NEAR Foundation Town Hall - December 13, 2023

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

1. 0:00

   Thank you all so much for being here. Good morning, good afternoon. Um, thank you for joining us for the last NER Foundation town hall of 2023. Super exciting. It was definitely an eventful year for NER. Um, but I'm definitely even more excited for what's in store for 2024. Uh, today's town hall will be focused around like a year in review.

2. 0:18

   Uh, we'll hear some exciting things from hubs and partners um, as well as from the ecosystem about what happened in 2023. We'll also learn a little bit about what to expect in 2024. Um, I want to, you know, once again, thank you all for being here, taking the time.

3. 0:31

   Definitely share this out and without further ado. Let's get into it. I'll go ahead and, uh, hand things over to IA for an introduction. Okay. Hope everyone is uh, excited about upcoming holidays. I see Marcus is already in very festive outlook.

4. 0:59

   So yeah, I just wanted to give like a quick what is open web um introduction. So if we go forward the our kind of standard definition of internet where all people control their assets, data and power of governance. And I I do want to kind of expand a little bit on this um because we say this a lot, but for me really, you know, when we say control our own assets, right, it's about

5. 1:33

   making sure that the assets are yours, not the banks, right? Not the middleman. And I'm I'm originally from Ukraine. We had over 100 banks who have failed in 10 years lived through hyperinflation. My grandparents savings you know there's still a book which has a record of how much savings they have but uh it doesn't exist anymore. But even in US right we had two banks failing this year uh where you know it went from at least for a while for for a bit people thought that

6. 2:04

   everything they have there is not uh is not there anymore. For data, it's really about, you know, the kind of everything we right now use, it's it's actually getting used kind of by the companies to make profit. And this is kind of the general uh tradeoff that we all adopted uh in the new internet paradigm. But it's in general leads to this kind of black mirror episode, right? where corporations are controlling more and more what we do through this data and in

7. 2:45

   this emergence of AI world the you know is this going to just even continue more and we're going to have intelligence kind of as a ser like service of intelligence right being controlled by few companies and that you know means that like they will be able to in kind of influence and uh you know define how we going to be interacting with the world and again this is where we're trying to build something that's uh is opposing that and is giving

8. 3:22

   ability for everyone to be able to have direct say and I think governance is something we don't talk that much but there's a general challenge of principal agent problem where uh when we select somebody to do things on our behalf, right? Be that representative in the government or uh a kind of agent that you know does investments on our behalf or something else. Like there's always a problem that that agent has their own motivation and that motivation drives uh different

9. 3:57

   results and like they have self-interest. And so kind of what we're trying to really achieve here is resolve this challenge and create a way to have a direct say in the decisions, right? And obviously not in a way where like you need to decide on every single small decision, but actually automating that. So kind of those are pieces really coming together in this vision is is the self- sovereignty is ability for individuals to really kind of control

10. 4:30

    the things around them and influence the things that they participating and communities they participate. So if we go to the next slide the what we're trying to do is to become the entry point. We want the play like we want to be the place where people come to open web experience it. They are able to interact with not just near blockchain but also all the other pieces of the open web ecosystem.

11. 4:58

    And to do that uh if we go to the next slide uh one important part is chain abstraction is this idea that although um you know near blockchain itself is a very useful uh kind of protocol it allows to build applications it scales it has a lot of uh capabilities.

12. 5:20

    The challenge though is that um there will be more blockchains and rollups and other kind of different infrastructure uh providers which are running their applications and uh zero knowledge is interestingly enables what I call kind of unification of security where you can run a single server that you know provides proofs uh of the execution and and it's as kind of secure as if you ran it on, you know,

13. 5:55

    hundreds of thousands of machines uh kind of validating the same compute and near is from the start been designed for this idea of chain abstraction because on near every account is a separate chain or a rollup and we really package them in a way to abstract out the um the blockchain and like abstract out all this complexity of different interactions of different chains and shards etc under

14. 6:27

    the hood. And so that's why we been starting to build this um blockchain operating system is really to bring it out of just kind of this near blockchain but to the whole web ecosystem and kind of really bring this chain abstraction to everyone.

15. 6:45

    So kind of I mean you all seen this uh stack of protocols kind of data layer, identity layer and application layer uh that blockchain operating system is comprised of and really all of these pieces need to work together to abstract the blockchain to provide the user experience to the user that is truly um not not requires user to understand the details and infrastructure and switch networks and uh bridge things but

16. 7:17

    actually just use the applications they want. And one of the pieces that we really kind of excited and looking forward if we go to next slide uh all right before that so the on the protocol side right um the there's like a few pieces that are important one of them is as more kind of this rollups are spinning up an ecosystem and the way to think about it is those rollups are uh

17. 7:47

    you know home servers right somebody can spin up your own server for your own application. Uh versus near is more like a cloud where you know you can launch your application and there's like number of data centers everywhere and you know the new data centers being built like we're resharding and adding one more shard um to kind of expand always have more capacity for the network uh in the network um as people are building more

18. 8:10

    applications. But at the same time this um kind of home servers rollups need ability to kind of connect to the rest of the network and uh and to do that they need to provide data availability and they need to kind of set their execution have crosschain messaging all of the things that near blockchain has been also doing for the kind of our internal rollups the accounts on near and so we offering kind of all that uh opened up all that offering to them Uh

19. 8:42

    but if we go to the next slide, the kind of one of the core pieces that we want to introduce is this idea that if you use near account, you'll be able to transact on other chains. So the idea that you will have addresses on other chains that you can interact through um by pretty much sending transactions on near and this is similar conceptually to when you log into Coinbase you have addresses on other chains that you can

20. 9:12

    deposit funds to but uh it's non-custodial and it allows you to actually interact with apps there and kind of that is probably the biggest piece that needs to come in to really uh enable this chain abstraction idea to truly kind of remove the need for a user to actually switch networks, bridge and can use kind of single view application like dabdab and others and just inter kind of interact with whatever apps are there. And so I think like kind of one of this is one of the core pieces that

21. 9:51

    um you know kind of the teams are working on in the new ecosystem to really bring it all together and make kind of this transition that um we working on which is it's not just about kind of the near layer one which it is you know powerful enables a lot of things but also it kind of opens up the whole ecosystem in web 3 to the users to be able to participate and and be active with.

