Community Update: June 5th, 2020

This week in America, millions have taken to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd and a system that pushes down minorities and perpetuates injustice.

We have been humbled and inspired to watch this movement spread across the globe. We applaud your support. This is too important for silence.

There is always more we can do in the pursuit of growth, acceptance, and allyship.

We understand that many don’t have the bandwidth for newsletters. If community programs and learning new ways to earn and learn serve you, read on. If not, we love you and are here for you regardless. If there are other ways we can support you and this community, please let us know.

The Launch of our Guild Program

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our second community program. At the beginning of the year, we started our Contributor Program to directly work with community members on NEAR initiatives. Since we began, people around the world have been looking for ways to get more involved.

The existing Contributor Program is focused on individual contributors to NEAR’s engineering efforts and it will continue. The Guild Program is focused on community contributions. Whether you already run a community, project, or company, or you want to start one, the Guild Program allows you to receive rewards based on the engagement of your Guild. Head over to the launch announcement.

RL1 Hackathon Winners

NEAR hosted a two-week hackathon with Gitcoin right after Ready Layer One, a virtual conference. In case you missed it, the recordings are uploaded on the RL1 YouTube Channel. We want to thank all participants, who got involved and competed for the $9.500 prize pool. Over 25 teams submitted their project, of which 12 received a prize. Check-out the full list on our blog.

Links to all the winners for anyone else clicking through

1/https://t.co/bYk3EahPC6https://t.co/CKDX4iHiOyhttps://t.co/io3cJtvpvChttps://t.co/YKT2ljwWyDhttps://t.co/mmlwJiTIgqhttps://t.co/heJUIvFXEjhttps://t.co/3NxWFI2bb5https://t.co/f5DOkDqThNhttps://t.co/7u9ZY9toWL

— maria (@MariaShen) June 3, 2020

Tweet by Maria Shen — List of hackathon winners

Events

• Our friends at Fabric Ventures are hosting their third edition of Web 3.0 Stage at CogX on June 8-10th. Illia and Erik will be speaking. Message us for the chance to receive a free ticket — first-come-first-serve basis.
• Do you want to see what our community is up to? Join us at our Community Talk next Wednesday at 5 PM CEST. Jan will cover how cities can be introduced to smart solutions on blockchain. For more info and how to sign-up head over to our Community Calendar.

Engineering Update

• We completed the security audit of our core contracts. The issues that were found can be addressed by the improving documentation or adjusting the fees; 
• Finishing the implementation of the core functionality of the NEAR to Ethereum bridge. Last Friday, we successfully transferred an ERC20 token from Ethereum to NEAR;
• We have formed a team to work on the “contract runtime”, which in the future will be a general-purpose out of the box solution for any blockchain wanting to run Wasm contracts;
• We published a spec and the implementation of light client proofs;
• Lots of work on testing and stabilizing the chain;

Validator Updates

• Stake Wars is now open for contributions: every validator challenge gives the opportunity to earn NEAR tokens by creating tutorials, blog posts and videos. More info in the Github repo.
• Blaze, one of our contributors and validators, is building a Validator Dashboard on NEAR.

Congrats to our friends from Polkadot and Celo for launching their MainNet

How You Can Get Involved

Join the NEAR Contributor Program. If you would like to host events, create content or provide developer feedback, we would love to hear from you! To learn more about the program and ways to participate, please head over to the website.

If you’re just getting started, learn more in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol or read the official White Paper. Stay up to date with what we’re building by following us on Twitter for updates, joining the conversation on Discord and subscribing to our newsletter to receive updates right to your inbox.