Protocol Work Group Call #5 – NEAR DevHub August 31st, 2023

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

1. 0:04

   everybody well I guess we'll go ahead and get started uh just an FYI we are recording this call and we'll post it later to YouTube so anyone who joins or wants to watch later can catch up um hello and welcome to our fifth protocol work group call my name is Maxwell I'm a community manager in developer relations here working at Dev Huff I'm excited to take a look at a new protocol NEP and come to

2. 0:30

   a decision about it so here's our agenda first we'll discuss the objective of this call and provide a little bit of context about the near developer ecosystem and the NEP process then we'll introduce the participants and go into the main discussion of our NEP which today is NEP 492 proposal to restrict ethereum addresses on here and afterwards we'll open it up to q a and talk about next steps

3. 0:59

   um so today we'll be using a Google meet later on in the call if you have questions or you want to chat you know you can raise your hands and uh I suppose if people want to introduce themselves in the chat you can do so as well just your name and where your what Your affiliation is I suppose in the near ecosystem all right so to get started let's discuss the purpose of today's call

4. 1:27

   we're here to publicly vote and arrive on a decision on NEP 492 which is a proposal to restrict ethereum addresses from being created as near accounts we're also here to celebrate the time and effort that people invested into this NEP and it went as it went through a rigorous review by the community and subject matter experts who care about making your ecosystem better so before we jump in we give a little background on the energy process and kind of the near developer community and protocol Improvement standards

5. 2:03

   uh just in context about Dev Hub uh Dev Hub is our new initiative to decentralize nears development we bring together individuals and organizations to help build a more decentralized developer core for the new ecosystem be that the protocol be that boss Etc and we provide social structure and tools to empower anybody to contribute to mirror from submitting ideas to implementing code so today the main tool for interfacing with Dev Hub is through near devhub.org

6. 2:34

   we have various communities of people interested in specific topics for example this one this is the protocol community group or well work group in this case and this is also a great place to meet with like-minded individuals to brainstorm to propose ideas or to get access to technical support and funding so in addition to these informal Community groups we also have these formal work groups who help make decisions in various ecosystem areas such as protocol contract standards

7. 3:03

   these groups have selected and recognized experts who engage with the community and help review proposals in a fair and timely manner so for example we make decisions on technical proposals that you may want to get integrated across the ecosystem such as in this case an update to the protocol standard on what qual what is allowed to be an account name you can submit an idea for for a

8. 3:27

   technical proposal using an NEP a near enhancement proposal and it allows anybody to propose an idea to the ecosystem well the new NEP is submitted the relevant work group will help review it and move it forward through our formal NEP process in terms of participants we have these rules and responsibilities within the NEP process we have the author who writes and presents a proposal the moderator who does things like review The Proposal move the discussion along and facilitate this call we have

9. 3:58

   reviewers who review the NEP and provide technical expertise and then we have this work Group which votes and provides the final decision on the outcome of that NEP and just to visualize this process every NEP goes through a draft process a review process and then we will take it to the work group for voting at which point it will either get approved or rejected most of this activity happens asynchronously within GitHub what we do get to when we get to the voting stage

10. 4:28

    the work group has an open public call such as this one to arrive at the best decision in a transparent way all right so before we jump into the actual MEP let me introduce the well highlight the participants who are involved for NEP 492 we have Bowen who is the author of this proposal and also a member of the protocol work group but he will not be quoting in this case myself who is facilitating this call and our reviewers are also from the protocol

11. 5:00

    work group we have Michael and Marcelo who in this case did the reviewing for this NEP and then finally we have our whoops that's mislabeled that is the protocol work group that um is going to come to the final decision and so let's jump into the actual NEP so first I'm going to ask Bowen to present the NEP and why you believe it's important and from there we'll have the work group discuss the findings and ultimately get to the final decision so uh Bowen if you'd like to take it

12. 5:34

    away so initially the proposal is to restrict the creation of um valid Instagram addresses shown here uh that was to basically uh prevent both people from like scamming other people into like depositing tokens into the uh like what is what looks like about this number drives on near and also some like user by mistake when they withdraw from uh exchanges and so on their carers about selecting the destination address

13. 6:05

    uh but then some of the uh reviewers pointed out it you know we don't have to special case this um is there a mattress and maybe it makes more sense to restrict the creation of a top level account altogether um yeah indeed there was the reason why top level accounts longer than 32 characters were allowed to create it to be created by anyone in the first place um was just purely some kind of um oversight I believe and there wasn't really a good reason why that is the

14. 6:37

    case um and so basically We're The Proposal is changed to um restricting creation of top level account unless it is um impressive account which is um sorry for uh characters wrong yep so basically that is the uh proposal that is right now um and uh it will also enable um certain Integrations with a certain wallets um in in the future if we figure out how to do it but I mean that's obviously outside of the scope of this

15. 7:13

    um this proposal and also there is this question of um what do we do with existing um Instagram addresses that are created on here I think there are about five five thousand of them um yeah those are outside of the scope of this proposal and the um the the purpose of the proposal um is to basically limit so limit the account equation so that such addresses cannot be further created so at least we have mitigation to the problem right now