22. 10:24

    So, uh yeah, I've been doing some Twitter spaces. So, we did one with bankless as well as we did a retro on uh neat and uh sharing more about the phase two of sharding with Bowen and Eric. And I'm going to be doing weekly uh tour spaces now. Um unless kind of uh can't make it, but obviously we'll try to get more people to participate. Then we have one tomorrow uh that I think Marcus just shared um to talk about DA and and chain abstraction in more depth. So I invite everyone to join.

23. 11:03

    All right. Protocol update next. Uh could you go to the next slide? Yeah. So just want to provide uh some update on the work that we're doing on the on the protocol. Uh kind of talk about this already at the uh Twitter space last week. Uh but know that not everyone was here. Uh so just want to uh reiterate uh some of the things we're working on uh and uh uh our plans for the next year. Um so uh I know that you

24. 11:44

    know people expressed concerns uh uh after what happened with the needing uh couple weeks ago. Um so we are actually going to uh implement uh actually release the resharding in the next uh Neo core release. Uh so what this does is that um uh it will split the largest shard on year today. So shards three were uh both the cosmos contract and also the sweat contract reside on uh into two separate shards. Uh so I mean

25. 12:17

    obviously this helps with more capacity and also reduce the uh the state the size of the state uh in SH 3 but also this is um for us to test our uh resharding approach in case that we want to use it in the future as well. Uh and then uh obviously that's not the only thing we're working on. uh looking forward into uh 2024 um the stious validation work that I talked about near uh is going to be released uh in early 2024 um and this would allow us to complete

26. 12:50

    the original phase two of sharding go where like uh it's completely sharted system uh both transaction state uh proc uh both transaction processing state are sharded um and also st validation because it allow us to hold the state in memory we also to significantly improve the performance of each uh single shard.

27. 13:10

    Uh and that would uh give the network a lot more capacity. Um and you know in case there's a next um uh big load on mainet uh it should be handled perfectly fine. Um and in January we also plan to uh to launch this uh uh this testing network uh specifically for the stress validation launch so that people can come in and send a lot of transactions.

28. 13:36

    Uh we may even incentivize people to send a lot of transactions just to see how the uh network would perform under under that uh huge load. Um and finally uh um kind of given what uh happened during the the needs uh minting we know that um while the kind of the protocol worked um in a way as expected the the expected way is not necessarily the most optimal. Uh so we will work on um congestion control and then figuring out how we can allow people to prioritize

29. 14:06

    transactions so that um you know in case of congestion they can still send their transactions if for example if they want to pay uh a bit more and also figuring out how to ensure that um uh we we localize uh the impact of the congestion a bit more so that um if like one short is congested or like if one contract is very hot it doesn't cause the gas price to rise globally um so that um you know

30. 14:32

    people doing other things on other unrelated shards would not be affected. Uh so yeah that's some of the things that we're uh working on. We're excited about um yeah so that's the update from me. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you Bowen for that. Um cool. So on the in the KPIs section just wanted to do a quick overview of of how we did uh this past year.

31. 14:57

    And so to start with uh the main metric, our northstar uh for 2023 was monthly active accounts. We came into the year uh just under 1 million monthly active accounts, closer to 800,000. And we are about to finish the year uh over 5 million monthly active accounts. So that's roughly a 6x increase from the beginning of the year to where we are today, which is absolutely incredible to see uh such amazing growth. And as Ilia

32. 15:21

    mentioned, we are uh consistently the one of the most active chains across across any um in in the entire space. And uh two big reasons for this uh both Sweat and Kai Kai. Um so Sweat we launched uh about a year ago and Kai Kai more recently. Um but collectively they represent at this point probably closer to three three and a half million monthly active accounts between them. So Near is home to two of the biggest consumer apps in all of web 3. So it's incredible to see both of those products

33. 15:53

    and applications continue to grow and get mainstream adoption coming to coming to New York. And then looking at the top 10 um apps across all all chains uh looking at the past 30 days of data we have four of the of the top 10. So, Kai Ching and Sweat plus also Pipe Lair and Play Ember round out four out of the top 10 across all blockchains. So, that's incredible incredible to see see our apps growing.

34. 16:22

    I mentioned this earlier. Um, on a daily basis, we now are seeing over 1 million daily active accounts up from around 150,000 in the beginning of the year. So, that's like a 7x increase in daily active counts. And if you look at a handful of of of peers, you see that we are just growing faster and faster and outpacing nearly everyone else on a daily on a daily basis. So again, amazing to see such such active

35. 16:46

    engagement uh with with the with the blockchain. And then in terms of transactions, yeah, I mean another insane year that we have seen. Um and we had our peak a couple weeks ago with over 10 million transactions on chain. And again, we're consistently now seeing uh million to two million transactions every single day, which is insane compared to where we were a year ago. So again, amazing job to to everyone here and the rest of the ecosystem for driving uh mainstream adoption. And now you're you'll get to

36. 17:16

    hear from a lot of the the projects and hubs that are making this all all a reality. Awesome. Just want to say thank you all for being here. Uh we can segue into Banyan. Uh Cameron, hey everybody. Uh how's it going? My name is Cameron Dennis. Uh I know a lot of you, but if in case you don't know me, uh worked at your foundation for about two years. Spun out in the last year to start the banyan collective to help scale near in the United States as well as you know fill some of the the gaps in the ecosystem and would love to

37. 17:46

    kind of just tell you what we been up what we've been up to in the last year. So click next slide. So yeah, as I kind of highlighted uh our main objective is to scale near the US and we sort of focus on two things besides that is like Voss Devx because in the last year Boss was launched and you know for us to really scale near in the United States uh we want to work with a lot of different ecosystems and to do so we actually really need better developer experience and so we've had a

38. 18:14

    focus on improving the boss devx and the second thing is uh public goods infrastructure because if we don't have sustain ustainable pathways for founders and builders to get money, then we're going to have a really hard time scaling here in the United States. And so, uh, we're really trying to build a lot of the solutions that we need and that other regional hubs are going to need as well. Um, so yeah, I think, uh, shot will tell you more about what we've been

