NEAR Town Hall April 2021: 1 Year Mainnet, Rainbow Bridge and Aurora

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

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   it's awesome to be here at nearest town hall um and uh welcome everyone who joined it i apologize if my internet is sometimes a little bit slow so uh in case something happens but it's exciting to be here today we're going to talk about actually a pretty two pretty cool events one is it's been one year since our genesis blog for mainnet and as some of you may know we've had a rainbow bridge launch which was amazing

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   next slide so first of all i want to welcome everyone i mean this is uh like one one of the events we we are doing and we want to do more and we want to kind of engage more the community uh this is for you to ask questions to participate so please uh come to the chat in the events and leave your comments leave your messages and questions and we're going to answer them at the end today i'm going to give a quick overview where we've been

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   for it was near for the past year and then i'm going to transition to eric who is going to give us kind of an overview where we are going in next kind of coming coming months and then finally alex fchenko will cover in more detail how rainbow rainbow bridge works how's it going and shows us a demo and then we will do questions so let's do the next slide so almost to the dot a year ago we've actually had a genesis block for

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   near mainnet and not everyone was here back then but our initial idea was to kind of bootstrap the network really started going uh what in a proof of authority mode to actually be able to start testing all the infrastructure that's built around it and so this is important because you know as people want to build apps there's actually a lot of infrastructure from wallets to indexers that needs to be built on top and so we launched it on april 27th

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   the genesis block the block number zero and we had a transition plan how it will go from a proof of authority mode to the kind of fully permissionless network next slide through this we have pretty much it took us a little bit longer than we expected to go to kind of the next mode where we have uh onboarded lots of great validators had been running the network so we have been running the stake wars kind of the competition for validators to really

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   exercise the network and they have found lots of lots of issues with the network during that period of time and so by september we kind of got into a really stable state and we're ready to uh to get to the next stage so september 21st was mainnet restricted this is where from our perspective network was ready and we gave it to the community to really vote when they think it's ready as well

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   and uh unlock transfers right so before that all everybody's tokens were locked uh we were planning that it will take a few weeks but uh and kind of at the end took three weeks all in all but it's been a pretty heated debate there's a lot of folks kind of contributing there's a lot of things that were missing at the beginning but at the end the vote passed and the transfers unlocked on october

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   13th that really showcase that community can make decisions can coordinate can come together to make something kind of decisions this big to unlock transfers and really enable the main net to be fully permissionless right so this really like from perspective of kind of actually working network this was a first day and it's now almost six months since then which is also amazing so going to next slide we can see that

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   uh our network has been evolving and growing and actually last few weeks we've been hitting records almost every week where uh this sounds a bridge launching and a few of the apps launching and i'll showcase them we've been hitting kind of uh pretty much uh like almost 10x of our weekly uh weekly active accounts than before and actually i think like yesterday was uh peak day was hundred thousand transactions per day and it kind of keeps growing so it's really amazing we

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    see some of the apps kind of starting to really pick up and if we go to the next slide you can see the apps that are really growing are uh refinance i'll mention what that is near crowd uh and like few others and so this is really amazing to see because this is you know actually operate a fully operating network we have you know all the tooling working everything works you know users are able to onboard really easily it's kind of web to experience and at the same time we have all the

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    kind of pieces coming together and those apps are starting to grow so in the next slide i just want to highlight a few apps uh this is kind of high level right we see kind of the evolution coming and eric will go into way more depths on this but kind of in three different like sub compartments it's uh financial applications community applications and data applications and so here we actually have a representation of this with refinance and pulse representing kind of more financial side uh ref is a

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    daxon near build a community we have pulse market also a built by community prediction market we have a creator side which is represented by bear club very cloud probably is like second app on near and actually first thing built on near ever so the history of bear club is pretty funny because it was a hackathon internal near hackathon project uh december 2018. so we built it first in 2018 and then it was like one of our examples

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    for a long time and then it was turned turned into a full app for this token this kind of economy around it and launched and uh if you haven't seen it check it out there's a really awesome video of kind of evolution of pretty much community drawing together different art uh there's kind of worse as always for for the spots in in the in the space and then we have paris and min base to kind of

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    market places coming from different directions uh pretty much providing creators a place to offer their art and in kind of main base pretty much having like a wide variety of use cases so these are kind of like six highlights i wanted to make but there's actually plenty of more apps already launched and even more building so if you go to next slide this is just a screenshot of awesomeneer.com

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    check it out this is where you can find all the apps that are kind of trending which are right now being launched and always uh you can see apps that are in building and kind of all the other pieces that are in the ecosystem so shout out to the awesomeness team for being awesome and if you're building a project and it's not there you can always submit a project there so next slide just kind of stepping back right there's been a year of a lot of work right uh since we

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    launched we actually had over 18 protocol upgrades and so near behind the scenes kind of in the protocol has a pretty much kind of a hard fork mechanism based on proof of work that allows very smoothly to transition from version to version and really upgrade the protocol and this has been pretty clear that this is a needed thing but part of what we believe is is that the protocols needs to evolve protocols needs to continue to grow and kind of incorporate new features and so we've

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    been doing that kind of together with validators and really like presenting the what are the next things improvements in the protocol will be and letting them to adopt them by running the new version and so there's been a ton of box fixes i mean if if people are interested you can go and check out near course release notes there has been reduced cpu usage and memory usage that's been one of the kind of uh

