NEAR Town Hall February 2022 - NEAR Global Expansion, Pagoda, Education and MetaBUILD 2 Hackathon

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

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   hello we originally had this tunnel scheduled last friday for for those of you who attended you will know that we decided then to keep it very brief and to make a short statement on the events in ukraine given the terrible situation as described last friday our immediate focus has been on our community and on our people we have taken and continued to take a number of measures to help ensure the safety of our community while the situation has sadly only

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   worsened we deeply realize how important the work that we're doing is and how important it is to keep our community informed with the latest from us before getting into what we've been up to we wanted to share with you an initiative that we've actually been starting to if you want to actually help the situation of what's happening in ukraine um this is called unchained fund it has been started by great ukrainian crypto

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   entrepreneurs among switch ilia unchained is currently raising funds in year to distribute and many other cryptocurrencies actually to distribute to humanitarian purposes within ukraine the near daos alone that is part of this multi-sig has raised around 1 million of dollar in a couple of days if you want to contribute you're very welcome and thank you in advance and as a reminder um if you need us please feel

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   free to reach out at support near that foundation we're here for you now on to our agenda today's agenda is quite packed so i'll start by making a brief intro and recap of what near is about and where we're at julie will share with us recent announcements which we did at 8th denver we'll then have bowen sharing with us update on the near protocol and then we'll move into topics that are very close to our heart which are education and awareness chris and yadira will share an overview of our recent

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   awareness activities across the globe but also what we've been up to at east denver and what events are coming up next sheriff will share with us what's been happening in the world of education last but not least we'll go into support and how we actually are working together to help support the community for with that in mind josh will provide an overview of our funding platform and what we're doing for the ecosystem and i'll share with you a couple of exciting infrastructure partnerships which we've

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   been working on last but not least we'll go into a short panel with two of our regional hub so i'll introduce what regional hubs are for near and how we're actually working through that we have claudio for lifetime with us and roon will cover the uk now getting on to our introduction at near as you know our long-term goal is to create an inclusive healthy self-sustainable fully decentralized

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   ecosystem with billion of users a world where a billion of participants can own their data decide how and on what they vote and make revenues in ways that filled their personal ambition and purpose as i mentioned in the introduction more than ever we feel that creating the open web world for trust and transparency is very much needed as a foundation we do have three main roles number one is actually helping

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   raise awareness of near what is the near protocol how can we actually get more people participating and joining what the possibilities of an open web are giving are giving and are providing with that pillar we actually focus a lot of our activities on awareness and education the second pillar of what we do is actually supporting projects and builders who come and who want to do something on there that can come in the matter of grants of funding but also in

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   sharing our knowledge resources and helping cross-pollinate within the community and last but not least we do have a role to play and helping shape governance and a clear and safe path to decentralization for all the way we think about things which is usually easier to put on a slide than actually to do in real life but is a simple flywheel we are very focused on attracting and

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    helping have talent via programs of education which you'll hear more about later today from sheriff and one of our goal is actually how can we have half a million qualified students who come and learn about the open web but also the possibilities of near the second part of that flywheel is assuming that you can attract enough talent you can help create great projects and so for that we are working towards having 100 qualified projects

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    projects that can help help attract users but also maybe raise external venture capital funding for most and that talent then leading into projects enables us to actually get to active users so having active users to create a world where we can have billions of users on here is ultimately where we're going for and at the center of all that as i mentioned earlier we do have governance so again simpler to put on a slide but we find it a helpful framework for for all of us and across the community to help things through how

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    we are working two things we've put here a couple of data to share the progress that have been made fair enough to say that actually we've made great progress on the number of students that are coming to our program the number of grants and grant recipients that are being distributed the number of dows that are being created equally and every day more creative ways to leverage that and the number of projects that are being built on on

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    there now that being said in terms of active users it's fair to say as you can see on the right hand side that we do not have yet applications that are creative sticky weekly active users and again it is something that we're extremely focused on as an ecosystem developer growth uh is something that was mentioned recently in electric capital report which we find extremely interesting now fair to say that

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    actually when you look at that slide the number of developers while growing extremely rapidly in particular for the new ecosystem is still very small now what gives us hope is the fact that building on near is something that is actually made to be simple the usability is at the core of everything we do and you might hear more of that actually when julie will walk us through what's happening with pagoda but enabling builders who might be

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    javascript builders we believe will actually help multiply that number by many many more and now with that note i'm gonna hand over to julie to talk about pagoda hi everyone i'm julie head of operations at pagoda and i'm super stoked to share what's in store from pagoda if we go to the next slide please uh so ilya announced this actually at east denver uh so we're building the next generation of three startups how did we get here and what does that

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    mean i'll get into that right now can we go to the next slide so uh if you recall the goal from day one uh for for the protocol itself was to build a blockchain that was easy to build on and easy to use uh and something that could actually support internet scale global usage and so for the first years of near inc uh which is now pagoda um you could consider us kind of og near these were the the devs that that built and shipped mainnet back in 2020 and we needed to figure out okay we

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    just solved this problem what's another problem that we can solve to keep the new ecosystem going and so uh we put our heads together and realized well we accomplished part of our mission of building the the underlying infrastructure but now we realized we really needed to double down on really enabling a more seamless experience for developers and entrepreneurs to launch their their own web 3 businesses and so