39. 18:37

    building with potluck soon, but if you click the next slide, I don't have that much time, so I'm going to run through it. Uh, so we're really focused on this is for Q1 and Q2 kind of first half. uh we've been we worked closely with DevHub to recommend some projects uh to you know one help uh essentially fill their their pipeline of of candidates for the owners of minor wallet astrodo and uh

40. 19:00

    the near explorer so we work closely with builders we incubated a project called jutsu this is a IDE for boss developers it's in the browser um we you know did a lot of stuff we worked with near foundation very closely we organized a lot of events and workshops and meetups and we sponsor hackathons and run hacker houses. We did in Q uh first half the year uh ran the hacker houses at um ETH Denver and consensus in a Austin. We realized that hacker houses are an amazing way to actually get

41. 19:30

    builders to ship for the hackathon. Uh the uh actually I think like over 90% of all of the people who won your prizes at ETH Denver were in our hacker house. And so that is a really good signal to the the value of these things. um you can actually get a lot more sort of bang for your buck if you do a good job coordinating people. And then we really want to support the wallet ecosystem.

42. 19:51

    This is again like if we're talking about the entry point to web 3, it starts with somebody creating a wallet. And you know the reason why I joined near early on is because uh it's a flexible account model and the easy uh opportunity it has to to onboard people.

43. 20:04

    So we really want to make sure that the wallet ecosystem is robust. So uh we applied for a grant through MetaMask uh to build MetaMask snaps and then gave that grant to Here wallet and the whole point here was to not only like bridge gaps between the Ethereum and your ecosystems but um also see opportunities to help support the wallet builders. And so we run uh almost I think it's bi-weekly uh wallet builder calls just to give the builders a space to kind of

44. 20:28

    coordinate around missing gaps in the wallet ecosystem. Uh this is during a really kind of turbulent year for near uh turbulent year for near wallets. uh given that there was the wallet selector that was dropped and the transition from on your wallet so for for wallet.org to you know the the selector. So we built a feature list to help rank wallets in the selector. We do a bunch of other like miscellaneous stuff in Q in first half.

45. 20:54

    uh we built a lot of like internal reporting and systems for our CRM and uh cycles for uh near foundation because honestly we have not uh done this before at scale like we need a better way to report uh what we do and so yeah this is kind of first half of the year managed a ton of Twitter accounts uh support the NDC a lot uh this is kind of you know the birth of boss and so we ran near.org/gateways /gateways to try to

46. 21:19

    make it easier for people to uh you know explore the different gateways and create a bunch of content. If you go to our YouTube at Bay Collective uh you'll see a bunch of the stuff that we do. We try our best to and shout out to to Shot and the team for uh creating evergreen content consistently. So click next slide.

47. 21:37

    This is uh Q3 and Q4 second half. Uh we are this quarter was primarily these half is primarily focused on getting new builders. We onboarded around 126 new developers to your ecosystem. Got a ton of different quality components shipped.

48. 21:51

    Uh we launched potluck to sustain uh developers and more open source developers given that you know bare markets are a hard time for people to make money. So we want to create a way for people to give direct donations and quadratic funding. Uh my background has been uh working closely with academia and blockchain clubs and so uh worked with DevHub and connected them to over like 35 different university clubs to help start their new campus program. Uh

49. 22:16

    working very closely with uh James and the Build Dow crew. James is uh you'll probably see in the next slide that he is a Devril with Banyan. Uh he fortunately is actually going to be spinning out to run this thing called Build Dow which is really cool. And the whole goal here is to you know again create a more sustainable pathway for builders to receive funding for the near ecosystem and and beyond uh supporting things like boss docs and dev tools and

50. 22:39

    everything sponsored a lot of hackathons ran a lot of events this sort of the the near builder support but at the same time NDC was getting stood up and we really want NDC to succeed because um if they do then we're going to have a much easier time sort of spinning out the communities. Uh to be totally frank, I don't want to run a huge company and organization where we have near Austin, Seattle, Chicago, DC, Miami, XYZ. I want

51. 23:04

    to spin out local communities that um are self-sustaining and have solid leadership. And so we really see the NDC as a great sort of landing point for them. And uh so we wanted to make sure the NDC was solid. So we actually are proud to say that we uh referred the most valid voters uh to the NDC. In the first election, we recommended over 16 people to nominate themselves. A lot of them did get elected. Um, we maintain

52. 23:28

    the NDC gateway and the GWG and uh, you know, SH and the team created the RFP book for uh, the NC product book, which is pretty cool, or the RFP for the book. And, um, sort of going back to the wallet ecosystem side, we work very closely with these wallets to get them to support the wallet selector. We created this thing called onboard DAO uh that eventually spun out of Banyan and is now uh living solely in the NDC which is really cool and the whole point here

53. 23:53

    is to take kind of take over the uh role that we were having supporting the your wallets. Um so they got at least approved for funding for the NDC and then um we are we ran the account abstraction hacks or track at near con we ship near snaps to mainet it is live today it's not uh super useful so we want to make sure that uh we improve the functionality before we go very public with an announcement with MetaMask and everything and then a bunch of miscellaneous things uh we ran a summit

54. 24:23

    with uh this amazing person called ERA uh in San Francisco it was called edge intelligence or edge summit. And the whole point here was to gather the top researchers and uh engineers in the AI space in San Francisco to help sort of seed a narrative for the near ecosystem and and real products to be built uh around running uh super intelligence on local devices and having that interact

55. 24:47

    with blockchains. And so uh ran that in SF in September. That was really cool. And we built a bunch of stuff uh shout out to shot and the team kind of working with him. uh built a telegram wallet, a bunch of stuff like mint based functionality on bots. Uh running all these DO tooling calls and NFT calls.

56. 25:03

    Really just trying to be like ecosystem management is the way I frame it. Um so yeah, and we also we run newsletters primarily in SF New York. Uh super proud to say that our open rate is above 45%. Which is insane. Uh so just trying to grow near in the United States and in 2024 hope to scale beyond San Francisco, New York. uh looking at Austin and Seattle for the next hubs.