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    major things that valdez came in the beginning and we've kind of been the team been fixing that uh we reduced the storage uh staking cost by 10x it's been actually a developer uh concern as uh people started to use it more and more there's been clear need in kind of cheaper storage and and uh as we underneath trying to optimize a lot of things it became possible to do and then we're continuously improving performance for a single chart uh there's new updated web assembly uh environment

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    there's uh kind of ways to kind of optimize how things running uh and like transition sounds uh some of the work to kind of do ahead of time at the same time we keep doing more work on sharding so i mean obviously like if you're familiar like the nearest shorted system it runs in a sharded capacity right now but with one shard we have kind of test environments with h charts and uh testing more and really on one side we still don't need this right even those

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    current growth so still lots of capacity in the one shard and so we want to make sure that kind of as we transition into this multi-shot environment everything will be kind of running as fast and as much as possible so we've been testing this for the past few months there's more work there join the chain sync if you want to learn more next slide one of the critical pieces been is standards uh this is dev like our developers have came to us and said we

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    need standards that you know are actually represent near in a way that like because near's async environment and also because a lot of original ethereum standards also were kind of done in maybe too quickly and already now so ingrained that people are it's really hard to change them so for example fungible tokens the approvals method has made a lot of pain for developers on ethereum and so actually we have pioneered

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    going away from approvals and actually using uh callbacks and so this allows to actually create a very interesting ways of of doing financial operations and kind of security around that and so actually refinance is one of the first apps that using it like kind of putting it all together with a lot of uh tokens and bridge and everything and then the other side of this is nfts i think nft has been an interesting

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    evolution of things but it has not really came to fruition uh like in the full capacity that we believe and kind of the nft community believes it is possible and standard is one of the things that been uh kind of putting it down so we have lots of teams that are building kind of nfd projects on here and they have came together to build the standard which really includes kind of core features

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    like royalties inside right allowing pretty much artists or original owner original creators to receive the uh reward as as the nft gets resolved later uh there's a lot of more metadata enrichment data and there's global ids which are really important as you can allow to like link directly into nft inside in some contracts and there's more features that you can look into next slide so all this is awesome there's a lot of stuff going on there's a lot of developer tooling i'm not going to

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    mention there's like so much things going on on developer tooling side but i do want to mention kind of education like from beginning near like we believe in education as kind of one of the ways to bring a lot more developers into the ecosystem the like what we did with whiteboard series what we did was kind of app review live review of apps this is all being about how do we kind

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    of educate people how the protocols work how applications work uh we also have obviously how enterprise like how to build projects with open that collective podcast uh open that up podcast and so this is actually two more new initiatives that we started uh this quarter uh one is about actually certifying developers right actually turning them kind of going from zero to you know a

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    fully certified kind of developer uh with like few levels and you know if you go through this program you actually get an nft so if you haven't done it yet uh check it out so it's a learn new club and just like a full you know intense one week program but you come out actually knowing how to build things and then there's a kind of interactive like self-paced uh education platform

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    called neura academy which allows to again on board uh developers and really gives them space to to build their own thing and so going to next slide i kind of like there's a lot of stuff going on on the product side there's a lot of stuff going on kind of developer side but really important thing is community and near is not just like one community and so a lot of people kind of may be coming in and saying like oh near's official

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    whatever telegram channel is not that active and the the reason is it's actually community of communities right we have a lot of kind of sub communities which are uh span from regional like we have bunch in china we have uh kind of killed in india we have uh guilds in other places in russia and then we have kind of interest level right from privacy to nfts from you know daos to defy and then this kind of

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    really specific purpose skills like uh and skilled is specifically focused on marketing and creating community marketing veneer and so really it's not just about you know one telegram channel it's actually about kind of a whole host of these guilds that are working together but at the same time serving different functions in certain different purposes and so if you're really interested in kind of participating more in the new ecosystem you should join sounds and skills kind of based on your interest based on

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    location i also want to highlight actually right now in india there is a kind of health care crisis corona have hit them way harder than actually i realized at least and they really need help so nier's india guild actually are helping locally they're doing blood drives uh they they're trying to kind of collect donations so uh please support them and uh like we have near will be supporting them as well i think it's really important there's like india's really big country they have this like

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    as we've seen other big countries have not always managed to to get things really going so please uh urge everyone to kind of help out where they can um so yeah this is kind of just a quick overview where you've been i mean there's a lot more obviously going on there's uh so many things but uh in the interest of time i'm gonna pass it on to eric ceo of near foundation and he's gonna cover more about where we're going with creative economy and beyond thank you

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    thanks alia yeah hey everyone thanks thanks for joining us and uh yeah so actually if you jump to the next slide uh i i'm going to make a statement and uh and then kind of like walk through actually what it means so so near is the infrastructure for innovation which powers communities creators communities and financial markets to drive a more open interconnected and consumer-empowered

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    world so there's a lot of stuff in there but really what i want to get to is this idea that um i don't think anybody's going to argue that when we set out we set out to build the best technology and you know a lot of a lot of even what it was talking about bubbles up and starts from from the technology layer of all of the things that that protocol has has enabled um and all the work that's

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    gone into it all the work that's gone into standards and everything like that um and what i really want to do is bubble that up and and frame that in a little bit more into the into the why and into kind of what does that enable so if you jump to the next one uh the the first place and by the way that that's sort of both a short-term thing and a long-term thing so so the first piece does start with the infrastructure so if you go to the next slide you always have to kind of