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    that's where pagoda came from the first web3 startup platform uh can we go to the next slide so um so right now our ecosystem consists of many open source projects that can be integrated as open services it's a familiar and cohesive development experience on top of a decentralized tool set in the last year and a half we've built an amazing global community of projects that will power the open web next slide please and so to be clear uh pagoda

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    isn't building everything from scratch while we are building a lot we're also aggregating existing applications and platforms across the new ecosystem into a single simple experience web3 doesn't have a web 2 stack of tools to help startups get going so for example in web 2 tools like amazon hubspot and intercom can be pieced together to help startups launch monitor growth managed

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    ux and a bunch of other things uh for uh for those applications however every service we use now in web 2 will need to be rebuilt to integrate with web with web3 uh to support wallets quick crypto cryptographic primitives in blockchain data among many other things pagoda is a place that as a developer or entrepreneur you can come and you can launch your startup quickly it gives you all the tools you need to launch and operate your startup what does that mean though it means you

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    have the blockchain data that's accessible you have analytics for your application you have upgradability for your contracts you can launch a dow you can start managing your contracts in ideally your community over time it also means you can start launching tokens using lockups all of the nuances that operation teams like mine spend time figuring out and implementing all of this is in one place within pagoda

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    pagoda also continues to contribute to the open source nature of the new ecosystem because there's still a lot of development that needs to be done on sdks and apis next slide please so uh the stack of pagoda contains everything developers and entrepreneurs need not only to build usable secure products on web3 but also to operate measure manage and market them at the bottom of the stack is the blockchain protocol which is the bread and butter of the ecosystem but beyond that there are a ton of necessary

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    services and tools that pagoda brings together for example developers are using rpcs there are data needs that the data needs to be fetched from the blockchain to actually understand what's going on there needs to be streams of data to react on the front end we need analytics there should even be an alert system to pause contracts or something else if if something anomalous happens

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    and then we can figure out with a dao what to do next and this could improve security with wallet services you as an application have a responsibility to protect your users so providing them tools such as two-factor authentication authentication and other ways to prevent loss of funds are inherent to uh to the tool set that we provide and then the question is let's say you're at a hackathon and you created

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    this really cool thing and you ask yourself well now what maybe this is a business and you need to launch it and and pagoda will help ensure that you have the governance structures in place that can help you upgrade your contracts if you need help fundraising there there are resources within pagoda that can help you fundraise um and all of this again is central into the developer console within pagoda

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    marketing as a tool is also available there are a ton of different use cases specifically with nfts that are interesting um in terms of really bringing to scale and bringing to market your product and it helps you really double down on the people who are genuinely interested in your products and giving them a bigger voice when they're sharing user feedback all of this is packed is packaged into pagoda in the developer console for the

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    first time ever next slide please so check out pagoda.com and drop your email address if you want to stay connected with updates you can also follow us at pagoda platform on twitter otherwise thanks so much for your time and i'll pass it off to bowen for an update on the protocol hey everyone i'm bolin from pagoda and today i'd like to provide an update on the protocol with the increase of usage on mainland in the past several uh several months we

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    realized that it is extremely important for us to optimize for stability and performance to that end we are working on two major initiatives one is to make aurora the most widely used contract on here to run faster we are currently collaborating with our team on that and the work down this coder has already yielded a2x performance improvements another thing is that we would like to

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    make storage run faster as well storage reason rights actually consists of a majority part of transactions on near in general and it's very important that we make storage access faster overall in parallel to the efforts on optimization for stability and performance we also want to increase community involvement in the protocol development processing channel to that end we're currently working on two things one is that we will schedule regular public meetings for community participation and discussion of protocol

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    i would like to gather more feedbacks as well as ideas from communities on how we move forward with the protocol in addition we're working on defining a rigorous process for new feature development process so that we can make the protocol a more community owned and community driven process all of that is in the workings and we will post updates on twitter in the uh in the upcoming weeks so please follow us on twitter and stay tuned for the news

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    with that i'll pass it on to chris for marketing updates hey guys uh christian from the near foundation uh really here to give you guys an update on what we've been doing uh within the ecosystem from a marketing perspective if we jump to the next slide you guys have very likely seen us in the news and around the u.s but also around the globe where we've been doing a little bit of test and learn when it comes to marketing go to market but also how we can leverage things from the web

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    2 world to help advance the the conversation around web3 so if you saw us in miami you likely saw us in context of nfts with ease and dead mouse which was a project run by the mint based team the aim there really was to make nfts and music nfts accessible to the masses and be able to get people in and start collecting and start a conversation around you know how do you actually recognize music uh and music-based nfts

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    is something that should be accounted for when an artist is going platinum so think about artists as folks that are driving the conversation around change and adoption of new technology uh with partners like the mousetrap team and dead mouse from there we actually jumped to new york and san francisco in new york we really started to go and have a different conversation around carbon footprints and you know there's always a lot of conversation around

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    um layer ones and carbon usage and offsets and all those things uh which we are proud at the the near foundation in the near community uh to be a carbon neutral blockchain now we're actually offset with our partner uh south pole uh so while you see these buses and your first thoughts probably are these buses dirty they absolutely are and so what we're doing is making sure that when we even look at our footprint uh of our go to markets uh

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    that we're accounting for that uh as we go around the world and on the right there you see a little bit of mass reach so we've been close media partners with brave browser and brave software uh to really look at how we can leverage things like sponsored image takeovers around the globe to drive eyeballs and awareness and people into the new ecosystem to experience and learn uh learning being a really big key