57. 25:26

    More to come. You'll be hearing more from us and uh hopefully the products that actually come out of Banyan because ultimately the banyan tree, it's a tree by the way if anyone's curious. And the whole point is the roots grow from the top and if the trunk is healthy, the roots grow and we create a forest of trees. So if our tree dies, other trees exist. So um yeah, that's the that's the TLDDR of what we did for the Earth. Oh, and this is the team. Wouldn't be possible without them. They're

58. 25:51

    incredible. Um, shout out to especially the community managers Joanna and Alejandra and SF New York, James on Devril, Lachland on engineering, uh, web3 plug on the head of decentralization, and none of that would be possible without Jerry who is keeping the ship afloat dayto-day with management and ops. So, shout out to the team and yeah, if you want to stay in touch, uh, Twitter is not near hacks. Uh,

59. 26:15

    Twitter is actually banyan near. And something that we like to say is a quote from Belgi is win and help win. If we win, we help you win. If you win, help someone else win. And uh if you want to check out all the different support channels that we don't manage all of them, but we sort of aggregated them at yourbuilders.com.

60. 26:35

    Awesome. Thanks so much, C. Uh Cameron, amazing stuff you guys are doing on the banyan side. Uh next up, I think JLo had a little bit of issues with her flight, so I think we have um David stepping in for Vietnam. David, are you here? Uh yeah, I'm here. Can you hear me?

61. 26:51

    Okay. So yeah, uh I'm David. We're from the near Vietnam hub. So today I'm going to be sharing a little bit about some of the highlights that we had over the uh course of the year. So we'll start with some of the events that we hosted as well as some KPI metrics regarding our brand growth and some of the educational programs that we run along with the uh uh events that we host uh throughout the years as well.

62. 27:14

    Yep. So um across uh 2023 we ran a total of uh six university tours across various IT university in uh Vietnam particularly in Ho Chi Min City. Uh we also run a lot of offline uh and online meetups. So two we did in uh Hanoi city and Ho Chi Min City. Uh one of them is uh success strategies for next cycle. I think Eliia was also there for that. Uh and both of these were leading up to the big event

63. 27:40

    for the year which was near impact 2023 which uh took place around uh September. And we also did other speakership at various events uh across Vietnam as well. Next. Yeah. So this is one of the picture of the uni tour that uh that we did at the university of information and technology. Uh Elia was here also uh introducing to students about uh the boss. So we had a lot of these units uh throughout between June and August to kind of onboard a lot of people to

64. 28:08

    register as well as for the hackathon that we did in tandem with the event. Yep. And this was the uh success strategy cycle uh for next cycle uh event that we did at Hongang University as well uh in the time frame that Allayia was there as well.

65. 28:27

    And yeah, the biggest highlight of the year was uh near impact. We had 25,000 people register for it across two days. We had over 20,000 attendees. We had 200 plus media and press coverage, over 5 million social interactions and impression uh 600 uh engagement. And we had over 5,000 developers participating in both the boot camps leading on to the uh coding challenges as well as the hackathons that we did uh in parallel

66. 28:50

    with the event as well as over 20 uh winning teams for the hackathon for a price pool of 2.7 billion VND which is around 110,000 uh US dollar and distributed quite a lot of gifts throughout the event and we also brought a few to uh uh near as well in this spin. Yeah.

67. 29:09

    Yeah. In terms of KPIs for branding and growth, we had over 200% increase in terms of our Twitter followers. Uh and 10% increase from KPI from our Telegram community between quarter 4 and quarter 1. Yeah. And in terms of the near community grants programs, we provided uh we'll be providing four community meetups grants between now and uh next quarter. We had 35 application form and the first programs that we're running is in the 16th of December. So in just a couple of days. So JLo that was supposed to be

68. 29:39

    here, she's currently flying over to Hanoi to kind of set up with the team right now. Yeah. In terms of education, so before I did mention that we did run boot camps as well. So leading up to near pack, we had a total of four boot camps. So this was why we kind of went to across very use tours to kind of promote this for the hackathon. So we did one for near and boss. This is the one where we had

69. 30:03

    the most participation coming from because we were already doing these courses uh beforehand in the beginning of the year. But we also did some for solidity, JavaScript and Rust just to be inclusive of all the others as well. Uh yep. And yeah, just to kind of summarize, uh we did a combination of various workshop lectures. We work with universities to kind of bring these programs into schools. And at the end of these programs, typically what we do is also a mini hackathon to kind of invi incentivize teams or kind of like uh

70. 30:34

    newbies that are into the space to kind of explore and then we would do a pitching demo day usually at these university or various uh uh developer meetups location. Yep. and some of the traction number from the educational programs. We see uh close to 3,000 to 3,500 building on uh boss and uh near and over 7,000 onchain transactions and about 20 to 30 different projects coming out of these

71. 31:02

    uh hackathons as well as educational initiatives that we did. Yeah. And last but not least, we also are working with university right now to kind of carry out uh a lot of our initiatives and this is has been a core part of our strategy is to kind of focus on the education and mostly primarily uh focusing on working with university partners. So we've kind of signed with three universities to kind of bring these educational programs into these lectures as well as have courses. So the lectures has been quite a lot of help in

72. 31:33

    helping us facilitate this and making it easier for us to also uh continue to uh pump out these courses and yeah I think that's pretty much sums up what we've been doing and some of the highlights that we had over the course of 2023. Thank you.

