NEAR’s Decentralised Front Ends for Any Blockchain

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1. 0:00

   all right oh my goodness all right no I don't want to share this all right oh my God hey how are we doing all right oh that's not open um start again uh hello everyone thanks for being with us through all those technical difficulties um again my name is Josh I work at developer relations at near Pagoda um I want to talk about decentralized front ends that are chain agnostic and

2. 0:41

   yeah part of the what I was starting with was why am I here um which was very top of mind for me like thinking about the space thinking about the state of things um and what Drew me to this space and why I'm deciding to stay here um is because of my core values and what brought me to this place is because I want to make a real impact on real people's lives in a positive way and I

3. 1:05

   feel like this technology has that opportunity not everybody sees it that way and that's okay but that's what I'm here for and part of that is decentralization it's actually not part of it it's the main thing and we talk about this all the time decentralization decentralization cool that's a great word what does that mean and for me it's about just Distributing the power like it's owned by a couple people like the internet was started at you know free we just

4. 1:29

   peer-to-peer let's shared information um and then it gets a little bit more Consolidated and there's Gatekeepers um you know I want to be a part of something that's going to be disrupting existing systems um and putting power back into the individual and again another part of that is open source and what does open source mean to me it's like the free access the information um not everyone has that and I think it's really important that we share

5. 1:53

   information and that resources are shared and that's what it really brings me here so I think it's time to transfer the internet ownership to people that actually use it and not the people that are you know gatekeeping it but the individual users should be the ones that actually own it and I feel that is our responsibility as developers who have knowledge and the resources and the

6. 2:16

   expertise to contribute to that like with great power comes great responsibility uh Spider-Man reference but it's true like I think it's super important to be a part of this movement in a powerful way in a in a positive way um and you know we have this magical uh ability to make bits do things and I think we need to use it in the right way so that's my soapbox I'll step off of that now and kind of get into

7. 2:42

   um the current depth architecture architecture today um which I was chatting with a guy that I work with and felt a little rug when I got here oh decentralized apps oh it's all decentralized but it's not really um this is how it works now for developers this is kind of a developer focused uh talk but um basically all of your source code assets everything is on a regular web 2 database it's you know Amazon Google all that stuff great it's fine but just a little tiny bit it's on the blockchain

8. 3:12

   um so you know yeah I get it how are we gonna move that needle from not really that decentralized to more decentralized um and that's kind of what I'm really excited about about the blockchain operating system it's a stack it's not something that you can run on your phone or computer that people are asking what's this operating system how can I run it um it's a framework where we're using the blockchain in a way where we're

9. 3:35

   storing crucial State and your source code all on a smart contract that's on the blockchain and then any larger assets we utilize ipfs store pictures on that peer-to-peer Network and then everything else is stored on chain uh it was pretty stoked I'm like whoa wait a minute all of my source code is started as stored in a smart contract and it really blew my mind I was really like taking it back that we were actually

10. 3:58

    able to make this a reality you can try it yourself you can go to neo.org you can sign up here's a QR code I'll bring you back to that in a second but what I want to talk what I want to want to go through with a couple minutes that I have left is a demo of how to actually do this and what it looks like so we go here we'll go to near.org and I just want to let everyone know and developers know we're in Alpha we literally built this in the last four months of Engineers figuring out how we're going to take this technology and

11. 4:31

    actually build this system so please try it out report some bugs help us figure this out but this is the landing page right now I'm currently logged in using fast off it's really awesome I wish I had more time to tell you about it but it's the most easiest onboarding web 3 I've ever seen stoked on it try it out right now on your phone or you're on your computer but yeah I'm currently logged in up here with the near account I have um I won't get into zero balance because I just probably doesn't make a sense

12. 4:56

    right now but all these are components over here on the side which are apps it's kind of like a decentralized App Store to a degree and able to publish components to the world I can take a look at okay this is a cool chess game let me take a look at it let me look at the details all the source code is published online I can look at dependencies it's kind of like an npm package I can see all right what dependency area we're using here how are

13. 5:21

    we how are we using these components and um and what's the source code and what's the history of it I can actually see okay this was only one commit but like the commit history is focused on the block height so as developers are pushing code you can see a history of it and I can look at the entire history of an application and I can see if anybody's changing code and we can be open and transparent with everyone so

14. 5:44

    it's pretty cool I think I lost my back button yep there it is let's go back to um this so yeah if I wanted to go ahead and say develop I go to this develop I can go to the sandbox and we have a profile page and everything you can view the source code of so I can take a look at my profile page I can come over here I can render a preview and this is kind of what my profile page looks like and I

15. 6:08

    can look at all the source code that's inside it and I can make edits to it if I want to and publish a version of my profile that I want I don't have to worry about like say Facebook's going to change the way the things look I can make it look however I want and I can subscribe wherever I want so yeah say I wanted to get outside of nearest ecosystem I just want to use near as my place to host my front end code and I want to connect my back end to ethereum or any other blockchain I can do that

16. 6:35

    um there is a component here called Lido we'll go ahead and open it and we can render a preview and yeah if anybody's seen this before it's basically a way that you can stake on ethereum I'll go ahead and I'll connect with web3 I'll connect my metamask oh no and this is of course because I restarted my computer oh nice sweet it worked all right we're on ethereum wow that's amazing and now I'm logged in with ethereum again Alpha

17. 7:07

    I would like this button to be kind of moved up a little bit but now I have this Lido component that I can go ahead and take a look at look at all the history um of Lido and I can actually if I search for it again it's probably the easiest way to do it I can embed this if I want to go back to my profile page go into the source code say around line 177 I can go ahead and import this widget

18. 7:31

    Source right here render a preview and now I have that component that's embedded so it's like this composability that I can grab any kind of Open Source component embed it into my profile I could import import this into my application say I want to take this app and now build upon that so it's a way in which we can have communal building of applications and this decentralized open

19. 7:54

    source super transparent way and kind of look at what the history is of uh yeah of the entire um development cycle for everything I'm running out of time maybe I was on my soapbox a little bit too much in the beginning but but yeah you can take a look at a lot of different components you can search for them you can Fork them um I'm really excited to see what we can make out of this and oh I didn't I didn't show uh the last part so yeah if I wanted to I the the profile page that I now rendered a preview Okay cool so

20. 8:27

    this is my new profile page I'm going to go ahead and edit that uh profile page but mine and then I will confirm it and then I'm going to save it and then I'm going to try what happened I added Lido and it's like a commit history I'm going to save it and it saves it on chain kind of shows you all right we're going to put this on the blockchain stores all that um takes all that information stores it this is all a live demo which

21. 8:51

    I'm super stoked it's working and not having uh that issue and then it's now published and now it's distributed I don't have any Gatekeepers I can go to the components page and it'll show you the most recent component that was just shipped and now I have immediate access to my user base and I'm able to distribute applications to people instantly not have any censorship not have any resistance um and uh yeah it's pretty it's pretty

22. 9:17

    sweet so I would like you to join me and build something cool using this platform please talk to me after the talk I'd love to talk Tech with you and talk about like would you have maybe ideas that we can help uh yeah kind of shape the web 3 space and the way way that we want it to go so with that I will stop talking and thank you for dealing with all my stuff