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    start start with the infra and then and then let's like build our way up so obviously um near starts starts with the blockchain uh this when we built this blockchain when we went when the the core team has built this blockchain the idea was make it scalable make it usable make it affordable uh for people to use and as elia mentioned that launched officially in the genesis block

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    about a year ago and then the the full community handoff occurred in october and so then from that point things have begun building upwards so the middle layer of this is components and so on top of the blockchain you have the smart contracts that create these components that become reusable components that that get integrated into everything and i think a good example of that is like d5 on ethereum as as this whole layer of piping where all of these all of these components get pulled together

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    and so the components layer is really important because that's actually what what provides the uh the apis and and uh everything that enables the apps on top of it and the ultimate goal here though is is to be building consumer ready apps and and the thing that i want to note is that even though the story starts with infrastructure and ends with apps what what the infrastructure provides is actually really important because that's ultimately what the apps are going to have to draw

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    upon in order to you know to create good experiences for consumers so if you go to the next stage i'll start with the infrastructure layer but but kind of build out rewards a little bit uh so the idea here is we we know that near is a proof-of-stake sharded blockchain it's built for scale some of the other cool stuff though is the flexible account model is really designed to make it so that developers

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    can build really flexible adapts on top of near they can quickly deploy them they can build them using languages that they that they know and trust assembly script rust um and but the real question is like okay so why what does this mean and so that's where i want to go into the components layer in the middle and talk about three specific things so one is amms taos and nfts and then kind of talk through how is that coming together um because

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    one of the cool things about being in in the foundation is that is that we kind of get to just see like what's what's bubbling up from across the ecosystem and what's fun about my job is i i i get to sort of pull this together and see how the story is developing and that's basically my goal here is to kind of talk that through so if you go to the next slide um on the amm side the amm stands for automated market

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    maker um and this is just one set of components that people are building out on in the ecosystem on here so ilya mentioned ref finance i have an example of that the reason why that's something that could be built on near was obviously the the development environment is it's easy to use um it's low cost and high speed um but there's also there's this uh synchronous asynchronous

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    tradeoff um so basically uh dapps on near can choose between uh sort of the uh the performance of a synchronous environment or the scalability of an asynchronous environment um creating things like amms in that environment's actually highly flexible and allows them to do things that you don't always see on other chains one of the other pieces of that is inner connections so the rainbow bridge is a big piece of this i'm not going to steal alex's thunder on the end

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    there but but having access to other chains actually allows a lot of movement in in assets that that's quite helpful for things like that so to go to the next slide i want to jump into nfts as well um so we've done a lot of really cool stuff in this ecosystem uh around nfts so italy again mentioned that we have nft launchers um so we have nft launchers we have ft launchers uh that's been created by by teams out there we have peras has also launched

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    and one of the cool things that that actually happened a while ago was uh near got certified as as officially carbon neutral and i'm not sure if it's the only blockchain but it's definitely one of the few that is officially carbon neutral and that means that nfd's issued on oneera are actually green nfts which really matters when you talk to people who are who are in this space and who are thinking about issuing nfts but the other piece of course is that interoperability means that the nfts

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    that are issued are not actually stuck on near it's not an island it's not it's not a uh it's not even you know a sort of a an l2 in that sense but it really is it really is a place where the nfts can be set free so i think that that's giving it more momentum um for for people who want to innovate and create cool stuff with nfts and elia also mentioned some of the things around differing minting fees uh the flexibility uh with which you can

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    assemble these standards and assemble these contracts has allowed for some really interesting innovation on that front and then if you go to the third one which is daos so sputnik is one of the coolest things that we've had on year so right now sputnik is in version one uh it there is a forum post you can take a look at on on the government governance forum uh which is around sputnik version two and

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    uh dow's on near is something that we're we're just beginning to explore the full power of because what's intended to hamper dows on other chains for instance ethereum where of course they they invented the concept of daos is they've actually had to take a lot of the actual governance the practical governance of dao's off-chain because of the transaction issues and the fact that you you can't have a whole community of people voting on chain when

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    transaction fees are so high and when it when the experience is so rough and so a lot of a lot of what you can do with thousand year is providing this high flexibility of experiences is is creating these taos to be highly configurable so that they go from being this this esoteric governance experiment into something that's actually useful by real communities and i'll talk about why that matters in a sec so if you jump onto the next one

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    the the other piece of what i wanted to talk through is is great so so we have infrastructure that provides low cost flexibility lots of you know lots of uh transaction throughput um it allows people to build great components but why does that matter and and that's where we get into the greater economy so if you jump to the next slide so the creator economy is basically a triangle when you when you when you look

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    into it so creators creators are at the top of course i mean creators creators is a pretty broad category it means anything from i mean i mean probably the most typical thing that would come to mind for someone is is some form of artist somebody who's creating intellectual property uh you know that that could be musicians that could be formal artists there's a huge realm around that but it's also and the the creator economy goes all the way out to the edges to the individual creators

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    um developers uh but but realistically it's anyone who's building something creating something with intellectual property and who wants to uh to take that out into the world um but creators creators don't exist on an island right and uh communities are like creators are fundamentally powered by their communities and communities are fundamentally often driven by by creators themselves as creators and

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    communities are very intertwined and then in order to make it an economy though for creators to get to become sustainable they obviously have to to make an income from what they're doing and that's where financial tools are actually important as well um and so the three pieces kind of work together you have creators who who you know the communities gather around creators and then there's an economic uh relationship where uh you know where

