NEAR Foundation is excited to announce a new strategic partnership with MARBLEX, a blockchain subsidiary of Netmarble Corp, that will help expand Korea’s Web3 gaming industry. MARBLEX will build on Aurora, NEAR’s Ethereum-compatible layer, for maximum scalability and blockchain gaming accessibility to onboard more players to Web3. 

Under the new partnership facilitated by the NEAR Korea Hub, NEAR Foundation and MARBLEX plan to achieve mutual growth by linking the NEAR blockchain and Aurora with WARP Bridge to enable interactive collaboration, promote global joint marketing events, and enhance brand awareness. 

Through WARP Bridge, competitive and casual gamers alike will now be able to enjoy a variety of games and exclusive content through NEAR’s Blockchain Operating System (BOS). The BOS leverages the NEAR Protocol’s fast transaction speeds as well as effortless scalability and onboarding (via FastAuth) to make the onboarding experience as easy as possible for the masses. 

MARBLEX: a developer and publisher of mobile games

A Web3 gaming giant constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, MARBLEX is a well-established developer and publisher of mobile games with more than 6,000 experts from across the globe. MARBLEX’s goal is to bring the highest quality Web3 games to market by providing key services such as a cryptocurrency wallet, decentralized exchange, token staking, and an NFT Marketplace.

“We expect NEAR’s core narrative to play a pivotal role in bolstering the overall MBX 3.0 ecosystem,” said Junki Moon, Business Division Director of MARBLEX added. “Through the collaborative integration of the NEAR Foundation’s extensive technical expertise with the content prowess of the MBX ecosystem, we will maintain our position as pioneers in the ever-evolving landscape of the global blockchain trends.”

Robbie Lim, GM of Business Development at NEAR Foundation, added: “This collaboration with MARBLEX will be an important milestone in promoting various use cases based on BOS (Blockchain Operating System). We will continuously advance the gaming ecosystem of NEAR Protocol as well as attract numerous users to enter the Web3 scene by onboarding high-quality MBX content.”

NEAR Korea Hub, which oversees business development in Korea and Asia, played a key role in this strategic partnership. The Hub also sees the partnership as breaking a barrier to Web3 entry for mobile gamers. 

“NEAR Protocol provides a user experience similar to Web2 using Fast Auth account abstraction feature, greatly lowering the initial entry barrier to Web3,” said a spokesperson from NEAR Korea Hub. “We will continue to strongly partner with excellent domestic companies such as MARBLEX to implement a user-centered ecosystem where users can easily enjoy all services.”

The post NEAR Foundation and MARBLEX to Expand Korea’s Web3 Gaming Industry with Aurora appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

Web3 won’t be dependent on central authorities to access services like social media, games, Metaverse experiences, and more. Decentralization, coupled with permissionless systems (i.e, open or public smart contracts), will give people a greater sense of ownership, control, and protection over their data in alignment with the financial outcomes of decentralized apps (dapps). With this regulatory foundation—or governance, as it is referred to in crypto—humanity can evolve into a new era of borderless economic opportunity for all. 

A future built on creativity, community, and inclusivity requires a core based on interoperability between blockchains. There is no single blockchain that will own Web3. NEAR and other blockchain communities understand that the future is multi-chain, and bridges and decentralization are critical to getting there. 

Rainbow Bridge: the first step toward a multi-chain future

Enter Rainbow Bridge, one of the first fully permissionless, decentralized, and openly accessible bridges in the crypto-sphere. Almost a year after launch, Rainbow Bridge has more than a dozen projects utilizing this technical infrastructure.

In connecting NEAR and Ethereum, Rainbow Bridge is a major first step toward the multi-chain future, allowing developers to use NEAR’s fast, simple, and low-cost transaction network to move assets back and forth between the two protocols. Crucially, Rainbow Bridge gives NEAR users access to familiar projects on Ethereum.