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    and pillar of what we're going after to get people into the industry and and to start building so thinking about building in san francisco the focus really was on uh meta build which is the large hackathon that has just closed actually and we'll talk a little bit more about in a few minutes but we brought in cross chain partners so you see the bridge in the background there we're trying to build bridges uh which is something that you've heard uh from us and twitter and

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    in the conversation for quite a bit uh but we're really asking people to be brave step up uh be a builder put your best foot forward and don't let what chain that you've started on stop from where you're going to realize the the web3 future and the open web that's with that jump into the next slide so let's get down to the numbers so since the beginning of the year across reddit twitter coindesk brave

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    we've had over 340 million global impressions that has led to a little under four million engagements so that actually is clicks to to come into the space and into the site and to start learning about near and we've actually seen exponential growth on twitter as over 60 000 new followers on twitter uh from the activity that we've been driving now reddit we actually did for the beginning

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    of the year a little bit of conversation around this being the year of near we actually saw our reddit following double in the last month and a half and with that really starting to drive a conversation and start to actually hear from the community about what do people care about most what do they need from tooling to concerns about environmental impact so starting to give us more signals about what end users are actually looking for

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    and so thinking about what people are looking for they're actually looking for information so 87 000 views on youtube with almost 10 percent of that being our town hall so the fact that we're here talking about these things right now becomes really important because the town halls are the place where you can ask your questions where you can come in where you can start to participate and where you can start to demystify some of the the things that you might hear in the media

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    but most importantly these aren't just vanity numbers that we're going out to the world with and saying hey pat ourselves on the back for being seen we're actually seeing this translate to on-chain activity directly through marketing initiatives so over 162 000 wallet transactions uh from new york to miami to um denver even for free denver as well as a hung bao initiative around lunar new year

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    so with that you know we're seeing activity we're seeing numbers push forward we're seeing exposure and we're getting the near uh protocol out to the world uh so jumping to the next slide we will talk a little bit about meta build it's like i said this is the largest hackathon that's been run and if we jump to the next slide again by the numbers we had nearly 4 000 participants which is pretty amazing we had a number

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    of partner challenges with partners like the graph flux mint base for us and brave so we're really looking forward to seeing who the winners are and what they've put forward and out into the world for the community to pick up and start playing with or consider to build further but seeing 313 submissions is pretty awesome for the start of the year the next hackathon will start in august we will share out the updates from the

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    the latest one just so you can see who who won who built what what are people most interested in the space but there are additional events in the pipeline and if you're thinking about running a community event or a hackathon definitely let us know reach out to maria at the the pagoda team or email us there on the right hand side and you know keep building within the community i think the biggest thing we can do is ask you guys to get educated

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    spread the word and get building and with that i'll pass it over to eudera to talk about east denver and what we saw out there thank you chris hello everyone today we're going to be talking about youth denver which some folks have touched on and we'll dive into upcoming events so let's get into it next slide please all right so two weeks ago near activated during east denver with the

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    angle of building a multi-chain open web future our approach was broken down into two parts the first comprising of the near beatle week lounge and followed by the eve denver hackathon so the lounge was live for about three days we had 26 sessions totals everything from panels talks workshops networking opportunities were hosted in our space sample sessions included everything from near 101 getting started on near a spotlight on the aurora ecosystem

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    which has been blossoming and fastly growing rapidly growing uh parachains with octopus network creating seamless onboarding of the masses with brave and forecasting the future of funding with coinfand coinfund we also hosted a couple of sessions on daos which have become increasingly popular and the importance of diversity equity and inclusion given that this space that's rapidly growing it is always going to be of huge value and

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    importance to bring in diverse persons different backgrounds minds all in all we receive positive feedback at the event and online through social media next slide please so here you can see just some of the snapshot highlights of some of the momentum and accolades that we're receiving online next slide and just a roundup of youth denver by the numbers we had close to a thousand contacts captured in our space we had

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    about 250 people at peak uh these sessions were not live streamed youtube but we did play with twitter spaces and on day one we had a total of 3 000 views so all in all there was a lot of interest there and on youtube we launched one video on how to create an nft on year has received about 1400 views and on the main core part of the hackathon ilia mariek and some of the others were interviewed by time magazine coindesk

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    epicenter podcast i'm sure some of you have seen some of those published pieces on media and near was also very present within the denver hackathon official program uh we had about 15 sessions and again some of our top panels moderated by andrew chow time magazine zack stewart of coindesk and jeff john roberts of fortune the event isn't over just yet for the hackers so if you are hacking i i encourage you all to submit a bounty uh under nears if you want to check

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    those out be sure to check out youth denver youth denver's website and you'll be able to see all of the boundaries down here has put forth um so more news to be shared there excited to see all of the submissions that we're near will receive so we'll circle back again most likely in april with some of the news there next slide and finally on upcoming events near will have a presence during paris blockchain week summit so while i can't reveal too

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    much information there there will be more news to come and always be sure to check out near.events where you can see all of the events happening from near's pipeline which linear foundation organizes or other submissions from the community so any questions that is always the best resource i'd recommend for everyone to take eyes on and always follow us on social media next slide and i'd like to pass it off to sharif who will cover the education updates thank you

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    uh hey everybody my name is sharif i work on education with near foundation it's a pleasure to be here thank you so much for your attention just before i dig into the details i want to remind everybody that for the education team we have a vision of a world where millions of makers use near recognizing it as the best place to build the open web starting with about half a million activated makers at the end of 2022 it's a very ambitious goal

