NEAR Community Update: May 17th, 2019

We had a blast in NYC, kicking off Consensus week on Monday with a DeFi panel in a completely packed room. We followed it up the next day with a fascinating panel exploring the future of gaming in blockchain (meme of the week right below from this panel!). We also jumped on a panel on Staking and Validation. High quality edits will be available soon, so make sure to keep an eye on our twitter! On the development side, the major push has been the new wallet, economics design and the new version of Nightshade consensus. In community news, we’ve wrapped up the hackathon and have been having a great time in New York, collaborating and discussing the future of blockchain with some very smart and cool crypto teams!

Au revoir New York! Until next time!

Blockchain Gaming in 2019
Apparently “we’re starting!!!” @Mitch_Kosowski @NEARProtocol @neondistrictRPG @opensea pic.twitter.com/6ku8N0JeXh

— Matt Lockyer (@mattdlockyer) May 14, 2019

COMMUNITY AND EVENTS

NY Consensus Week

It has been a HUGE week for NEAR events while we’ve been in New York for Consensus Week.

First off on Monday was a panel on the Future of DeFi, moderated by NEAR’s cofounder Illia, which had a completely packed house despite the rainy weather.

Future of #Defi discussion with

? @nanexcool from @MakerDAO
? @haydenzadams from @UniswapExchange
? @cjl49 from @compoundfinance
? @ricburton from @Balance_io
? @kaiynne from @synthetix_io

Thanks to @NEARProtocol for hosting! #NYBlockchainWeek pic.twitter.com/RObpcqffwo

— Tom Howard (@_TomHoward) May 13, 2019

If you missed the livestream you can watch it here; we will be releasing the full videos of both our panels next week.

Also on Monday, Alex spoke on a panel about sharding with Quarkchain, Harmony, Thunder, Ontology, ETH and Zilliqa.

Fun meetup here in NYC, a lot of different teams presenting their take on blockchain sharding: @harmonyprotocol @Quark_Chain @zilliqa @OntologyNetwork @NEARProtocol @ethereum and more.#Consensus2019 #BlockchainWeekNYC pic.twitter.com/HFjF4yesIp

— protolambda (@protolambda) May 14, 2019

On Tuesday we ran two events simultaneously – a Crypto Community Managers’ Happy Hour hosted by Jess, where we met community managers from around the globe.

We also had a panel on the Future of Gaming hosted by Sasha from NEAR. The livestream is here if you missed it and the full video will be up soon.

If you’re in NYC for blockchain week, come hear about the emerging blockchain gaming space tonight. I’ll be speaking alongside folks from @neondistrictRPG, @ArcadeDistiller, @dapper_labs, and @GodsUnchained https://t.co/WZhZDK9x4p

Thanks @nearprotocol for putting on the event!

— Devin Finzer ? (@dfinzer) May 14, 2019

We are so grateful to Nomadworks NY for hosting us for all NEAR’s events in New York; everyone on the team there is amazing and we had a blast!

Finally, Illia presented on a panel on Proof of Stake networks alongside Tezos, Cosmos, Parity, and Solana Labs. Livestream here. Illia will also be presenting on the economics of validation at this event tonight.

Talking next gen proof of stake protocols with @SolanaLabs, @cosmos, @NEARProtocol, @tezos and @ParityTech pic.twitter.com/Iw5QQdGYXm

— Wilson Withiam (@WilsonWithiam) May 15, 2019

Hackathon 

NEAR’s first hackathon, Hack.One, is closed, the judging completed, and the winners announced. Thanks so much to our esteemed judges Linda Xie (Co-founder & Managing Director of Scalar Capital), Peter Kieltyka (Co-Founder & CEO at Horizon Blockchain Games Inc.), and Sina Habibian (Advisor at the Ethereum Foundation) for their thoughtful and constructive feedback.

*Drumroll*
And our winners are:

• 1st place ($5000) – Team twitr, with a blockchain implementation of Twitter
• 2nd place ($3000) – Team Zod.TV,  with a decentralized video transcoder
• 3rd place ($1000) – Team azban, with a decentralized economy for data storage

Thanks to all the teams that participated, and keep an eye out for our next hackathon.

ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS

The Wallet has gone through even more iterations and is very close to release. We’ve started breaking the mega Pull Request (that encapsulates all of the new consensus research up this point) into merge-able PRs. Lastly, we’ve begun the process of breaking our mono repo into many smaller ones, so that contributing is much easier.

There were 34 PRs in our multiple repos from 6 different authors over the last couple of weeks. As always, the code is completely open source on Github.

Application/Development Layer

• Implemented RLP in assemblyscript.
• Added testing to near-runtime-ts.
• Nearlib
  • Extracted into separate GitHub repository and re-configured continuous integration
  • Improved error handling
  • Make continuous integration tests work with shared TestNet
• Two version releases of near-shell, the dApp command line tool
• NEARStudio
  • Tracking downloads in Google Analytics to see who moves from online IDE to local development
  • Improving downloaded code compatibility with CLI development tools
• Wallet
  • Completed phone verification service
  • Integrated phone verification with blockchain
  • Integrated app-specific access keys into the wallet
  • Introduced common request error handling components
• Added base64 encoding and decoding to near-runtime-ts

Blockchain Layer

• Implemented economics that deducts fees directly from the balance instead of using gas/mana
• Discussed new Nightshade consensus in Santa Clara
• Currently breaking the gigantic research PR on the new consensus into smaller, mergeable PRs
• Big refactoring PR of existing consensus to prepare for merge of Nightshade

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED

Join us! If you want to work with one of the most talented teams in the world right now to solve incredibly hard problems, check out our careers page for openings. And tell your friends ?

Learn more about NEAR in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol. 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.

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