The development of Rainbow Bridge evolved, as many blockchain projects do, out of a necessity to solve an immediate engineering problem: how does a project on a separate blockchain migrate its services to another without having to rebuild the entire product from scratch. Thanks to NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge, any token or Dapp that uses Ethereum’s Virtual Machine can run on NEAR. With this capability in place, the NEAR ecosystem is able to integrate ERC20 with native NEAR solutions. Anyone can use NEAR as a technical backend while operating in the Ethereum ecosystem. The NEAR-ETH Rainbow Bridge is entirely permissionless and decentralized. No single entity controls it.

With Rainbow Bridge, NEAR effectively becomes a collaborative Layer 2 solution for existing applications and assets deployed on Ethereum. In addition to solving the problem of high gas fees and barriers to entry and scaling, NEAR brings about an additional value proposition: it’s incredibly easy to use and simple to get to grips with.

Rainbow Bridge advances NEAR’s larger goal of advancing Web3 to create a more open and inclusive internet and financial ecosystem. The key is to empower NEAR community members to operate in a high quality, scalable, and self-sufficient manner.

Pagoda: accelerating ideation to application for Web3

For developers looking to use Rainbow Bridge or other bridges, the NEAR community offers a number of projects, tools, and resources to get started. 

Pagoda, the first-ever Web3 startup platform, gives developers and entrepreneurs access to interactive tutorials, scalable infrastructure, and operational analytics that are Web3 native. Using Pagoda’s Developer Console, tools and resources can be found at every layer of the stack, from the base blockchain protocol all the way up to the application and marketing and distribution layers. Aurora, the builders of Rainbow Bridge, also offers a number of resources on their website to developers looking to build atop their EVM. 

With this technical foundation, NEAR has already begun its journey of creating a network of interoperable blockchains.

Other bridges and collaborative partnerships

NEAR is, at its core, an ecosystem. The technology is just one part of the equation, with the platform’s true infrastructure being its self-directed, decentralized community. Human decisions are the heartbeat of NEAR and its partnerships. 

A number of exciting projects are already showcasing the collaborative efforts happening within the vibrant NEAR ecosystem. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Aurora

A turnkey solution for developers seeking to extend their dapps to reach additional markets, Aurora uses a number of NEAR’s core technologies, including sharding and developer gas fee remuneration. 

The solution consists of two core components. The first is the Aurora Engine, which allows for the seamless deployment of Solidity and Vyper smart contracts. The second is the Aurora Bridge. Based on NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge technology, Aurora Bridge enables the permissionless transfer of tokens and data between Ethereum and Aurora.

Allbridge

In December 2021, Allbridge announced an integration between Aurora and Terra, an open-source stablecoin network controlled by its stakeholders. The connection between the two networks brings Terra liquidity to the Aurora ecosystem.

As a modular and expanding token bridge with on-chain consensus, Allbridge provides a fast, affordable, and secure way to move liquidity between EVM, non-EVM, and L2 blockchains. Allbridge’s mission is to make the blockchain world borderless, with the ability to freely move assets across different networks. 

Octopus Network

A decentralized network natively built on NEAR Protocol, Octopus provides out-of-box security, interoperability, and on-chain governance to projects that are creating application-specific blockchains (appchains) for their open web applications.

Built around the $OCT Token, Octopus Network functions as a composable means by which applications can operate with different security parameters on NEAR. Octopus Network Relay runs a smart contract on NEAR, which provides infrastructure for a validator network that brings partners together.

Woo Network

In December 2021, NEAR Foundation and WOO Network completed a $5M token swap to create a partnership between the two projects. Think of this partnership, in which NEAR and WOO Network share tokens, as a symbolic bridge of sorts. 

For the NEAR community, WOO Network provides a liquidity ecosystem that connects traders, exchanges, institutions, and DeFi platforms with access to liquidity, trading execution, and yield-generating strategies. For Woo Network, NEAR provides a carbon-neutral, high-scalability platform built on a proof-of-stake, layer-1 blockchain.