73. 31:49

    Amazing. Thank you so much David for coming on and filling in awesome stuff you guys are doing in Vietnam. Uh we have another great hub presenting today. Um if you want to go ahead. Sure. And I'll I'll keep it short. I promise. Marcus, conscious of time. Next slide, please. Um, hi everyone. Uh, I'm a from New York Balkans. For those who don't know me, I have been running together with my colleagues hub in the heart of the Europe for the last two

74. 32:14

    years. Uh, just a brief overview of what we were doing. Uh, we've been operating through three phases. Uh, focus areas were ecosystem growth, partnerships, um, and product development. uh we've been running the operations in seven plus countries. I say seven plus because in the last year we have also done some of the things outside of our region as well. Um one of the highlights in terms

75. 32:39

    of partnerships were strategic partnerships on boarding such as Axelar such as Nonsense where we work very closely with Lelay and the foundation team uh but also Mastercard uh within the region where we actually focus a lot of the efforts on the onboarding of the non-Web tree users into web three. uh we've organized over 50 community events and conferences across the region and outside and the focus of the third phase

76. 33:04

    that have started uh beginning of this November is going to be community growth uh by onboarding the developers and founders all across the region. If we can go to the next slide uh I would show you just a little bit a year in review from the balcon side. So uh as I said uh some of our efforts were into building new products. So one of them was Techuno. I'm going to show you uh just briefly uh in more details. Um then uh the strategic partnership with uh

77. 33:35

    Mastercard uh very big appearance on one of the largest fintech conferences and ETH Denver. Uh then the partnership with Axelr and Nonsen. But we also did a big activation with the World Rally Cup um that was going uh in our region. Uh then uh we announced the new product which is pathfinder essentially uh which transfer on the blockchain uh were was participating in the conferences such as future tense which was essentially like futuristic conference for web two blocks

78. 34:08

    split the largest regional conference uh near was the main player there we had a really big appearance there uh and the activation of the founders and developers uh then we did an activation on ETH Belgrade side event uh and also web tales event uh which also included boss workshops. Uh then we moved into Berlin where we actually were participating uh as near on one of the largest web

79. 34:33

    developers conference with 12,000 plus uh attendees. We've actually uh developed uh collected over 500 uh developer leads on that one. So one of the learning points is let's be present on the conferences that are not necessarily web three. Um and then uh we did uh different activities with one of the media houses where we actually used the kuno and onboarding into web3 tool for uh voting on the real-time TV show

80. 35:04

    which has shown how NFD can have a specific utilities as well uh collaboration with our Vietnamese colleagues uh having techno as part of the near ape. Um another uh big activation with Mastercard on one of their campaigns for the end users uh activation on the game changer conference which was essentially like a digital and and gaming conference. Um and then we were also present uh last couple of weeks uh on data science uh

81. 35:36

    European conference where uh we had a presentation on the AI and blockchain and this is essentially the first time we actually started pushing near uh as uh AI and blockchain kind of player and solution uh within the region and this is also going to be one of the focuses moving forward. We officially launched our product pathfinder on the mainet. Uh and uh now moving forward as the community growth is one of the biggest focuses we started moving more into the

82. 36:06

    partnerships. One of the first ones were with sandal wallet learner uh digitalia uh best uh and quant which are essentially big student organizations big developer work developer shops etc. So that's a bit of a year in review. Um next slide please Marcus just briefly on our two products uh techuno is essentially uh business as a service platform issues pods uh so essentially it's an attistation tool and we call it web two to web3 onboarding because it's a very simple solution uh like some others that we've seen in the

83. 36:45

    near ecosystem uh it has uh already activated uh both the users and both the revenue that is flowing uh through this solution and one of the things that we have uh following up are basically uh integrating with uh stuff like stripe multi-chain compility uh etc. And the next one is Pathfinder.

84. 37:12

    As I said, decentralized file sharing platform exclusively built on your protocol for now. We launched it in November 2023. Now it's in the uh market validation phase. Thank you everybody who have tested it and give us that their feedback because it's really useful. Uh and some of the next things that are in play are more integration with Calimero network because we look at it as a business tech solutions overall that we can offer uh to the client and further upgrading security and privacy.

85. 37:42

    This is something that we talked already today. Cameron mentioned it a lot. So and Ilia so uh that's on the plate for us as well. And the last one Marcus if we can move on. Essentially as I said moving on focusing on onboarding I mentioned the partnership the way how we see the developer journey is onboarding joining the community ongoing education and opportunities and support uh in which we already touched upon with the near horizon and near foundation. We

86. 38:12

    see there is a lot of work to be done yet on finalizing the funnel between the hubs that are onboarding and between all of us that are nurturing and retaining. Uh but this is something we look forward to working with all of you moving forward. So thank you everybody and greetings from Croatia.

87. 38:32

    Thank you so much. And last up on the regional side we have near Globe. Thank you Marcus. Hi everyone. I am cheesy. I have been in the near ecosystem for three years and have built communities in the Turkish and German speaking area organized our NIA workshop and uh blockchainmies.

88. 38:52

    Today I am here to talk about the near globe d short summary about uh what it is its strategy and how to apply to the DAO. Uh as we all know the significance of a crypto community for a project is immense. It helps to split the word, attract new users and even seeker investors and partners. A community also provides valuable feedback and gives trust in the project. So the near globe serves as a bridge between communities

89. 39:27

    uh toward one direction and we will work closely with the HUM to fulfill the goals of the NDC. Um we are in total five consils and all of us have a background at near and have previously led a regional community before. Next slide please.

90. 39:48

    There's currently a lack of alignment between the activities of regional communities and the sustainable key performance indicators. Also there is no uh onboarding program for new local communities for further expand near into other regions and there's also an overlap between the activities of the regional community and other Dows. Next slide please.

91. 40:15

    Our DA has a KPI based uh reward. So each community will make a proposal first and if it gets approved they will receive the reward based on their achieved KPI afterward. So 50% will be prepaid and 50% based uh on their report at the end of the month and we will classify the uh communities into six tiers from S to E and give the reward uh accordingly.

92. 40:46

    Next slide please. If you come to the KPIs, 12 and a half% will go to the referral systems. So for creating uh new wallets uh or onboarding new users and we believe that a continuous outreach to new audiences in the source of the new community members um is the source of new community members and we will focus on increasing the daily usage and trans and transactions on um one example is um tango and

93. 41:20

    gification mechanics for example with zilli on social media or near social. Another strategy is to demonstrate near to nonblockchain communities for example with uh trade fee apps uh traditional software companies and a IML data permanence.