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    to that end we are holding a few guiding principles in mind you may have heard these before coming from different people around the ecosystem number one users don't realize that they're working with blockchain technology at all number two participants of the ecosystem have a smooth journey to their goals number three makers are able to engage self-directed learning experiences from zero to hero number four educators teachers perceive

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    teaching web3 and using near as an attractive professional opportunity actually and finally of course the materials and systems that we have are continuously improving let's dig into a couple of details next slide so uh since the um at the start of the year uh we have trained uh just about 40 000 students uh 75 of those coming through training partners that we engaged a couple of quarters ago q3 of

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    2021 who are now just getting warmed up we hope to see a lot of amazing things from those partners all around the world um only uh about a hundred of those people have earned the exclusive near certified developer certification at this point by submitting original demos of their own design that have been reviewed by experts in our ecosystem and of course we expect to begin to scale out the review process

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    and the support that we provide for people to earn these certifications we also engaged about 300 universities with active ambassadors on their campuses incredibly excited about that initiative and uh 30 companies are now actively engaged in recruiting near certified developers through jobs.nir.university check it out of course you're welcome to join us near.university certified check out the link at the

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    bottom of the slide let's move on to the next slide please in terms of fellowships and grants our ways of earning out of 180 amazing fellowship applications 50 have been accepted or actively working today around the world on writing new training material building applications integrating with existing systems helping to engage the community and the ecosystem at large so very exciting activities happening there from the fellowship program and on the grand side over the last 150 days 47 grantees

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    spread among 15 countries around the world have received just under 2 million usd worth of near tokens and their activities are ranging from integration with learning management systems to art projects that we hope you'll get to enjoy with us over the coming weeks and months as we release those to the world next slide please i'd like to spotlight a couple of individuals and groups that are doing particularly well in the way that they're engaging with these opportunities so hibba

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    for example has been bringing near to the middle east she is aside from being a mother to a four-year-old and a phd candidate in urban planning she joined the ncd program after a 90 90 day coding bootcamp and talk about productive she has since then conceived and led the development of near in minutes with the help of several other entity project graduates she has also built nearby example a new

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    website that she's built with one of her colleagues also a graduate of the ncd program which will help people learn faster by bringing examples into a coherent series of lessons and to inspire others to join her on her journey she recently launched near in arabic with the help of two other uh near university fellows who are uh bringing near into the the arabic speaking world so that people can learn and earn and get connected with others without having to cross the very difficult and challenging barrier of

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    learning english first if anybody is familiar with that and so moving on to the next slide please if we look into the fellowship programs a number of exciting developments there i'd like to highlight gotham padilla in particular who's bringing near to campuses he is a machine single-handedly having launched multiple initiatives which are engaging students um uh with near so in this uh

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    three-month fellowship he ran a pilot for the campus ambassador program which brought over 100 ambassadors and then in january he doubled down on that effort and that model and received a grant to scale the program which is now reaching close to 300 campuses and engaging tens of thousands almost 100 000 students around 328 campus ambassadors so lots and lots of people engaging here

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    and he continues to innovate having launched a validator as well as building a local dev shop that are that is helping non-technical entrepreneurs building on near so definitely as a fellow he is um uh really breaking uh breaking barriers and raising the bar there let's move on to the next slide please finally i'd like to highlight a wonderful example in our effort towards decentralized education near hispano has been bringing near to latin america and this is a small group of very dedicated and focused and

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    capable entrepreneurs and engineers that have been you know growing uh nearest presence in central and south america over the last six to eight months and have capably not only completed all of our certification programs uh near certified developer and your certified instructor but then gone on to translate these programs into spanish and successfully delivered to hundreds of other

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    developers and entrepreneurs near certified developer and are now launching near certified instructor in spanish they also innovated on their own by creating a new certified professor program ncp to bring near certification training to university professors and to make it appealing for them to bring near into university classes so finally near hispano has also been working in close cooperation with the education team to bring on over 20 developers and residents as part of their initiative to adopt the

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    fellowship program and they are working with those developers to ship apps directly to mainnet i think now we're at three applications on mainnet with more coming lots of exciting work there for the spanish speaking community so hopefully today what you've heard is that we are working with people all around the world to engage them in their native language to innovate on the near platform and to to

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    bring that to the world again on their own terms in their local region and hopefully this inspires you to come and join us at nerdot university to get certified apply for a fellowship and even consider applying programs thank you next i'll introduce josh daniels who will talk to us about funding thanks so much for uh the update that was really exciting uh updates from the education space uh so i wanted to spend some time with the group here speaking about funding and ecosystem and just for by way of introduction josh daniels the new york

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    foundation focused on funding next slide so over the last year or so we've really been spending a lot of time deeply thinking about what does funding mean within the near ecosystem and as part of that we've developed this vision which we call the near foundation funding platform which is at its core focused on driving success of the ecosystem by providing clear and efficient support

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    across these four pillars one is around supporting that creative triangle which marik and others have talked about a bit earlier the town hall around basically supporting and activating communities and projects that need support the next is providing access so making sure that individuals and projects and teams and areas wouldn't necessarily receive support and funding are ultimately able to gain access again efficiently and clearly via the

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    foundation's funding platform next is community really looking to work with folks that have new ideas and are really on the edges of thinking creatively about how to engage and develop within year and making sure they have the support they need as well and the next isn't aligning incentives this is really making sure those those partners that we have and those projects that we do work with making sure that there's a milestones-based approach to development