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    they're able to make themselves sustainable as creators and and even the communities make themselves sustainable as communities uh through through uh you know accessing financial tools so to expand on that in the next slide so the creator economy is basically perfect for for the blockchain space um and and i i don't think it's it's not a surprise to anybody that creators have had a really hard time monetizing uh and and making themselves sustainable during the course of of the internet right we

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    sort of went from real world scarcity to infinite replicability and then and then intellectual property really took a back seat and it became quite difficult uh for creators to find a way to make themselves sustainable and so the components of blockchain are actually almost uniquely suited to help creators and and to kind of reboot this this creative cycle and it starts with nfts

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    at the top so so each of the three components that i was talking about actually fit smoothly into one of those categories so the creators that sit at the top um nfps nfts actually create digital scarcity it actually it makes their ip something that they can that they can not just monetize but can monetize in really flexible ways to interface with the other other pieces of this

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    the the the community side of it is uh on the daos right so if you have highly flexible dows that can issue tokens you can configure uh how is this community going to going to spend its money but even in a bigger idea it actually allows communities to then become uh instantiated to then almost become incorporated as as entities so no longer does a creator have to uh have to sort of serve their facebook community their insta community their tik tock community and all of these you know and each of these communities are essentially owned

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    by platforms the communities themselves can then become a an entity in and of themselves they they actually they have a treasury uh which is the dao and and they can issue tokens to their members and then the creators can issue nfts into that treasury where the cash flows from those those nfts um there are a million different configurations where these things come together but it's an incredibly powerful loop when

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    you have creators who are actually able to interface directly with their communities to issue into their communities and then that aligns the communities behind the creators and allows allows this incredible virtuous cycle where communities are incentivized to go out and find great creators and help support them through the act of of creation and and all of this is powered by uh by nfts and by dows and then to bring things

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    back into the financial layer though you also need to have markets around these things right and that's where something like an amm comes in where you know these are tokens and so they do need to they do need to move around um nfts need marketplaces obviously you know at some point somebody's buying somebody selling and there's a whole host of financial tools and a financial ecosystem that exists to support that and and each again so it's each of the three pieces of this

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    triangle are things that are really uniquely powered by blockchain and the fact that they can work together uh is it that's what creates the cycle that makes the creator economy drive and so if you go to the next slide the way that this is has kind of come together is we saw defy summer in 2020 right like that that was when the power of d5 was kind of unlocked for the world and we saw what what happens when when all of these components can work

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    together and and people can assemble them permissionlessly and and you know sort of uh financial elements can move freely through the ecosystem and then uh what i call nft winter was we had the people drop we had uh uh we had a number of these these major nft drops and and i think for ev every day for seven days for an entire week nfts were on the front page of the new york times right

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    so nfts at the concept broke through to the mainstream but at the same time those nfts were very single player because they tended to be issued on chains like ethereum that that transaction fees really meant that it had to be these million dollar drops because you can't do more than that um and so the thing that ties this this whole cycle back together is is the community's arc and so really in the next call it's six six to 12 months uh

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    where where i i think i'm very excited is seeing what happens when you get these dows out there and and stop calling them dows and start calling them community treasuries and start helping communities actually uh instantiate themselves and then and then be a part of this of this triangle in this loop because that's what ties it all together and the reason why i wanted to start with um with the the components is just to show you

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    that uh for near like this is pretty much what near has actually been built to enable as i mean you know you saw open finance happening on on ethereum you've seen the single-player style of nfts happening on on ethereum and some other chains but really it's it's the flexibility of dropping in these dows and creating these and making these components able to interface with each other uh that

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    boots this cycle and and kind of takes it into the consumer world as opposed to the the collector world um so if you go to the next stage that's where i just wanted to pop it up into a little bit more of like what are the implications of this and so ultimately what this does is it drives a more open interconnected and consumer-empowered web and i want to i want to specifically note consumer empowered but i'll start with interoperability so if you go to the next one

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    um again i i don't want to steal too much thunder from alex but interoperability is a huge piece so if you have components sitting on top of the infrastructure interoperability is really important because these ecosystems don't exist in isolation and in the next couple of years i think that you're going to see a multi-chain world where every chain needs to be connected with the others and

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    mirrors is is no different and so we have we have a series of things that are being built in the ecosystem that help help that interconnection i'm sure there are lots of them out there that i don't know about but basically there are kind of three main areas one of them is bridges which allows assets to transfer to and from near not just assets but also function calls and things like that so it so kind of below the surface it it allows these chains to um to interface with each

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    other in a way that the consumer doesn't even necessarily have to think about and then you also have the ability to run new types of applications on on near and so that's where you get into something like how do you run evm on near on one side or how do you run app chains on your um like uh app chains based on sub substrate and things like that on your and there are separate efforts that are that are making that happen as well and

70. 30:50

    so the goal of interoperability and and the goal of of uh you know all of these all these individual initiatives and the way that they sum up is is by making near kind of this hub of interconnection and so if you go to the next slide i so the idea here is or i guess kind of where this leads is when everything's interconnected why should assets stay on one chain as opposed to another why should why should

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    developers build on one chain versus another and what it comes down to is is ux right because as as as people have seen with d5 people chase incentives right and so if the world is interconnected and somebody's throwing incentives on one side of the ecosystem then everything kind of sloshes over there for a while and then it sloshes back that's that's not really how the real world works uh and and consumers are actually the anchor of the real world and so the question has always been and