94. 41:40

    Education of the local communities, creators and influencers plays also a big role for us and the communities will hold local offline and online events and also participate in workshops. Next slide please. The main long-term goal of the near globe though is to make the community self- sustaining. uh which means that the marketing cost will be covered by themsel for example by having uh partnerships uh

95. 42:14

    ads revenue or selling goods. Another goal as I mentioned before is to partnership with non-blockchain communities and to harmonize diverse new communities across the globe toward one direction. Next slide please. We are looking forward for your participation uh for new and old communities. By scanning the QR code on the right side, you will be redirected to the proposal form. Our team will review it uh accordingly and get in touch with you. Our mission at New Globe

96. 42:49

    is uh to catalyze a powerful uh and united movement ensuring the world is aware of the extraordinary technology embedded in the NE protocol that transforms our everyday lives. Thanks for having me here today. Uh let's keep building on NA. Thank you.

97. 43:10

    Awesome. Thank you all so much for coming from the regional side of things. Uh amazing updates. Uh I have no idea what that red line is, but uh we're going to keep the momentum because we still have quite a bit of content to get through in a short amount of time. If we do go over a little bit, um this will be live on YouTube or streamed on YouTube so you can find it later. Uh but without further ado, we have some amazing projects coming to give some updates.

98. 43:31

    We'll we'll segue into NYM. Yeah. Hi, this is Harry from NIM and I think A is going to give the uh presentation, but I'm here as the CEO and co-founder. I'm here to answer any questions. A are you there? Yes. Thanks. Thanks Harry and thanks Marcus.

99. 43:50

    So today we'll be talking about the near and nim partnership. Um next slide please. Okay so first of all why is privacy so important to us. Uh for anyone that doesn't know NIM is a layer zero privacy focused infrastructure. Next slide please.

100. 44:10

     So for starters, on a global scale, yearly data breaches cost uh companies 4.45 million. That's an increase of 15% over the last 3 years. And the things that come to mind are the likes of business uptime, remediation, legal fees, as well as audit fees. Um, from a first glance, this doesn't all look very exciting, but when these things are put at risk, it puts a huge payload on the companies that are affected. Next slide, please.

101. 44:50

     Okay. And our solution, next slide, is a decentralized incentivized mixet and private credentials. So our flagship product if you like is the NIM mixet and this prevents traffic analysis by adversaries who are capable of watching your network. Um the likes of the NSA come to mind and the NIM token. This is how we incentivize our node operators and they are paid based on the amount of

102. 45:21

     staking as well as validation that goes on with the transactions in the mixet. NIM credentials is another one of our products and this allows anyone well when when it's launched it will allow anyone to expose certain parts of their identity in exchange for a service. If you imagine you want to make use of an online health service all you would have to do is expose maybe your name and your date of birth whereas the rest of your

103. 45:53

     identity stays private. So your doctor doesn't necessarily need to know where you live or where you were born for you to access health care services. And lastly, the next blockchain. Well, this is an IBC and Cosmo enabled Cosmos blockchain where NIM credentials lives.

104. 46:14

     Next slide, please. And last but not le least is NIMVPN. This product will allow end users to leverage the power of the mixnet directly from their computers. Next slide, please. Okay. And what we're all here for is the NI and NIM partnership. If we go on to the next slide.

105. 46:39

     So we we're actually long-term partners. Since 2021, NI has supported NIM's foundational developments through the open web um incubator. And more recently, we're now planning to provide unparalleled privacy uh which will allow near users as they access their favorite NFTts, DeFi protocols, and DAPs to do so away from the prying eyes of malicious um cyber criminals. Next slide, please.

106. 47:14

     And this isn't a one-sizefits-all uh sort of uh sort of product. Next slide, please. The way this is going to work is first of all, we're going to have a discovery phase between near and nim. This will allow a fit for fitfor-purpose product to be designed. There will then be a build phase which will then go through a rigorous test before it's deployed. Um, what we're thinking of right now is that it will most likely look like a wallet

107. 47:45

     integration with NIM's MixNet. Next slide, please. And this is a very simple illustration of what the integration will look like. If you imagine N's wallet users are on the left, as soon as they do a wallet sign on, they will have the option to choose if they want to route their traffic through NIM's mixet or not. And if they choose to do so, then as you can see here, their internet traffic is flowing through multiple layers of encryption, which will help them mask their IP address as well as obfuscate

108. 48:21

     their geol location so that cyber criminals cannot track their internet um packets from where they originate to where they essentially end up which is with near apps and services. Next slide, please. So, I'll leave you with this. We're dedicated to building a privacy focused future and we're excited to be working with NI. And next slide. That's it from us.

109. 48:52

     Yeah. And I would just like to say that, you know, we've had a long history of NIR. I remember going to China with Ilia not so long ago. And we really think a wallet integration with NM as long combined with holistic privacy analysis which we've talked about with folks like the cippher punk guild and stuff a while ago will really be useful for uh making near eventually a number one privacy uh

110. 49:16

     yeah 2019 a private a number one privacy ecosystem because you will have a lot of use cases not just ordinary users but like you know enterprises who really want to build software on them uh and all everything will also uh sorry enterprises that want to build on near will will need some privacy and so will a lot of uh different apps and so we're providing again network level privacy with some kind of lightweight zero

111. 49:40

     knowledge but we'll kind of look at the whole ecosystem on about privacy and near because we know there's a lot of other stuff happening so we can discover more complimentarities over time any questions or maybe there's not time for questions I know we got but I'm happy to answer them in chat For sure.

112. 50:00

     Yeah, 100%. Anybody has any questions, Cameron, as you was raising some really good ones. Definitely take them in the chat. Uh, and really appreciate again you you uh you guys coming on. It's definitely uh you know, definitely appreciate it. Um, next up we have Octopus who's been building in the near ecosystem for quite some time and they have some amazing exciting updates coming out. Without further ado, I'll hand it over to Vivie. Thank you. Thank you, Marcus. Thank you. Hi. Hi. Hi, everyone. Um, this is Vivie.