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    and growth so that all are really aligned in terms of that overarching goal of really growing the near ecosystem and having a significant development going forward next slide so over this last year we've had a lot of growth as we've looked at sort of funding again as a sort of core vision and focus for us at the foundation uh here are some of the big highlights a couple that i'll call out here that i

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    think are really exciting for us is the deployment of grants so where we've sort of deployed direct grants to projects to support them with over 270 which is really exciting that is then coupled with a lot of the grants that have been deployed within education and other areas within the ecosystem as well we've also had projects that have sort of received grants but then also have moved into the next phase of development and received funding from outside sources so you can see here that close

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    to 80 million dollars was raised by a multitude of projects uh in the ecosystem that we're looking to drive again continued growth and engagement as they build and develop and then the other one that's really exciting here has been looking at uh deployment across guilds and community driven projects so this is something that is going to be a priority for us as we move into 2022 i'm really sort of continuing to focus here and identify projects and teams that are

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    really working at community level development we'll hear a bit more about this as we think about our regional approach next one and so quickly we want to pause here to kind of let folks know how if you are building and engaging and developing how can you get more involved so the first way here on the left is to uh really engage our funding team which i lead uh we have both non-equity equity funding and then regional based

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    funding and so over here are the places where you can reach out but ultimately our view here is to really be sort of creative and supportive for all projects that are looking to develop and figuring out what works best for them next is we've launched several grant pools in collaboration with several other projects and teams within the ecosystem here you can see a selection of them and ultimately these are focused on really uh supporting projects whether they be in the decentralized finance

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    space whether they be uh looking to integrate via a layer layer to aurora or whether they are gaming on the human guild side uh and then obviously you heard a bit about near university from sharif a little earlier um next uh you can see our backers network this is a collection of investors supporters advisors uh really sort of you know thought leaders in the space that are ultimately very interested in engaging with and supporting and developing projects as they grow and build and so we're happy to connect folks directly

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    who are interested in speaking with folks within that network and then here on the far right you can see engaging with our near ecosystem broadly and so you can see here these are links to various resources and teams that you've heard from here especially that will help you to explore even more what are the opportunities within the ecosystem next slide so quickly on the ecosystem front wanted

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    to really take a step back and focus on two areas but we've seen a really significant amount of growth and development over the last four or five months the first is on the nft side uh so over the last three or four months we've seen a lot of interesting projects develop here this includes uh net new uh primary launches of nfts that have been growing we've also seen launch pads

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    developing you can see a few here that are uh noted according to your knot astro and utopia uh our secondary market has also been really flourishing over the last several months as well for us which is uh one of our largest secondary markets right now uh based in southeast asia has spent a lot of time developing their ecosystem and so they've actually seen uh this last month over seven million dollars worth of uh secondary

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    volume uh sort of trading that's gone on on their platform which has been really exciting to see we've also had some net new projects come on that are providing analytics and information support uh in the nft ecosystem so near tracker.io is one of those where you're able to see all the existing products that exist some of the top performers as well as some of the net new projects that are coming to market so there's a lot of excitement here that we're seeing and we're very excited to support and

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    welcome all projects who are looking to engage in that space next slide area that we've seen a lot of really great interests and especially on the grants side to see dozens of applications and projects looking to either build natively or develop or integrate via other chains has been in the gaming side and so here we're going to show you a video from our team human guild which i highlighted a bit earlier

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    which shows some of the really uh game gaming projects that they have been working with and have really done great things over the last second half of the year uh in 2021 yay

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    yay wow

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    so i really appreciate you all taking the time to watch that video and learn a bit more about funding in the ecosystem so now i'm going to pass it back off to marie who will talk a little bit more about infrastructure partnerships with the foundation before we get into actually our regional panel one thing we wanted to highlight is partnerships and in particular infrastructure partnership how we think about that i think you're starting to hear us talk a lot about building bridges and a multi-chain world and

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    that's indeed what we believe in and with that in mind we are working a lot on making sure we can have the right infrastructure partnerships so that the ecosystem can thrive the first partnership which i'd like to highlight is actually elliptic you may have read about that on our blog on our blog elliptic is now available for near native and what that means is actually it's very exciting for

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    in particular having enhanced on-chain security and access to data and in particular being able to build strong fin crime solution the second partnership that i wanted to mention here is actually old bridge again back on the theme of actually building bridges we have been working with albridge which is the first bridge to connect near protocol to terra solana and cellular ecosystems

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    more to come on more bridges but again these two things we believe are quite important for all of you in the ecosystem to be able to build bridges and build strong solutions that are not only built on the near ecosystem but also relating and being linked to other ecosystems and now we're going to go into the last part of our town hall and we're going to talk actually about regions and have with that original panel so i have here with me today rooney who will talk about

89. 41:51

    what's going on in particular the uk and europe and i have here with me also claudio who will talk about latin america before doing that just a brief introduction on what we mean by regions and why regions matter in a near ecosystem you've heard actually sharif mentioned that education is in particular important for us in particular having like local material that enables people to really grasp the meaning of what's

90. 42:17

    being discussed and what's being taught well that's why we are actually expanding by original hubs because we believe that actually to be a global company and actually to be a global protocol we need to have a local very regional footprint so regional helps help all of us expand the near platform and really get to the billion of users it's actually only a few people although it's still a majority but few people who really speak english and we want to

91. 42:41

    actually enable the access to more of that having local adoption is super important because you can have local activation of awareness it's it's therefore possible to have local drive of adoption supporting projects finding local connections local partnership building local community building and having the right educational program in the right language so that's why we're doing all of that so when we look at regional hubs where we're at and what that means and