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    this is this is the question that started all of us on this journey of how are we building like how do we build the right technology to power this and why it's more than just about scalability it's about usability is that the cons you have to anchor everything in the consumers in the consumer web uh and so that's where that's why the creator economy is so exciting and why all of these flexible components and why the apps that are coming down the pipes are so exciting is because uh the

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    ability to reach those consumers is something that near almost uniquely enables like this is this is what near is for and this is why it's so cool it's because now people are starting to build apps that that have web 2 style experiences which means that communities for instance can adopt dowse in a way that they couldn't with other chains because it was kind of this esoteric difficult to use technology and now now there's the ability to just drop it into

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    a web 2 interface and allow people to to use their tokens in a way that feels normal and natural and familiar to them and so what that means is that if if the user experience and the ability to reach consumers lives on lives in the near ecosystem that's that that makes near almost like a gravity well where where other areas of the ecosystem want to sort of come into near and participate in that and so that really means that near becomes the

75. 32:59

    the center the hub of the interconnected blockchain ecosystem it doesn't mean it's the only blockchain but it's the one that that when people really want to build these apps that touch consumers and drive the consumer economy and drive the creator economy which is again uniquely enabled by what blockchain is giving it uh this is the place to start so so that's what i'm really excited about and if you go to the next if you go to the next step that's also kind of where where it

76. 33:24

    transitions into what's coming up um because you know a year ago to to october we were in this infrastructure building phase and obviously the infrastructure is never quite done but you go from infrastructure up into components and components are are really getting there like i said we we have uh sputnik version two uh is is being built out there uh uh so so dows are being innovated on nfts are pretty much all the launchers we could possibly need all the marketplaces that could possibly be needed are are in their uh in their

77. 33:56

    contract form right now uh and and then the next piece of it is really about interoperability and that has also started rolling out and that's going to be coming out quickly and then on top of that it just gets it just goes into launches right it's once you have once you have the infrastructure you have the components on top of it you have you have the ability to interface with other chains and all it is is it's just about the apps because then it's just having developers pull these pieces

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    together and turn them into apps and launch them and and you know once they launch them are there resources in the ecosystem to support it so if you go to the next stage and kind of lay it out almost like a roadmap there's so much cool stuff happening over over the course of this quarter and then into the end of the year that that basically fills in this road map that basically closes the loop and says this is this is how the creator economy exists and and and spins up and starts

79. 34:46

    building that flywheel on near right so it starts with these components most of the components have launched interoperability we have rainbow bridge that's launched edm and app chains are coming down the pipes so that's going to make near kind of the center of interoperability and then in terms of app launches and um all of those things there's a number that have already occurred and you're going to see more and more and more coming down the pipes and to support all that there's a whole host of resources

80. 35:12

    that are kind of waiting to be deployed uh the near grants program has has been ongoing now for for a full quarter uh it's deployed a significant amount of tokens and and uh fiat capital uh but there's a whole bunch of other stuff down on the resources side too and a lot of them are around community governance and sort of how how does how does the community begin to take hold of the resources that have been allocated uh in the genesis block for community

81. 35:37

    usage and so beginning to unlock that and seeing how that can be unlocked and deployed towards efforts that support number one number two and number three there uh all of this is is coming down the pipes in the next three months in the next six months in the next nine months uh through the end of the year so uh i don't want to go into the details of those i don't want to spoil the surprise but i guess just just to

82. 35:59

    to pop it back up um there's a lot to be excited about and i think it hasn't always been super clear like how do the pieces fit together and why why is near what is the infrastructure on you're good for and i really just wanted to provide that that note that the first step is the creator economy and and closing that loop between how do creators issue nfts into instantiated communities that can then they can then leverage their own nfts their own tokens their own treasuries and access financial tooling that creates

83. 36:33

    this incredible cycle that allows uh creators and communities to become sustainable and and to build amazing stuff and i think you see you've seen that the hints of that and i think that's what's coming down in the pipes and that's where the momentum is starting to build it's like it's like the wave that you can see out there that's coming so be excited uh please get involved in any of the development efforts that you need and i

84. 36:56

    guess just to dive in specifically to the interop piece of it i want to hand things off to alex chivchenko who led that project on the rainbow bridge and i appreciate your time thanks um hello guys i'm alex suchenko the product manager of the rainbow bridge project excited to be here excited to see all of your reactions and not a lot of questions unfortunately right now but maybe i will raise some some questions so please be active um recently

85. 37:28

    i believe many of you have heard about the rainbow bridge so i would like to start from from the question why and what's the reason for us uh to build a rainbow bridge um obviously ethereum is a leader among the second generation of the blockchains the blockchains with smart contracts um the idea of a smart contract was originated in ethereum actually so no doubt that ethereum as a first mover have had an advantage in it

86. 37:59

    as we see right now as eric already told us we we have seen during the course of a year the device summer and then the nft winter and the ethereum ecosystem is booming it is growing and it faces some problems the problems that were surfaced uh at the very very first comment to the satoshi nakamoto's a white paper for the bitcoin and the problem of the scalability this problem is there it is obvious because of it we have very high fees and ethereum blockchain um and uh

87. 38:39

    this this this is bad for two reasons first one for individual users who are using it it just means that they need to pay pretty high fees the other one is for the applications on the like the top level users are able to access these applications and unfortunately they are not able to scale though they potentially can't do this so that's the problem uh so if there is a problem let's just solve it