16. 7:45

    and then we can figure out what to do uh with the existing address later all right cool uh I think um Marcin you wanted to talk through the uh the considerations or the concerns yes so basically the three concerns I have is that in this case this means that the creation of non-implicit accounts now is fully controlled by register right and if I understand correctly this is permissioned

17. 8:18

    in some vague way uh yeah but that that only applies to noun implicit account so or other like expression account and it's already the case for um top level accounts that are less than Siri to characters wrong so this is another two yeah 63 characters I guess right but now we kind of turning it on for like all the length and this combined with the fact that Dodge near pop domain registers also controlled by

18. 8:53

    I guess New Foundation I don't know means that technically there could be censorship when it comes to creating new names right so I think that with this we are losing a little bit of this and decentralization or Independence or you can always create a implicit account right yes but you kind of lose the post yeah implicit accounts always work yes but we actually want to have some named accounts and you know going forward one of the selling points of near are exactly these named accounts right most people will not be trusting implicit

19. 9:26

    accounts for like high value things with this we again this is more of a kind of separate question of like who but the both the you know the bottom register like the main register and the dot new register is kind of controlled by the same so the near account is actually not it's controlled by a smart contract that anyone can call to create accounts so it is not controlled by a single endangerment it's not locked right uh well that I'm not sure you can check

20. 9:57

    I checked before before the meeting so again this is like to be fair that's why I said that I would vote still yes because the risks of people kind of creating ethereum-like looking at dresses and getting people in this like a far higher risk so yes I still think that we should go forward with this but still kind of this is my concern that you know we're doing a step towards a little bit less

21. 10:21

    decentralization when it comes to these two implicit naming yeah that's very fair I think we should figure out how to do top level accounts auction yes and because that's that's what was written in the white paper in the past that we're going to do this but I didn't see this at least publicly anywhere the second small thing I would like us to add here okay these what we do these address might be outside the scope of

22. 10:45

    the nap but uh do we know how much value was in these devices uh I mean no another's point but we can aggregate the data I don't believe there's a lot of um a lot of value right now because one thing that we might consider doing is in Explorer we should post a warning when someone this is one of these addresses stating clearly that this while this address looks like ethereum address it might not be control you can actually

23. 11:17

    check if it's controlled by you know the person who was owning this uh but you know yeah we'll still add a warning because 5K addresses being there means that they could be still used for malicious purposes even if people cannot create new ones the burning address on ease is actually created on the earth and I believe it it is created for the purpose of scamming people yes yes and then okay and then last but not least I think that

24. 11:52

    there will be a question of like how we name this snap because in this case we're not only restricting ethereum addresses yeah we're restricting with the top level yeah I mean ethereum is the reason why we're doing it but yeah it will be a bit cleaner when you look for the for the history of net names yeah and I think these are all my concerns thank you one uh one small comment uh also with regard to first point by machine is that

25. 12:22

    uh the main reason I I propose not extend this not only for ethereum account is because this was proposed to be done on the protocol level but maybe we can have the initial proposal implemented in the register the near rather than on the rather than the protocol itself so that way we have like the initial proposal but with the benefits of uh before benefits like protocol is not just doesn't need to be aware of this no

26. 12:55

    uh yeah sorry I kind of I was saying too complicated uh so basically we leave these nepasis and we pass it but then on the register account like the registry is actually a conflict but no no no right now it's not a contract right now it is just in regular account uh it's only near only near is a smart contract but near-con creative level accounts no no cannot the register account is just called registrar well anyway proposal still makes sense

27. 13:34

    like we could deploy a smart contract to register if that makes sense and then reduce your could have this logic of like do not create ethereum accounts or we're going to create these other type of accounts so the thing is like let's move it away from the protocol itself that's not the kind of complexity we want to have there but oh no no but that's not a problem the problem is that right now anyone can create the like

28. 13:58

    it's not the it's not it's not that you want to limit the permission of registrar right now it's more that anyone can create top-level account that are longer than Siri to character so by restricting the capability of register it doesn't help well what I mean is that everyone can interact with the register and let register create an account for themselves right but the problem is that they can also bypass that right now like

29. 14:21

    it is allowed that they bypass it and directly create top level accounts no no no I mean it's past this net oh oh I see I see yeah so you obviously you don't okay okay so it's like a Improvement to the how the register account works yeah that's mm-hmm so we can have like decentralized account creation we can have uh be in the state that we were before but having this uh uh hack implementation in the

30. 14:55

    register might get a smart contract rather than in the protocol itself yeah I can add that as like a future possibility yeah yeah um I guess uh everybody with their their various points and concerns right now does anybody want to summarize this as like a GitHub comment or anything like that just this is all documented and people can revisit it in The Proposal afterwards because I didn't really see a lot of these uh points when I was checking out the page it would be really nice to have this documented

31. 15:37

    no volunteers well anyway volunteer someone well marcine you had um you had all those concerns right would you mind writing those up to the GitHub page all right I'll take the other thumbs up as a yes all right all right so uh moving ahead in our process we need since this is a four-person work group but Owen is the author he's unable to vote on this proposal so we need a two-thirds