92. 43:07

    how we approach that so on the left hand side you'll see our general approach which usually we start with local events meetups and then we go into education empowering the community having grassroots go to market product labs which can become startup incubation developer relation and ultimately get into what we call ecosystem funds on the map you can see lots of different locations if you by the way have ideas of places where we're not and you'd like

93. 43:30

    to be involved or participate please reach out this map is constantly evolving now let's get into our panel so claudio is here with us today to talk about latin america and roone is here also with us to talk about uk and more broadly also europe and i'll be moderating the panel claudio roon thank you so much for being here thank you guys so look i mean i think let's start with a little bit of background i'm sure people want to know your stories and and why why near actually why does near matter to you

94. 44:02

    should we start with you claudio yeah sure thank you marik and hello everybody regards from mexico city to the world um yeah so so for us as a we started as a guild uh was near spano um and our objective was basically trying to understand more about your protocol a little bit of background myself so i've been building a webco over the last 12 years uh have been experimenting with blockchain technology for the last three and successfully finally launched something

95. 44:34

    uh on a blockchain technology about a year a year ago and that was uh on the near protocol so i'm full long mirror but at the end of the day i found myself alone and and there's definitely if you want to go far you need to be doing it with a community with your peers and so that's what initially started our interest to launch near hispano and that was because of the support from open web sandbox of ant skilled as well and we saw that there was opportunities for us to

96. 45:06

    collaborate and cross-pollinate between each of the guilds and yeah so i took the jump that just posted on the forum hey who wants to write about near in spanish and here we are about eight months later and a few boot camps uh and support from the near education and here we are launching the original hub amazing and i think the approach you guys have taken in particular translating and having that in local

97. 45:31

    native language is fantastic great thank you uh roon should we go to you because it's quite a different actually you know background and way that you came to near but what's your story and and why near and what you do for near i don't know if it's different but i'm thinking like why not near right when people ask for that question but uh we can discuss that for for a couple of hours properly um but uh yeah no i um i

98. 45:55

    spent nine years uh almost nine years at google in google cloud and uh you know we're always involved with startups also before then had my own startup back in 2006 actually never made it to the unicorn status but learned a few bits and pieces from that and um i left google in july 18 and joined joe lubin's 50 million dollar fund called consensus ventures and for me what really triggered that was i was organizing an event for the ex google community at the google offices

99. 46:27

    in london in november 17. i remember this day clearly because it was the day before bitcoin hit 10 000 and we had uh probably 130 crazy young people in the room uh going absolute bunkers about whether it was eat or bitcoin which was gonna you know survive and win and i was like i wasn't sure if i was worried or you know excited about this sort of crazy vibrations and vibes in the room but i was like i gotta i gotta understand this better and um yeah i was really driven trying

100. 47:04

     to understand this sort of phenomena and uh yeah seven eight months later i was on my way out and going deep down the rabbit hole with the you know with with my job there at the consensus ventures and um part of it was also like driven by the fact that you know i thought we needed to change and begin to you know google from the inside i saw this amazing company amazing people also felt like there is a

101. 47:28

     a deeper need for change in society and now there is a potential technology to help put sort of more power in the hands of you know the people so to speak but also having worked with a lot of ex google startups over the years and i'll come back to sort of my story with with ilia there in a second but um i felt for me really like what was frustrating was um there were so many great ideas out there there was so much potential and

102. 47:52

     uh you know smart people but they don't always you know get the help they need in order to actually execute and try out solving those problems they see right and for me the big problem was also like how funding is sort of you know being or was organized and still is to a large degree today where i look at the vc model as most people know it is dead and i felt like maybe there is something here where we could apply this sort of

103. 48:16

     next generation internet technology to to actually sort of unlock that uh potential and um you know it's never as simple as you as you think it is or it's not the same as you know what it looked like in the past but clearly i think we're we're onto something here and it's already happening we're right in the in the middle of it but um yeah i think that's sort of the the bigger context um

104. 48:39

     i got to know of near end of 18 i think just after or slightly slightly a short time after elia and alex had pivoted from their ml play to to to blockchain uh which is sort of a well-known story by now why they did that um and for me having worked with ex-googlers knowing elia was an exclusive like i gotta keep an eye on them and um you know at the same time they reached out to me and a few other ex-googlers uh in early 2020 asking for how can we help them sort of kick off their uh prepare

105. 49:11

     for the minute launch and i was like this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be involved in something uh where there is a before and after mandate launch and as claudio mentioned um there is a skill program which is sort of evolved but i think there's still a lot of those sort of same components i kicked off which was actually named by a by a by a near member at that time we called it the goo guild which was basically a guilt for you know googlers ex-googlers and friends

106. 49:41

     and that then sort of organically evolved into running one of the first validator nodes we participated in stake wars that's still running very successfully this sort of near dedicated um validator node and i think for for for people new to to uh sort of the world of blockchain and the next generation internet that we're building here um for me was like okay there is this sort

107. 50:05

     of proof of stake or variations of it right which is sort of going to be the dominant player or mechanism uh to to run these uh future generation uh protocols or like the layer of the internet right so for me it was sort of like a no-brainer to try to get involved in that and also there's a huge untapped sort of topic here around governance how do we secure all these things it's just like there's so much to learn and do and