88. 39:10

    now uh and how we can solve it yeah and the solution to all of this as as you already heard from american id this is near blockchain however things are not working that simple in this way so there are lots of things already in ethereum and you know people just cannot move to near blockchain uh as simple as that so imagine that you are that you are moving from one country to another and imagine that you are moving from from germany to to japan and if i will tell you tell you that you

89. 39:42

    need to come to japan without anything without any money without any documents without even clothes so that will be a very very hard start for you in japan isn't it so we need to help people to do this we need to help we need to enable people to bring things from a theory mecca system to new york ecosystem and this is exactly what the rainbow bridge was designed to the project was started in uh in the

90. 40:16

    second in the fourth quarter of 2019 and to actually solve this simple problem and just to give you a sense of the size of the echo system uh i was looking at the d5 pulse about a couple of months ago and on the first february at the total value locked in the d5 was around 27 billion us dollars while today i was checking just before the call it is already 64. or even most almost 65.

91. 40:50

    so defy it still continues to boom defy grows and um well i can say that uh 65 billion us dollars is more than uh is is more than the cost of lots of companies in the world yeah so this is not a joke uh lots of value is locked there and we just cannot submit this stuff what is the renewal bridge if you if you want me to tell a one sentence uh definition of it this is a tool for ethereum and near interaction

92. 41:28

    it's not only for the movement of the tokens but in interaction in general this is very unique for the bridges because other bridges are focusing on transfers of the tokens while rainbow bridge architecture gives you an ability to to to do much more than only that and to give you a very very short outlook here i'm i will not go too deep in the in the technical uh depth of the project uh but just to give you some kind of sense how this stuff is working

93. 41:58

    um is the following so i'm going yeah i'm going to go a little bit into it um so the way how it works is that on ethereum we have a near client near light clients implemented and on here we have an ethereum like clients implemented and these clients periodically get the block headers from the other blockchains so on near and you have seen india was showing the slide with the the smart contracts that are having lots of transactions or the topmost

94. 42:32

    by transaction counts more contracts and you have seen their client.bridge.net this is the ethereum like client and near it constantly gets updates from the ethereum blockchain literally in couple of seconds after the ethereum block is generated this block uh is submitted to the near blockchain so on here we have the full state well not the full state but the current state of the ethereum blockchain we are able to access any

95. 43:02

    information that is stored on ethereum people are able to to get information from chained in oracle's for example people are able to get information from the state of the smart contracts and obviously people are able to bridge their tokens absolutely the same thing goes in the different direction with the difference that we cannot submit every near block to ethereum it just will take

96. 43:29

    lots of time and especially money because this is an ethereum transaction and it costs a lot and so that's why we are submitting near blocks only periodically once every 12 hours at the moment um and on top of that infrastructure the thing that can be built is the the connectors to to the this core infrastructure and these connectors actually implement uh the thing well the actual thing that is bridged either it is a talking itself

97. 44:01

    or an en fungible token or nft or potentially a voting of a dow that is located on near this thing can be transferred to the ethereum blockchain so to tell to to to give you a perspective on the on the current state of affairs um let me let me tell you multiple things and actually show you the things yeah so the bridge is live on the main net since 15th of march so it is already more than

98. 44:31

    one month of operations of the bridge on the mainland before before this bridge was uh deployed to the main it has alpha some of the partners have tested it and even before this it was located on the test and for a uh for a lot for lots of time and the most important the phase there was the uh was the the rainbow hackathon rainbow british hackathon happened which happened on october uh last year

99. 45:00

    and even before this the bridge was verified by the by the security company and we've got the audit of the bridge code at that moment in time since then we have fixed some of the issues and and i refactored a little bit the code but the majority of it remained absolutely the same so uh there are multiple things that are coming together with the bridge itself so there is a front end to the bridge

100. 45:31

     where you are you will be able to bridge your ear c20s uh there is a faucet created specifically for ethereum users uh so they are able to create their own near accounts with a little bit of fun in there so that's that's super cool uh there are some analytics um around the bridge i will show you in a second and also a very important thing is that wallet near world now shows the nap 141 balances and nap141 stands for the fungible token standard

101. 46:02

     so uh enough token let's go directly into the demo let's see how all of this stuff is working so i want to start with showing to you the front end of the rainbow bridge so this is it you can access it at ethereum.bridgetoner.org and i already started the transfer here of 17 usdt this is obviously an awful amount because uh for for the ethereum side transactions i already paid like

102. 46:34

     several times more than this amount uh however you're still able to transfer any amount of tokens yeah uh so here the transfer is at the point when uh the ethereum side of the transfer is done so the transfer was initiated on the ethereum site and then there were 20 confirmations of the ethereum blocks because as you know ethereum block blockchain doesn't have finality so you need to wait some blocks to build on top

103. 47:07

     of the of the block with your transactions to to be sure that your transaction is final and is there so the only thing that is left is for me to submit a proof uh of the fact that i was locking 17 usdt on the on the ethereum side and to issue 17 near usdt or and usdt on the near side so this is an ordinary near transaction i'm just clicking here that i would like to do it at the moment what what happens the bridge frontend redirects me to the near wallet and near wallet uh shows me some

104. 47:53

     information about the transaction i'm a low in this transaction and as you know the transactions on the near blockchain are taken around one to two seconds uh to finalize so this happens really really fast and as we can see that the the transfer was successful or like something everything was successful and you can see here that here is my transfer of seven of 17 usdt it is completed and uh yeah so i literally finished the