Roadmap for connecting new networks

The future is collaborative — a web of blockchain protocols and decentralized projects working together to build Web3. While NEAR wants to be the onramp for a billion users, the community also wants to help enable all ships to rise to meet the challenge of onboarding the world to Web3. And the NEAR ecosystem has the grants funding, technical infrastructure, and community resources and tools to help make this happen. 

In October 2021, the NEAR ecosystem announced a $800M grants fund to accelerate the development of its blockchain. Of this $800M, the largest allocation — $350M from Proximity Labs — will go towards developing the protocol’s DeFi sector. A DeFi DAO will govern how these funds are spent. These grant funds will be absolutely crucial in connecting with new networks for the multi-chain Web3 future. 

On March 2, 2022, NEAR announced a new partnership with Multichain, the most popular bridging platform in the crypto space, which supports more than 1,600 tokens, hundreds of millions of dollars in daily transactions, and 540,000 users. As a bridge operator, Multichain has developed the technology for all blockchains to interoperate. With this partnership, NEAR’s user-friendly interfaces and tools are now extendable across the entire Web3 ecosystem. The partnership is a meaningful step forward towards the advancement of a global network of open Web 3 platforms.

A decentralized future begins with the right infrastructure. NEAR is committed to enabling the tools to ground this vision in reality, right now.

The post NEAR’s Road to Decentralization: Building Bridges appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

In the web3 world, this idea can be neatly summed up by one word: decentralization. This is a process whereby control and the tools to create and reimagine everything from business to creativity are progressively handed over to the contributors. 

The NEAR Foundation has been steadily progressing in this mission, from the growing number of validators to the flourishing DAO community. But NEAR isn’t alone on this journey. It relies on projects in and around the ecosystem to help accelerate this mission. Enter Aurora.    

This project, started originally by a core team of NEAR developers, is now helping build bridges to other ecosystems and accelerating the adoption and decentralization in equal measure. 

A Bridge Between NEAR and Ethereum

Built by NEAR Inc’s core team (now Pagoda), Aurora is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) smart contract platform that creates a bridge between Ethereum and NEAR. An EVM, for those who don’t know, is best thought of as a decentralized computer that allows anyone to create a smart contract on the Ethereum network.

Although an EVM, Aurora works on top of the NEAR blockchain, giving it all of the benefits of the NEAR blockchain: super fast, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable transactions. That’s possible thanks to Nightshade, NEAR’s unique sharded protocol design that allows the network to process thousands of transactions per second without skipping a beat. 

With Aurora, the idea is that anyone building Ethereum projects can make use of the NEAR’s speed and low fees. The Aurora EVM allows developers to make use of NEAR’s blockchain, while the platform uses NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge to transfer assets. 

Let’s look at Rainbow Bridge, as this protocol is where things got started. 

Aurora and Rainbow Bridge

NEAR’s core developer team wanted to create a smart contract that would perform the function of allowing tokens to flow freely between Ethereum, NEAR, and other projects. The team’s vision: create a tool that allowed assets to exist on both NEAR and Ethereum, creating a multi-chain Web3 user experience.

To do this, the team would need to create a bridge that would be completely decentralized: anyone could use it, anywhere, and at any time—without permission. The developers were able to build the bridge and now, if one wants to move an Ethereum-based token—say, a stablecoin like DAI—and use it on NEAR’s network, they can do so via the Rainbow Bridge. 

Some of NEAR’s core team that had helped create Rainbow Bridge split off to continue their work. The result: Aurora—a project that now offers the bridge and a whole host of other features designed to create a global network of open-source Web3 projects. 

Aurora partnerships

Other projects working to improve cross-chain accessibility have since taken notice of Aurora’s work and become partners. One example is Allbridge, an application that unites scattered blockchains by means of global interoperability across all networks. Since Allbridge partnered with Aurora, it has launched a bridge between Aurora and Terra, an open-source stablecoin network and one of the biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap. 