108. 50:29

     um long story short that evolved into move which is sort of a fun dedicated to founders building on near or with the new stack and you know we want to support the most ambitious founders as early as possible um and uh yeah super excited about the the time we've we spent with uh you know near and the ecosystem and also uh what's actually ahead of us um so so yeah the future is bright thank you marika well thank you thank you so two very two actually very different stories

109. 51:01

     but which in a way are also contributing differently originally to the new ecosystem claudio i'm actually curious like when you look at your region which is a massive region actually what are some of the exciting stuff that's happening in in latin yeah so so definitely for us is it's we're tied at the hip with educating right because at the end of the day we have to understand that this

110. 51:24

     is a change of paradigm uh and while right now like the new generation entrepreneurs are launching on the sas space or in the fintech space this gives a has this creates a gap for the new entrepreneurs coming in or being being taught on on the in the whole region is that there's a leapfrog effect here right um whether it's uh the on the old guard or web 2.0 space you you had this models emulating the silicon valley model of guest venture seed and all these funding faces where

111. 51:57

     now you can um you can launch and you can do a community launch and there's yes there's an opportunities to raise funds but also to be self-sustainable from day one uh if you grasp on the power of communities uh and i think that shows a good example of what lucio and myself built with metapool which we launched on mainnet without no backing or no safety net at all we take a hail mary on it right and at the end of the day we found out that the new ecosystem was supporting

112. 52:27

     we built something that was needed for the community and the community backed us up uh and also a couple of the early early uh near employees as well they saw what we're building was something that was valuable ecosystem and so we think we can replicate that in the whole region there are some low-hanging fruits out there that may seem solved for more of the western hemisphere likely for example for us off-ramp and on-ramp

113. 52:52

     payments it's something that's been already solved in most regions but in latin america that's still lacking and there's for example this project coming from venezuela called near park uh it's a near uh ptp or uh um uh yeah so parity pair and so the idea here is that the communities themselves are supporting onboarding enough and off-boarding also uh users into the new ecosystem or to any other blockchain to be honest so and this goes with the narrative around building bridges and so

114. 53:25

     that's one of the key things we're building right now so it's bridges around around educating any anyone that's interested in understanding what this change of paradigm will be and so we're not we're focusing on different aspects not just only on the technical savvy but people that for example teachers right they are the guardians over the next generation of entrepreneurs and engineers and designers over all over the region and

115. 53:49

     they need to understand what blockchain technology is and so we're reaching out to them and and going two steps back right and then it's not about all decentralization uh owning your uh your keys and some some slang that for them is foreign but they do understand the basics right which is can you control your assets is this something that well no in venezuela no the banks are are owned by the government right uh in mexico yes there's a little bit of a

116. 54:21

     more freedom but just let's be honest with that it's just uh everything right now people do not know what to do if they control their own assets and so we need to teach them uh and then when you teach them how to build then that that creates a flywheel effect where more people get get uh attracted to it because they could say okay i can build i can build my own future there's programs that that will teach me how to how to fish right and so in the pond the pawn is really big so definitely there's a lot of things

117. 54:54

     going on on the on the creative sides of we've uh through the nearest panel guild we launched the first nft marketplace both supported on the aurora network and on the near network so that came out of a nct program and some of the fellowships that sharif and his team put out to the ecosystem and so we built that we we built those first use cases or or success cases so we inspire more people to come into the new

118. 55:20

     ecosystem start first to understand what it is and then look around their surroundings and see where opportunities are to bring this technology to solve real real world problems and so with that is just excited to have everybody in we have a chat group with more than 3 000 people from all over the world in our discord uh and also spanish speaking as well right because as you understand and if you you've gone to california you don't have to speak english if you talk spanish most likely somewhere

119. 55:51

     on the other side of the counter of the taxi or whatnot they'll talk to in spanish so it's a broad language that is mostly uh filter out throughout the globe and so we want to leverage that and and build those bridges so we can build value for the ecosystem but more importantly for the regional communities that are in desperate need for this and we believe that there's a yeah there's a great opportunity we're going to be building in the next six to

120. 56:15

     eight months so happy about that thank you that's amazing and i can hear a lot indeed about you know the flywheel that i shared at the beginning which is actually it starts a lot with talent education then you inspire people they build projects and they can see actually that there's something happening there um yeah really good and also great to see that you know you have a clear view also what's missing right so for anyone out there on-ramp off-ramp is definitely

121. 56:38

     missing pieces of the puzzle and so building that for the region but also i'm sure for other region will be super important uh roon if we change actually um side of the globe and and go uh with you like are you seeing any like trends that you would say are specific for division that you look at or actually would you say that all trends in in you know for the new ecosystem and more broadly for crypto are similar i'm just curious to

122. 57:02

     figure out like you know how do you think about those investments across regions and trends that you're seeing yeah it's it's a it's a great uh question um i would say i mean one part is definitely like being a european you know for years we always like valuation and rounds and unicorns you know compared to us they were way ahead of the curve right and a part of that was obviously talent was based on on location

123. 57:36

     and i think now also knowing claudio and his team really well uh we are fortunate to be to be supporting them from the early days uh you know talent is is everywhere right and people can work from anywhere right most often right and nothing beats meeting in person there's no no doubt in that right but i think and also where the regional hops from from uh from the near side you know it's incredibly important and if i'm not mistaken actually we have the first uh near london meetup on on thursday um so you should definitely