105. 48:29

     transfer if you want to to start the transfer then you need to choose the direction of the transfer i'm just just show you a little bit of the ui and you are literally able to to transfer any erc20 android or any c20 token so here are there are some some of the tokens that are listed there without like we have put it we have put these tokens here but you're able to enter any token

106. 48:56

     address and then you will be able to bridge this token this is this is how the transfer is initiated now the cool stuff about the near wallet is that well i can see my my usdt here at the right directly in the near wallet as you can see uh here is the the address of fn usd contract uh but i see here the balance so that's pretty cool i i believe that this is not the correct balance because i need to refresh the the page uh 157 and i believe we need to add 17 more

107. 49:34

     so we will be able to see yeah 174. yeah so how cool is that in the official wallet you have the support of all of the fungible tokens that are available on your blockchain that's super cool and now what i can do with these tokens well i can i can go to the refinance for example or which is the amm solution and i already have put on the refinance a little bit of a usdt and for example i can i can i can swap it into die while the bridge dies so for example if i will will try to

108. 50:13

     to exchange 50 usdt it gives me 450 usdt 47.8 die which is not that bad deal but not that good also but just for the sake of showing you how this thing is working um i'm just i'm just going to do the swap so as you can see again there is a redirection to the near wallet this there are some information about the transaction um allowing this transaction and again enjoying the speed of the near blockchain just in a matter of seconds the transaction is completed

109. 50:56

     and uh my uh and as you can see the swap was successful actually i i'm able to see what was happening there and this link okay something is not working with explorer yeah unfortunately but see well it literally doesn't matter i see that the balance of the usdt went down and the balance of the die the balance that i was having there went up so that's pretty cool so literally what ethereum people that

110. 51:26

     are here on the call can do uh is they can create a near wall through faucet actually i would like to show you where where you are able to to do this uh so if i log out from the bridge if i look out to from my from my near account then you will be able to see that if you need a near account create one here this is the link to the faucet the faucet is hosted by paras so you are able to use it uh most probably we're getting some signals that we need to to make this in

111. 52:03

     a bigger font or something but uh yeah if you if you if you're watching this just go here create your new account so how cool is that you are able to create your new account you are able to bridge some of your tokens that you have on there go to ref finance and swap it into whatever you you want and for example you can swap it into wrap near which is the something like wrapped

112. 52:26

     ethereum and you can get your near tokens so i really really enjoy having the already this apps here on the near blockchain and and have an ability to use this uh but besides refinance the thing that we already have is also a pulse market so for example with the bridge tokens people are able to create prediction markets and look here there is a there is a prediction martin for market for today's

113. 52:59

     match in between manchester city and psg which is nominated in die and that's cool you are able to go there okay you are able to go here and well what i can do and what all of you can do is to is to buy or is to predict the result of this of this match i'm not a big fan of football so sorry well not going to vote because unfortunately i do not know what is the probability of manchester city within the psg and the very last thing that i would like to show to you is some stats now

114. 53:39

     actually i'm going to show you the etherscan account and these 23 ddd 3e is actually the connector account uh the connector of the render bridge that holds all of all of the tokens that are breached at the moment to to the near blockchain and you can see what what you can see the stats on this we can go here and see that there are already more than 663 000 worth of us dollars breached from

115. 54:12

     ethereum to near and this uh this this number is continuously growing and you can see that the the biggest demand is tether and then we we've got wrapped ethereum and dye and so on there are lots of information here and uh some of the some of the there are lots of very interesting tokens that have been bridged um for example we have 20 matic talking on our blockchain which is cool so coming back

116. 54:43

     to the to the deck um coming back to the deck like near blockchain works better than uh than google google presentations that's cool so coming back here i would like to take a couple of minutes for the outlook of what is going to happen in future and uh very simple thing we would like to enable all of the near ecosystem to be able to work with ethereum define applications so pretty soon we are going to add an additional feature to the rainbow bridge

117. 55:28

     and ability to bridge near token directly to ethereum as an erc20 as you can see this opens in unlimited applications for the near token and this is going to be well from my point of view this is going to be a game changing feature for for all of the new york community so a small thing a small connector and it gives us lots of lots of value but however it it is it is not the the most important thing which i believe is coming because the most important one is the

118. 56:10

     launch of the aurora project and as eric said aurora is a joint project in between uh rainbow bridge and the evm so literally this project is about having an ability to launch ethereum applications on your blockchain and an ability to bridge the liquidity so here i'm like wrapping up the need of the ethereum ecosystem to scale now an aurora project is going to satisfy this need and is going to give an ability to people to make use of the

119. 56:51

     features of the newer blockchain like low transaction fees and fast confirmations and allow to adapt to scale their businesses so um so buckle up for the aurora release it's going to be pretty soon uh and we have lots of lots of interesting announcements here with regard to aurora and with regard to many other things that are happening in the blockchain um so here i'm going to stop thanks everybody for uh for watching us and being active with the questions and

120. 57:31

     this is exactly the time when we are going to go directly into the questions we are going to answer them so eric ilia please join me thank you alex awesome yeah just uh before we dive into questions just uh for the slide i mean obviously if you're here you probably know about challenges already but there's plenty of kind of places to follow to like the development as well as uh to participate in the conversation in the

121. 58:02

     community on the governance forum and also if you're a founder or building into building things to join the grants program and open web collective so yeah let's uh let's start with questions let's see what's our first question the one i see here is about yeah about the displaying of nfts will there be a wallet display for nfts can someone build one place i actually was just looking there's a project in near dash apps