113. 50:24

     I'm a partner and also head of media for Octopus Network. very happy to see you all here. Now today like Maka said uh we have like great uh news to announce you know the launch of new restaking which is the major part of Octopus 2.0. Now if you remember we mentioned that we started the upgrade um plans in the beginning of the year and now we are delivering it. Next slide please. Now

114. 50:49

     before I get into u more details, I'd like to ask you all to mark the day December the 17 this year, which is about four times uh four days from now. You could stake your near to auto chain to earn more extra rewards. I'll get into more details shortly. Uh next slide please. Now for those who don't know who we are yet uh we are one of the key infrastructure on near uh designed to serve application specific blockchains

115. 51:16

     or app chase which share security interoperability accent utilities and community support. Now the logic behind it is straightforward. When you could customize your decentralized applications with a specific blockchain you could greatly improve your user experience and that is a key to mass adoption. Next slide please.

116. 51:36

     So um in the beginning of 2023 we started the octopus 2.0 plan which includes two parts uh one is near retaking and the other one is adapted IBC which um will connect near with cosmos. Next slide please. Okay. Now let's talk about near restaking. So um the idea is actually inspired by IAL layer. um the most straightforward understanding of restaking like you know the gentleman from the ETH community put it you stake ETH and then you stake it again um I'm

117. 52:10

     not going to more details about how I layer works here today because of the time um next slide please and just to let you know that we are doing something similar with near for the near community next slide please so the Octopus network team has been working on a smart contract called restaking phase which brings restaking to the near protocol.

118. 52:33

     Like I mentioned earlier, you know, in about 4 days time, near restaking will be live and that means near holders like you and me and probably a lot of you watching and listening to the near time right now could restake our near tokens to earn additional rewards. Next slide, please. And I know that you know like you can read and watch our founder Lou's presentation and how the whole process

119. 52:57

     works from the back end by clicking the link. Now given the time limit today uh I'm not going into the details. Um next slide please. So I would like to tell you when it comes to value distribution for layer one staking rewards 100% of the rest rewards from the near protocol will be given to NEAR holders. So when it comes to app chain rewards, 70% will be distributed to NEO holders and 30% will be the revenues for Octopus network which the team will use to buy back OCT

120. 53:30

     tokens in the open markets and and then burn them um which would be a value appreciation for um OCT holders. Um also it's up to the FJ teams and communities to decide how and how much will be paid to risk takers. So in the case of autochain the rewards will be in OCT tokens. Next slide please.

121. 53:54

     So now now let's just the important issues you know why restaking and what are the benefits. So well obviously there are many for near holders reststaking allows you to multiply your earnings when you restake your near to validate or dele delegate to app chase and also for the broader near ecosystem by enabling restaking with near. There will be more app chains and middleares to use near as underlying staking assets will be increased the obviously the

122. 54:25

     value value capture for near also in addition restaking encourages near holders to stake more thus reducing the amount of near in circulation. So this dynamic helps establish a healthier supply and demand balance for near. So furthermore, a very important point we would like to make here which is in light with near's open web mission, the Opus team plans to relinguish control of the restaking base contract um making

123. 54:55

     restaking an immutable part of the nearbased protocol. So that means the risk takingaking infrastructure that odds team built is permissionless and any project in the near ecosystem could use it for free to provide share security with near restaking and so you know for the octopus community obviously it's going to be a win-win situation as well since we will be able to expand our market presence and generate more revenues and also

124. 55:26

     ultimately increase OCT holders risk to the buyback and burn mechanism. Next slide please. So without further ado, new reaking will be live with auto chain. Um autochain is an app chain initiated by the octopus community. So Octopus network will give away 4 million OCT tokens as a support as restaking rewards to near stakers.

125. 55:52

     Next, please. So get involved in with the great experience you could follow our Twitter and um also our website for the instruction on new restaking which is coming very soon. Um next please. So before I wrap up also um you know we mentioned that there are two parts of Optimus 2.0 right? So like I also have a another great news to share. Secret network which is a privacy protocol from Cosmos will be the first project to use adapted IBC that we built to connect to

126. 56:27

     near from Cosmos. So um and the timing is the first quarter of the coming year which is like the coming quarter basically and that marks the beginning of a new era for multi-share realities. Um next please. So, if you have a any questions, I feel free to reach out to us and um like I said, our Twitter and our uh website and also here's my contact. Thank you very much.

127. 56:54

     Awesome. Thank you so much, Vivie. Uh we have two last sections left. So, um like I said, anybody that needs to go on the hour, uh this is being streamed to YouTube, you can find it after. Uh if not, like I said, two more sections uh before we wrap up. Uh next up, we have an amazing project building on near uh pot lock. I'll hand it over to you shop.

128. 57:11

     Yeah. So, let's go back to when I first came on to Near. We're the first carbon neutral blockchain. We was giving out near drops at festivals. We was doing beach cleanups, yoga dial. We were just the coolest, viviest, down to earth people. But now we got the users, we got the consumer apps, we got the tech, we got the primitives, we got the Ethereum alignment, we got the DevX, we got the Dows, we got the BDS. But do we have the

129. 57:34

     impact? and do we have the culture that drives the movement of impact that we need to create and build the truly open web. So, hi everybody. I'm plug one of the core contributors at potluck uh the public goods platform at composable protocol on near and this holiday I know a lot of you on Santa's nice list want to fund public goods and I am proud to announce that all the public good elves

130. 57:59

     are hard at work tinkering away composibly building for the boss. And so our mission at potluck is to build plural funding mechanisms that are only possible on near but also shift the culture of near to use near as not only a way to fund open source development but also positive impact at scale. Uh next slide.

131. 58:23

     And so um uh just to give an idea what the solution looks like is we are a plugandplay fundraising mechanism for public goods to track the progress and also unlock higher levels of capital. Um, and so for projects, you sign up and you raise, you share your progress, and you get access to higher levels of funding pools. For donors, you amplify your donations through matching pools, and you also earn for raising for your uh favorite public goods with onchain referrals. And for patrons or people who

132. 58:50

     support uh funding rounds, um you make impact like a VC with future retroactive rewards. Um and for fund managers or round managers, you're able to launch your own rounds in a permissionless way. And so if you go to the next slide.

