Ready Layer One Rewind

In the backdrop of a global pandemic, economic shutdowns, work from home mandates, uncertainty and anxiety, crashing markets, tens of millions of unemployment filings, and money printers around the world going BRRRR — there was a need for solutions, and a need for unity. 

The vision of the technology we are developing is one that reroutes power back to the people. But that type of world changing vision can only be achieved with wide scale community coordination. 

So the NEAR team went to work calling up our friends at various other protocols. Soon, a coalition emerged: Celo, Cosmos, Polkadot, Protocol Labs, Solana, Tezos and NEAR. 

We envisioned workshops with members from various teams discussing standards, opportunities to contribute resources and expertise for the collective good of the space, and laying the foundations for future development. More than that — we wanted an opportunity, in these isolating times, to connect with others who also believe that we can rewrite our trajectory.

Designed with our unique global circumstances in mind and executed in 5 weeks, Ready Layer One is proof that collaboration is greater than competition. 

The Founders and Core Team members from every major Layer 1 ecosystem joined over 3900 other brilliant minds for the 3-day Ready Layer One; an intersection between a hackathon, a conference, a masterclass seminar and a vaguely anarchist festival for developers and builders of a decentralized web.

The event was designed for participants to choose their own adventure: hop in and out of a variety of ongoing sessions, be randomly matched with other participants for a 1:1 video chat or host their own pop-up workshop!

While the group chats, the memes, and the friends we made were most of the fun — we’ve done our best to capture the spirit by recording all the various presentations, workshops and sessions. And now, we’re sharing those with you! 

Our Favorite Moments from RL1 

👾 Day 1: 

We kicked things off with NEAR’s Erik Trautman and Illia Polosukhin announcing NEAR Mainnet! 

Alex Skidanov (NEAR), Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana), Justin Drake (Ethereum Foundation), Christopher Goes (Cryptium Labs), Jesse Walden (Mediachain Labs), and Karl Floersch (Optimism) discuss the importance of composability, explore the various approaches from leading protocols and how composability will impact developers. 

Anna Rose from Zero Knowledge podcast and Tarun Chitra begin the process of unpacking the opportunities and challenges for privacy and privacy tech post-quarantine. 

Vitalik Buterin discusses weaponized interdependence, the progression of control over resources vs control over networks, and control as liability. He makes a case for 2020 being the decade of Systempunks in his presentation: Cryptography and Cryptocurrency In Context: The Next Decade

Illia Polosukhin, Marek Olszewski, Sam Williams, Dietrich Ayala, and Curtis Spencer discuss various web3 projects building developer communities and how to grow the interest among traditional developers in programmable web.

⚡ Day 2: 

Unchained LIVE with Laura Shin, Illia Polosukhin (NEAR), Zaki Manian (Cosmos), Robert Habermeier (Polkadot) and Arthur Brietman (Tezos).

An assembly of protocol teams: NEAR, Polkadot, Cosmos and Golem come together to address Wasm in trustful vs trustless environment, metering, performance and safety, Wasm in Wasm, languages for the smart contracts.

Ashley Tyson from NEAR Protocol and Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human, discuss the velocity of money and how to build technology that enhances human cooperation. 

🛸 Day 3:

Data Availability Roundtable with Mustafa al-Bassam, Jeff Burdges (Polkadot), Dankrad Feist (Ethereum Foundation) and Alex Skidanov (NEAR Protocol) 

Crypto Cycles of Innovation: a fireside chat with Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz and Robert Hackett of Fortune Magazine

James Prestwich of Summa on Working Cross Chain: reviewing cross-chain communication basics and examples of it working in the wild.

Get Involved: 

NEAR is hosting several hackathons and has weekly community events. You can find a full list in our events calendar.

If you would like to get involved contributing to NEAR’s technical or community efforts, please have a look at the contributor program.

We look forward to seeing you get involved. Have questions? Join our Community Chat.