122. 58:45

     called nft gallery and then i also know we have uh gave a grant to another project also building it so yeah i think that there's at least like a couple places uh that are happening for this outside of a wallet uh i would say probably like short term i mean obviously wallet team knows best and you can check out their roadmap on the nearer roadmap here but uh but probably nfts are kind of down the pipe as there's a lot of a lot of other

123. 59:17

     functionality but yeah i think like stay tuned on on twitter and other places for the galleries to kind of to launch if if you're into code you can you know try running this say let's see the next question about ideos yeah that's a good question uh there is a few projects as far as i know in the ecosystem that are building ideos that uh really really trying to kind of shape this

124. 59:57

     uh i think they will be talking about this as kind of it comes to fruition but yeah i think kind of having a platform for offerings is definitely important for the ecosystem and i can see community community need and also people building it so let's stay tuned for that when will ref 2.0 happen that's an interesting question again probably question for ref team but my understanding is

125. 1:00:31

     rev 1.0 it didn't happen yet so probably uh in a few in a few months after 1.0 launches so if i if i would speculate yeah i think like graph right now is still in the beta uh kind of as as they are testing out how everything works and uh i think like as as there's more folks joining the community and more folks contributing the pace of kind of innovation there will accelerate as well

126. 1:01:03

     interpretability with some storage protocol that's actually a really cool question we actually have uh in we have this place for uh where you can find like kind of requests for grants and kind of ideas and this is one of the ideas there so if anybody wants to work on that this would be amazing uh and uh i would i would love to kind of you know if you want to discuss that how to structure it i think there's uh there's a lot of cool things to do with file coin and and

127. 1:01:35

     there is some research to do how to do it with rv uh actually i posted a way to potentially do it through off chain workers um because rv actually like it doesn't have a like client and so it might be easier to just have like off-chain workers kind of oracle style yeah and stuff like that is really good for playing for grants as well yeah exactly when can people transfer from wallet to another near wallet about bridged erc20 alex do you want to take that

128. 1:02:17

     uh yeah so as far as i understand what a team uh has a priority uh of this feature they're working pretty hard on this and uh well it seems like it's just maybe a couple of weeks from from the moment of time when people will be able to do the transfers of fungible tokens in their wallet so i'm not going to um to promise you this but it it seems for me that the world team is working on this already for some time

129. 1:02:48

     and almost ready to do this to to deliver this yeah i mean if you want to learn kind of the wallets a roadmap uh i linked this they have a repo is with kind of things that are cute and kind of links to current development and everything so you can keep track and maybe you know vote with emojis for things that are more have more community support yeah probably one additional question to

130. 1:03:20

     myself when when can where can i learn more about the technical details of how the ethereum bridge works so the best place to go is the blog and there is a in-depth technical article about rainbow bridge and that is written by by max so there are lots of information there and after you have read it the best place to consult with is going to be the repositories i think this yet another question when can bridge support transfer from

131. 1:03:54

     ethereum yeah so that's that's that's a hard question um because of multiple reasons well first of all the bridge team now is focusing on aurora and uh as you can as you can imagine um the reason why the bridge team is working with aurora is that well you need to be able to bridge tokens and to the evm runtime from the near run time so rainbow bridge is the project that enables you to to do the transfers from ethereum to near native runtime and now we will have yet well an additional

132. 1:04:35

     runtime the evm runtime and we still need to be able uh the transfer to transfer things inside of the evm runtime so that's why the bridge team is working hard here too right now so we are focusing on this thing and then as i said uh we are going to to release the near transfers well and after this we we will be able to to do the to do the the nft connector however anyone is able to build the nft connector so nobody is

133. 1:05:08

     and nothing is holding you from it uh the very important feature of the rainbow bridge is that it is completely trustless and uh it is like composable so people can build their own connectors if you want something for your dab to be able to transfer from from ethereum to near well you just can build a couple of smart contracts and deploy them and everything will be there so this is a very convenient you can you can think of a rainbow bridge as a

134. 1:05:38

     service that helps you prove then from the information on the other blockchain so that's cool as far as i understand matt lockheer is working on the nft connector um so shout out to him uh he is very very active and probably many of you know him um yeah the only the one the very last thing that i want to mention with regard to nfts is that there are multiple standards for nfts and there are some nfts that are not obeying any standards so for example cryptokitties and

135. 1:06:10

     cryptopunks they are not your c721 compatible so that's why in order to transfer these tokens you will need to build a separate connector so nfts are not that simple uh in comparison to fungible tokens also potentially it will take a little bit of time yeah eric and probably one to you yeah what's the plan to grow the number of creators i'm near you're muted if you're talking i think yeah

136. 1:06:54

     i mean i think that this is this is where we get to that intersection of what's bubbling up from the community versus what are we able to do with our with our own resources so i think i'm gonna defer a little bit um because there's some announcements that are coming up uh so pending on that one a little bit i would say keep an eye out on the blog keep an eye out on the on the telegram

137. 1:07:23

     awesome well this is it for today they had a really kind of uh update from one year anniversary to creators on near and beyond and what he does on a bridge i hope this was informative and we'll learn something we have more amazing stuff coming out so please tune in as we're going to try to do this town halls more often and kind of engaging more of the community members and if you want to contribute follow again follow these links there's a plenty of stuff going on across all this is a community of the

138. 1:08:01

     governance forum the twitter and also the discord and telegram so new chat and telegram link so we'd love to see you there thanks everyone