hardcoded values we always find them we never miss them so uh yeah tell us what it does and hopefully we can we can actually actually use it and it works um and I like to see that along similar lines as

7. 3:36

   the previous points that the submission can be continued and can add value to the ecosystem in in some sort of way whether that's like a a product itself or some tooling that you can contribute or like a reference implementation that we can add to the docs be good if it's useful somewh um tips have a think about what you want to build before and maybe form a team before the hackathon I mean you can't code start coding and hacking before the

8. 4:10

   hackathon starts but we're not the thought police we're not going to stop you thinking about what you want to build and it's probably beneficial you can just hit the ground running and build straight away so that's my top tip don't spend too much time on stuck on one thing a lot of hackers will just I mean they'll sit there stuck in a problem but try and find a try and find a different solution try and find a work around there was a good example at um

9. 4:42

   where was it eth Singapore where um one of the teams they wanted to Fork like the Explorer but it didn't work out very well because they needed like environment varibles so instead they found a work around where they added a Chrome extension to like mock that something was happening on the Explorer which was a really quite nice workaround um and come ask for support I mean that's what that's what we're there for that's that's what I'm getting paid

10. 5:15

    to do um and we want you to build the best project possible and we want to help you to do that so don't be hesitant to come and ask us any questions during a hackathon and a lot of people they back all night and they're tired by the end of the hackathon so they just go to sleep as soon as submission time but we want you to pitch to us I'm going to remember your project more if you're pitching so come pitch as you can see I written this three times because it's

11. 5:48

    very important I think you need to know this point the most because I don't think you submitted on time last time yeah yeah well look at this point submit on time submit on time submit on time submit on time very important there's no rewards for submitting late um in most cases so now I wanted to give a bit of General overview of like what you can build on there because we've heard a lot

12. 6:23

    about AI here but it's really useful to know like the context of near as a whole and the stack so you can better like Implement Ai and better Implement chain signatures so starting off one of the most interesting things and simplistic things about n is its account model um we have your classic 64 characters of like hexadecimal that represent an account of course but we also have your name named accounts

13. 6:56

    which I don't I don't really know why any other blockchains aren't particularly implementing this I mean you have like ens but this is baked into the protocol and once you claim your account you've claimed it forever um so there's like the top level account which is near you have py vortex. n which is my account and then you can also have like sub accounts of that account and these are these accounts aren't really actually related they just have like the

14. 7:26

    same name space and the benefits of this it's a bit easier to remember and it's very useful to organize accounts I can have all my different parts of my application uh as like sub accounts of my my main account and it makes it very easy to deploy like new accounts from contracts and you can do like a factory contract where you deploy more contracts within a contract um and yeah as you might know accounts

15. 8:00

    are also smart contracts and smart contracts are accounts which adds like a lot of functionality to accounts you can do more with an account and control it through code access keys this is pretty cool we have full access key which is like your standard key pair right it gives you full access over an account um and you can actually swap these keys in and out and have like a thousand of them uh so if you accidentally expose your private

16. 8:32

    key somewhere you can actually just swap that and rotate it without having to transfer all your assets to a new account uh which is kind of kind of neat and it allows you to swap accounts through code um in like a non-custodial way we also have limited access Keys which are a bit more special which allow you to call like nonp payable functions which are methods that don't require a deposit and you're supposed to give these keys out which might seem a bit strange but

17. 9:07

    we'll see why that is uh this is this is the classic meme of like the future of web 3 gaming where you have to sign each individual bullet you're shooting but the idea is with these limited access Keys you have like a a shoot method and you give this access key to the to the game and they're able to sign the these these shoot methods on on your behalf and yeah limited access keys are

18. 9:37

    limited they can only call methods that are non-p payable but I mean a contract can do basically everything everything an account can do so if you have a method that sends near then you can have a limited uh access key for that and it can do more than just uh call a me method really so here is the QR code you want to scan we have this is baked in there this is hidden it's for the special