Aurora is also playing a big part in decentalized finance (DeFi) growth in the NEAR ecosystem. DeFi refers to the peer-to-peer financial services built on public blockchains, and is one of the most active crypto sectors on NEAR. The NEAR community has been working tirelessly to make it easier for DeFi apps and tools to leverage the protocol’s developer-friendly advantages. 

One way that Aurora has made this process much smoother and more decentralized is through its extremely low fees (so low, they’re negligible), which it achieves by using the NEAR network. A constant gripe from users about Ethereum-based DeFi products is that the fees are often too high, creating a barrier to entry for developers and end users, and creating a hurdle to Web3’s mainstream adoption. 

Aurora adoption is growing so much that the team released Aurorascan, its very own version of Etherscan, the most popular Ethereum block explorer and analytics platform. Aurorascan has all of Etherscan’s features set and reliability, while giving developers the tools and data to see how Aurora’s EVM functions. 

But Aurora goes beyond DeFi. The platform is also integral to the NEAR community’s NFT projects, which have exploded in popularity since 2020. When the Aurora team spoke at this year’s ETHDenver conference in February, and they were joined by members of Endemic, Chronicle, and TENKBay—all NFT platforms that have launched on the Aurora EVM and NEAR Protocol.  

Future Aurora developments

So what does Aurora have up its sleeve for the future? Well, Aurorascan is still in beta mode, so more features will be added to that platform. And the team is also working to build new bridges, which will be announced in the coming months. 

There are also plans to allow NFTs to be able to hop between Ethereum and NEAR. You can keep up to date on all things Aurora on its Medium page.  

All this and more will help those wanting to take advantage of NEAR’s super fast and extremely cost-effective network, and help the dream of a truly decentralized world become a reality. 

The post NEAR’s Road to Decentralization: A Deep Dive into Aurora appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

So we thought it was high time to look back at some of the highlights from 2021: everything from protocol upgrades, ecosystem funding, community developments, and new projects launching on NEAR mainnet. 

We’ll also be giving a sneak peek at what’s to come in 2022 in a separate post, so keep a lookout for that. 

Protocol Progress 

The sign of a healthy network is one that is constantly adding improvements and tweaks to the performance, stability, and security—and NEAR protocol had that in abundance in 2021. 

Near Inc.’s engineering team racked up 20 upgrades to the protocol. Among the highlights were protocol update 35 – implicit accounts. This allows NEAR to have Ethereum style accounts that are public keys. They are created on-chain when someone transfers a nonzero amount of tokens to this account.

Another stand-out upgrade was protocol update 42. Here engineers lowered storage staking cost from 1N per 10kb to 1N per 100kb. This dramatically reduced the barrier of entry for contract developers. Before this change, when a developer deployed a 300kb contract, they needed to have at least 30 $NEAR on the account. After the change, they only need 3 $NEAR.

Lastly, not leastly, protocol upgrade 48 brought our WebAssembly runtime from wasmer0 to wasmer2. This shift helped half the cost of wasm operations, helping unlock many applications building on Aurora that were previously blocked because their transactions could not fit in NEAR’s gas limit.

This trend continued throughout the year, culminating in our biggest protocol announcement this year, Sharding. 

Sharding Takes Shape 

When NEAR released its design for the protocol back in 2019, we initially envisioned a completely sharded blockchain. We quickly realized that this brand new network didn’t have an immediate demand for processing hundreds of millions of transactions. Besides, a fully sharded blockchain is a complex endeavor, and we’d need a little time to do it right. 

However, the average number of daily transactions has now surpassed 300K. As more and more projects are building on NEAR, the volume of transactions is only going to increase dramatically in 2022. While the NEAR network is still only using a fraction of its total capacity, we wanted to start the transition to sharding now to avoid any unpleasant surprises, as well as ensure we can support all applications on NEAR. 