124. 58:10

     ping um sandy and mark from the near team if you want to get involved in that or join up but um but yeah i think like that that you know we are like a sort of uh the funds is incorporated in the uk um but we have uh you know founders and you know people we work with are from anywhere and that goes you know also from the other direction right and i think that's where you're also looking at you know the the funds

125. 58:36

     from that side of thing like whether it's crypto or not also coming from us and investing in the region right and i think that's you know it's changing the the rules of the game a bit for the existing players but i think you know that's great right and that is all the ultimate game and it's the same for us as well we have to be aware of that and i think like um we're trying to

126. 58:59

     to some degree to um maybe this is sort of more near specific right but like what we saw near wasps a year ago i mean it evolved a lot as a technology uh there's the technical execution has just been you know on the spot and the hopes high that you know the team will continue to do that but also like from an ecosystem point where we feel there is a lot of attention now we have to uh drive less inbound than we like we

127. 59:25

     had to do a lot more outbound so to speak before than we do today but i think we still like what really excites me is there's an opportunity to actually build as well right and maybe there's a small story here to share with uh you know the audience as well actually we were you know if you take this as probably what like 16 months ago now we were thinking about building our own liquid staking project from the move

128. 59:51

     side before we were fully launched because we saw that as a primitive that was needed in the ecosystem we actually had a press release lined up and we had some grants lined up and then one week before someone told us about uh metapoor and we were like hey hang on a moment they're way better than us they're way further than us and we don't want to compete here we just want to see these sort of you know core components in the ecosystem you know being built out so uh

129. 1:00:16

     yeah we quickly canned our project before and then uh you know we reached out to the medical team and yeah so i think you know we're trying to have that sort of builder approach where we see you know we can drive that but we're also dependent on that others obviously it's the same problem to be solved but now it's like we have people coming to us there are several wallets being built out like in the also for the more like sort of institutional space so i think

130. 1:00:40

     those are some of the the changes right and there's that sort of um i would say next generation of startups is also building for you know the multi-chain world right that uh that we know we're near is gonna be and it's sort of thriving in really well right um i can play a huge role in so i think yeah i'm not sure that sort of geographically uh but but definitely something that i've noticed and i could

131. 1:01:04

     also say like just looking at the numbers like i think in december it was we think we looked at more more than i actually assessed more than 50 projects right uh for potential investments go back six months you know maybe it was 10 or 15 right so it's just going to keep evolving like that and that's obviously allowing us or enforcing us to keep us on our toes um yeah and i think um the last one is also the talent right like so something that we we see a lot i think we've had a lot of discussions including

132. 1:01:35

     with you folks from the near foundation as well about how to attract but i think it's a very fine balance because what's this versus push push or pull um in the last six months we've seen you know uh you know major uh sort of group of groups from you know facebook google amazon you know et cetera the traditional companies actually come because they maybe they're bored maybe they want more impact uh but at least they're hungry to to build out and you know build our own businesses that entrepreneurial grid and

133. 1:02:08

     yeah solve problems and try to you know build the next generation internet um and uh yeah we clearly want to want to support that right and that's to me just some of these signs that you know whether there is another curve to winter or not like we still continue to see that inflow of you know of strong talent right and um yeah that's from all over the world completely i think there's been quite a few articles on that on the trend of like from web 2 to web 3 and i think what we are the three of us actually saying is that the need of talent across

134. 1:02:40

     different geographies and across actually different skill sets uh is very very much needed um great i like the fact that from what you're saying the role the world is definitely flattening and the game for vc is changing a lot and the builder approach making sure that the next gen startup can actually be helped in the way that means uh it's actually something quite different um super interesting uh we're almost out of

135. 1:03:02

     time but maybe so one short guys short answer right short answer to last question what's the one thing that excites you most when you look ahead at the at the year ahead so claudia should we start with you yeah for me it's all about it i have to back josh of this one right it's all about games i believe that that's going to be a it's going to be the forefront and it's going to be part of every major layer one strategy to reach out to the masses right

136. 1:03:32

     um and education and i think both of them can combine really really really really well and and so that's a big bet we're gonna be making as a regional hub uh we're gonna be educating people we need to understand how we make it that attractive to get to gamification um and then with that teach about on-chain information and how that feeds like a virtuous loop uh and try also to teach people to understand about what this means

137. 1:04:05

     towards transparency and privacy as well which are two things that people sometimes take for granted uh and when when they come in into the crypto space and then they need to understand that they need to manage those that those are not going to be managed by the the uh the four big uh letters right uh and so so definitely that's a great shift that's gonna happen and so we need to educate people on that shift and so so that's for me it's gonna be the next

138. 1:04:36

     next big bet and then how you let people manage their assets so it's just take it step by step but definitely gaming is going to be a big part okay cool thank you thanks for that what about you rooney one thing focus everybody should just really focus um nothing is is given and that's also what personally what excites me the most is that if we don't do anything like everybody on the call listening like nothing is going to happen but actually if we really pull

139. 1:05:08

     our sleeves up and really uh do everything and a little bit more uh in 2022 i really believe this year can be the year where near it sets itself apart from from the rest of the pack and yeah focus is what is required and execution agree so many opportunities everywhere look guys thank you so much for being here today two different approaches but actually equally participating in helping build a very vibrant near ecosystem so i hope to all our listeners today that you enjoyed

140. 1:05:41

     what you heard again thank you so much for joining us today more than ever what we're building matters and i think if you take one thing from today is that the ecosystem is vibrant it's global it's building and please stay safe and continue building thank you

141. 1:06:55

     you