19. 10:10

    Quest and basically we have like 5K in bounties I'm not revealing much about this CU it's a I think it should be called The Secret Quest instead of the special quest You'll have to figure out what's coming up but yeah you've got 5 seconds to scan it 5 4 3 2 1 zero uh yeah that was a bit of a Segway but meta transactions if you don't know what these are they allow you to basically pay for your users's gas and pay for your users's deposit if you want so you don't have to hold near to

20. 10:51

    interact with an application you can just use meta transactions and pay for the gas of your user and also uh good use case of this is like if you want to just interact with an application via usdc then you can just use usdc right you don't have to use the native token right it's all in the aims of improving the the user experience and here's some more technical details of of how it works if you want to look into that chain signatures this is one of my

21. 11:25

    favorite things about new it basically allows you to sign a transaction for any when I say any it's got a bit of an asterisk on that most chains any uh like evm and Bitcoin Bitcoin is like the coolest use case but uh for this haathon it's it's evm mostly because it's eth Bangkok right so basically it gives it gives like a contract the ability to sign a transaction which is a bit strange because you need a private key to sign a transaction right so there's

22. 12:03

    like a an offchain service of MPC nodes that that come together and they each sort of like hold a hold a share of a private key and they jointly sign your your transaction without one party ever holding the full private key um and yeah you can't just sign transactions for near you can sign it for ethereum all these rollups Bitcoin whatever uh um and yeah how does this work so basically you're asking this contract to sign a transaction for you by just calling the the sign method and this

23. 12:44

    then use like yield and resume functionality to wait for the offchain MPC service to return that signature to the contract uh and once it's returned to the contract then it returns back to you or like the client and then you send that fully signed transaction to the the network and there's some more specific steps here so first off you need to like derive the address you're actually using and you do that by just inputting like a an arbitary string path so it can be

24. 13:17

    like an empty string or it can be bunch of mumbo jumbo uh and that just allows you to derive a new address and have a spec specific account you're controlling and it's Unique to your account or unique to your contract the predecessor that is calling the NPC contract then after you've derived the address you want to know what you want to do from that address so you need to create a transaction like what am I going to do am I going to send eth am I going to call a method am I going to

25. 13:51

    deploy a contract that's why you need need to figure out and create that transaction then you get a signature from that trans action by calling the NPC Network as I said um and once you got that signature returned to you you need to add the signature to the transaction to get a fully signed transaction and relay that to the network um so there's a video here we can we can skip this actually it just basically shows you how to uh like do this in reality uh actually we'll we'll we'll

26. 14:30

    take a look so here's like a the near multi-chain example and it just showing logging into this application we have our metamask on the right for ethereum and this is this is the path um which the path then gives you an address on the chain and we're just depositing some eth sepolia into this uh derived address on ethereum and you see like if you're changing the path then the address is obviously going to change so you can

27. 15:02

    have like a a near infinite amount of uh derived addresses and you can see we just signed the transaction there and then once we got that signature we relay it to the network and got a um what is that called like a transaction has I suppose and that's it that's it it's pretty simple steps and you can just Fork that example to get started with chain signatures and chain abstraction you've probably

28. 15:33

    you probably heard of this before but this is what happens when you put the account model The Meta transactions and the chain signatures all together it gives you a really abstracted experience where you don't really know or you don't really care about the specifics of each chain uh you just interact with blockchain without the complexities of blockchain and in some cases it might be

29. 15:57

    even so abstracted that you don't even know it's uh it's web 3 and you can provide like a a web 2 experience with the functionalities of web three and things to think about when you're thinking about chain abstraction is that uh contracts can call the MPC Network because contracts are accounts um and this allows you to add like a smart contract layer on top of other chains and this is specific specifically