133. 59:06

     And so this is uh what the current boss application looks like. If you go to potluck.io orxyz.orgapp, you'll go directly to our boss state of application where you can sign up as a project. When you sign up as a project, it makes a profile on your horizon and on your social. Um and you can also sign up directly as a dowo with a sputnik dow proposal. And uh and then also users they can uh directly donate and then once you share that um you can also get

134. 59:31

     a direct onchain uh referral. Um so if you go to the next slide here's kind of our direct road map. We've been uh tinkering hard away. So uh direct donation and project registration is live. Um we're also working on our own contractbased civil resistance to prevent bots especially in the quadratic funding rounds. Uh we are um tinkering away at the final parts of the contract and building the front ends um and going to be launching some QF rounds in the beginning of Q1 right around the

135. 1:00:01

     holidays or after the holidays. Um and then and then afterward uh we're going to be building a permissionless uh protocol um to plug and play and also a decentralized BD network where you can earn for bringing in uh different uh funders and whatnot. And then uh later we'll be working on account abstraction uh remote accounts and actually plugging and playing uh with these new funding mechanisms.

136. 1:00:25

     And so if you go uh to the next slide um and so shout out to the 40 project that signed up already open source project communities nonprofits um and uh just kind of getting at some of the concepts that we're tackling. Um yeah so we're working a lot on account abstraction uh working on some non-custodial social o taking web two data uh for companies to easily apply on-ramps and off-ramps also

137. 1:00:49

     working on uh testation primitives in tracking impact um adding new funding mechanisms in a composable way we're actually going to be releasing a framework um in uh the next couple of days kind of outlining what these public good legos are and how you as a contributor as a developer as a region can contribute and actually um uh compose this kind of the Legos in the protocol and then also we'll be kind of targeting mobile users and building a 501c3 identity layer so we can kind of

138. 1:01:19

     get those tax exempt benefits uh coming on forward but the main call to action if you're a project sign up if you are someone with near donate directly and yeah happy holidays everybody awesome thank you so much awesome stuff you guys are doing on the pot lock side um and then the last section We have Nearweek to give us an exciting uh overview of the things that happened throughout the year 2023. Gus, go ahead.

139. 1:01:45

     Thank you very much, Marcos. And hi, everyone. Thanks for the amazing presentation uh on Podlock. So, uh I work at Neo Week. We're basically a media that will keep you updated on everything what's going on in the Neils. Uh if you have not already, you can subscribe by clicking on this link. That's just subscribing to our weekly newsletter. We have a lot of other stuff going on.

140. 1:02:07

     It's been a busy year. I feel a bit like in crypto it's a bit like doc year. So like one year in crypto it feels like a lot. Um next slide please. So a lot of the things that I'm going to mention today are just some of the most click stories um on which has been featured on our weekly newsletter. Um there has been the launch of the bus. I think that's was the baby steps towards uh where we are now with open webstack. This was

141. 1:02:32

     actually having front ends uh reinvented. Next slide, please. We had a lot of growth. I think David Weinstein covered that already very well. So, no need to drag out the time here. It's just amazing to see that we're not at 1 billion users yet, but we've really seen a huge uptake in apps like Catching and Sweatcoin and and type of adoption that brings. Next slide, please.

142. 1:02:59

     The Black Dragon has returned to the foundation and also a new PFP with some kind dragon as well. pretty awesome to see. We were very thankful for Marrique for her uh effort at the foundation, but it is very nice to have Elia back and I think me personally, I'm very very bullish on the open web stack and this narrative. I think this is the exact direction we want to go. We want to collaborate with other ecosystems and

143. 1:03:22

     this is the way I think we're going to get to mainstream adoption. Next slide, please. We also have New Horizon that launched this year. Uh we already have the first batch live. Uh we also have uh basically applications opening for the next batch.

144. 1:03:38

     Um we already begin to see the output of the first cohort and the stuff going on there. That's something we're really excited too. And I think in general what I've noticed as well is really the founder focus uh on near protocol has really stepped up. Uh the founder group is very active and those synergies and those protocol synergies is starting to happen. So very excited to see that as well. Next slide please.

145. 1:04:00

     Another launch NDC was also mentioned. Uh this is uh I'm kind of like a governance uh kind of nerd. So this has been very interesting to see how this has formed inside the uh near community. Uh a lot of things we built civil resistance uh I am human etc. has been a lot uh transparency commission reports and all that and it's a very interesting experiment and it's going to I'm personally looking forward to see future uh increations of this and we live and

146. 1:04:30

     we learn uh I think a nice analogy there is perhaps uh in relation to also potlock is gitcoin grants there we have had quite short feedback loops we have had actually every like quarter a new season we have had a post momentum or like at least a write up from metallic like and that I hope we can get into this focus and really just keep iterating on NDC. Next slide, please.

147. 1:04:54

     There's Deop as well. We also work closely with Deop just like Banan. Uh I think it's very nice that that like it all start with developers, right? It's kind of cliche developers develop developers, but at that stage that's in my opinion still where we at. We need good developer toolings. We need more developers. it needs to be easier to build and then I think I'm pretty sure we will see more gradual uh you know intake of projects that are not really

148. 1:05:19

     crypto on it web 3 native. I know we have stuff like catching and sweatcoin that are actually like kind of web 2.5 or whatever we want to call it but I think developers is everything and very excited to see how this is forming and in and and this is how this has kind of spinned out and become an organization uh very very exciting to see that as well. Next slide please. Oops. Google Drive.

149. 1:05:42

     Yeah. And uh lastly, just want to wish everyone happy XM and happy near year. It's been an amazing year. Us at Near Week, we are very happy to uh keep going, keep grinding. Um just want to say thank you to all our partners at Near Week. Uh if anyone has feedback for us, new concept we should do or want to partner up with us, we are always happy to do so. So, please uh stay near and

150. 1:06:07

     yeah, thanks for the time. I try to keep it very short. Awesome stuff. Thank you all so much once again for being on here. We had so much to go over. Um there was so many exciting things to happen in 2023. But again, like I said at the beginning, I'm even more excited for 2024. There's a lot of things in the pipeline. Uh keep an eye out. Definitely join the spaces tomorrow with Ilia around chain

151. 1:06:27

     abstraction and data availability. And I hope everybody here has a wonderful day and we'll see you in 2024. Take care everybody.