32. 16:17

    majority to move forward this NEP we've already had each work group member give their voting any uh indication on the NEP itself and here is a summary we see the yes but but it seems as if we are going to approve with three out of three thumbs UPS um so I guess these are the next steps Owen do you want to say anything here yeah um the implementation is basically ready I mean it's a fairly uh small change and

33. 16:53

    then we need to uh obviously merge the implementation and then stabilize the future but I guess you also um given what um given yeah what we just discussed I I also update the uh the napkin crude uh what um what do we discuss here today including some of the future possibilities and yeah um what we're going to do to uh um in the future to improve account of creation all right sounds great

34. 17:27

    um well thank you uh you're you're muted Max sorry thank you uh just a huge shout out to our work group members and to the author of this NEP and all the participants in the discussion thank you so much we're very excited to work together to decentralize the development of near together um and I guess I want to open it up to the audience right now uh and if anybody wants to chime in with some questions

35. 18:01

    um or discussions with the uh with the work group because I know we have some other participants in this call if anybody wants to raise a hand or just shout something out um Racine it's one one meta comment as this NEP was let's call it like on the border of security we should figure out how we can handle these things maybe a bit more faster or like again you could say there's not a security issue on the other side if someone's listening to the school hello

36. 18:36

    uh by the time we deploy the fix there might be like additional you know 20 000 accounts being created because we might have given people these ideas what to do right and of course there was a whole discussion on GitHub what not what now so this is more of a question to you Max of like how do you plan to do these like again it is not a security issue because folks this is not like you know oh my God the protocol is broken this would be handled separately but with these neps that are like on the boundary we should

37. 19:03

    have some a little bit different procedure for that so maybe not quite highlighting things as much is that a big concern like do we want to not post that part of the video is anybody really worried about that because I can just you know I'm I mean honestly I'm not worried about this video we already put this as an NEP we made some publicity about it it's fine it's more about like you know consider the whole process of someone who did not

38. 19:27

    think about doing something like this now they had like at least couple weeks to figure out that oh something like this could be done or whatnot I still want to make sure that near is transparent about the decisions we're making it's just in this scenario we could do at least the part of this voting let's go this a little bit earlier get the thing pushed into Mainland and then have the you know the the public discussion discussion

39. 19:51

    about why we did this yeah it is like an interesting point and definitely something to consider if there are like I have to imagine that probably with major security updates they would probably just you know just charge ahead and then you know document it later right um I think that would be everybody's inclination but it would be nice to have uh maybe a a formal process for security concerns or something like that yeah so the difference and this is like on

40. 20:23

    the boundary right right yeah I thought about it when when uh writing the proposal yeah indeed I think um I mean it is not a security risk of the product itself um so that's kind of why I didn't uh we didn't treat it as a security issue um and rather a good uh because we don't want to just like like suddenly push a change into the protocol that changed how account creation Works um and that's also

41. 20:55

    um suboximal so um and I think the the the kind of rationale here is that yes people can like create those accounts now but it's not free right it's like you you people need to spend like money actually doing that and it's not really they don't really have like a clear way of you know benefiting from that so it's um yeah so I thought about it and decided that yeah it's probably okay um but indeed if we want to think more about how to

42. 21:28

    um yeah indeed I would like I it I think it would be nice if this process um uh can be expedited right so I think that that would definitely be nice okay um no other questions anybody from the audience who dropped into this call it's one of your your few opportunities to get a hold of some uh protocol masterminds in the near ecosystem I'll use the opportunity just to thank you guys probably yeah keep doing a great job it's interesting we see

43. 22:11

    okay awesome yeah um thanks for all the work all right so I guess I'll move towards um closing this out then um oops so once more thank you to our author through our subject matter experts and to our work group members and uh now I'm just going to do a little bit about highlighting some ways you can get involved in your developer ecosystem so if you have a specific idea in mind you can actually submit it today using Dev Hub it has a little way to post

44. 22:54

    ideas or solutions that you think should be brought up to the developer communities or you can find other communities to collaborate with and and see who's there and who you can get support from if you have a technical idea that you want to get integrated across the ecosystem you can also work to submit your own NEP and you know post an idea on dev Hub after you've submitted it on

45. 23:18

    the GitHub you can also view all the other upcoming neps or the things in need of review the things that are being drafted we keep a pretty complete list of everything and you can go see it at a this link right here and finally you can join the community telegram group we have a telegram group for this community group we have one for contract standards for tooling we have one for Boss very interesting these days um but anyway it was just a bunch of ways that you can get involved

46. 23:57

    so uh yeah sign up and learn more about upcoming meetings that I'm actually not sure if we're still posting them to near.gov.org but we will have a community calendar on dev Hub soon um so we'll post more announcements about that it should be coming out pretty quickly I think but we're hoping to put things in a central place so that people can see what's coming up and then of course you can follow our Twitter and

47. 24:21

    telegram channels at near Dev Hub and um so yeah we have a boss Community call coming up next Tuesday if anybody's interested in that and we will be posting this reporting to YouTube for people who want to review the call and uh thank you so much everybody for attending I think that's about it thank you Max for moderating that was great thanks