30. 16:29

    useful in the case where the target chain does not have Smart contracts itself so you can basically become like a an enhanced version of Bitcoin where you have Bitcoin defi controlled on there which is which is really quite cool but even if you're not using Bitcoin you still get added functionality um where you can basically aggregate all these chains together and also like I mean if you like ethereum

31. 17:01

    still use ethereum but why not add near on top of it because you inherit its account model it's fast finality and it's cheap gas price um so yeah what what specifically can you do with this um within contracts it allows you to sort of automically swap assets from different chains um with near finality and gas price as I said um and this is done through not just like swapping the assets you're actually swapping the accounts that hold

32. 17:34

    the assets um some other use case like create a link drop of any asset on any chain you want to drop it on social login this one's really interesting to me uh and like account recovery cheap multisig that are sense to deploy because basically instead of having deploying like a safe or whatever that that cost you x amount of dollars you can just have a a near contract that derives a load of accounts um and they

33. 18:07

    each have like the functionality of a multi basically uh and it's like a it's like a really scalable way to do things I mean if if you find that cool come speak to me about it for sure I like I said def5 on bitcoin and another one not explored too much is sort of of integration services this is where you well you integrate the service on near like an oracle or a like a approver um and then once you get that proof or that verifiable data source then you can broadcast it to any chain

34. 18:47

    without having to specifically integrate on that chain so you you don't have to do a load of BD you don't have to hire any BD you just I mean you just you you just send it there um without having to integrate anywhere so you've probably heard enough about AI at this conference but we're going to talk about it a bit more um there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with AI and and N has obviously become very AI

35. 19:18

    focused um but I want to talk about like what can you do with AI in a hackathon within the scope of a hackathon and how to to think about AI within a hackathon setting so in my opinion near becomes the best place to build an agent because you're not just really building it on there you are building it everywhere since the agents can now transact on across any chain um so why not build it

36. 19:50

    on near why why Silo it to one application you want to serve your users everywhere and have access to liquidity everywhere um and good thing about account model on here it gives like agents a better existence they're they're more unique with the account model they can they can do more really um and try and think about when you're using AI if you're using it at the contract level how can contracts use AI

37. 20:23

    to make decisions um I'll get into an example later but smart contracts can now yield and resume so they can await a response from like an llm an offchain service and then resume its computation based upon that response uh so you can control the contract via an llm basically and blockchain I mean we've been here for a few years but it's still sort of terrible user experience and

38. 20:55

    developer experience so how can we use AI to make our lives easier and make interacting with blockchain easier this is a this is really key and there's some there's some easy wins in this sector so why can you build one of my favorite um I think the creators are here but Shi gbt it's basically a a treasury of a load of meme coins and these meme coins Auto rebalance themselves and meme coins will be bought and sold based upon

39. 21:29

    an AI model and how well you as an individual shill a specific meme coin to that AI um so yeah it's a it's an interesting one like I said making lives easier I as a developer indexes are boring to build right I want there to be some sort of agent that I can say just build me an index uh the records for example the the account ID and the bid amount for each bid Bas placed on like an auction if I could just say in natural language an indexer I want then this would make so

40. 22:10

    many devs lives easier and there's a lot of lot of things you can do in this sector um yeah and I suppose along similar lines using AI to interact with blockchain via natural language uh and building an agent to interact with specific contracts or or infra and uh if you come to the next shop by uh Workshop by Louise then uh he'll tell you more about agents so I really recommend that one um yeah and a interesting use case I

41. 22:47

    saw was like agents having their own existence within like a blockchain games economy so whilst even if there's no users online these a models are going about and like buying and selling assets within the game so you know going a standard game you have these like NPCs roaming about but they're not they don't really exist but you can give them really cool existence with with blockchain and they can transact at their own free will yeah that's that's what I have for

42. 23:25

    today um pretty chill but there's my telegram if if you want to it's my profile you like that yeah uh so message me message me if you want to if you want to hack with us even if you don't i' still be interested to see what you come up with and uh come say hi at eth Bangkok