November 15th marked the beginning of this transition, as we unveiled Simple Nightshade, the first step (Phase 0) in our fully-sharded and secure blockchain. We dropped Simple Nightshade now so that we could preempt any unpleasant surprises with transaction speeds later. In Phase 0 of Nightshade, NEAR’s sharding is split across many nodes, making it super fast and ready for the onboarding of leagues of new developers and blockchain users. 

In early 2022, NEAR will move into Nightshade Phase 1, in which we will introduce the new role of chunk-only producers—those who only validate one shard. They produce chunks (shard blocks) for a specific shard and don’t need expensive hardware to do so—all without sacrificing network security. In Phase 2, currently scheduled for Q3 of 2022, both state and processing will be fully sharded, and validators won’t need to track all shards. And in Q4 of 2022, we will enter Phase 3 (Dynamic Sharding), in which we will enable the network to dynamically split and merge shards based on resource utilization. This will make NEAR almost infinitely scalable and able to handle any short-term spikes in usage. 

For more details on sharding, head over to the NEAR Medium page, where we’re publishing a series of features on how Nightshade is impacting the platform. Beyond a simple primer on how sharding works, we’re also exploring how Simple Nightshade is now powering the DeFi space and helping make NEAR carbon-neutral, amongst other things.   

Funding finds its feet

An ecosystem needs support, especially in its early days when projects are just finding their feet. In 2021, NEAR Foundation went above and beyond to foster growth and innovation. 

First up, there was the news that the NEAR ecosystem announced a monumental $800 million in funding initiatives targeted at accelerating growth. While NEAR is giving all communities access to this record amount of funding, there will be a special focus on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) teams who are actively revolutionizing and reimagining the way we interact with money. 

DeFi projects on NEAR have already been thriving this year, with $200 million total value locked across projects like Ref Finance, Skyward, and Octopus. In addition to ecosystem fund news, Proximity Labs, a research and development firm targeting the NEAR ecosystem, announced its own $350 million grants DAO to build on the momentum.

In the ecosystem, key projects like Aurora raised $12 million in its first funding round. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for scaling decentralized applications on NEAR, received funding from the likes of Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital and other funds.  

Flux Protocol, meanwhile, the decentralized oracle provider building on NEAR, raised $10.3 million to build the future of open finance earlier in the year. The project’s round was led by Distributed Global, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, Uncorrelated, Figment Capital, Maven 11, Reciprocal Ventures, Jabre Capital, Greenfield One, IOSG, and Flow Ventures.

With funding in place, it was only a matter of time before the ecosystem took off. 

Explosive Ecosystem Growth 

NEAR’s 2021 was marked by massive growth. Fueled by Rainbow Bridge, which connects NEAR with Ethereum, as well as Simple Nightshade sharding, the NEAR ecosystem saw an exciting proliferation of gaming, Metaverse, NFT, and DeFi projects. 

Gaming

Gaming was probably always destined to be a strong crypto industry, and 2021 proved to be a fantastic year for NEAR-based gaming projects. We expect this Web3 gaming momentum to carry over into 2022. 

In 2021, OP Games, a blockchain-based Web3 gaming platform, began transforming how users buy, own, and trade in-game assets. Unlike current gaming platforms, which often monopolize worlds by sandboxing digital assets, OP Games is offering them as NFTs and turning entire games into fractionalized NFTs. This way, players and fans can co-own projects and, if the game finds success, shape how it develops through its DAO. 

Similarly, Vorto Network began developing its online marketplace, where users will be able to buy in-game items and digital assets through a crypto wallet. Hash Rush, a blockchain-based, real-time strategy (RTS) game set to launch on Vorto Network in January 2022, will let players immerse themselves in the Hermeian galaxy, where they build, compete, and exchange goods through various levels. Hash Rush will be a great example of Web3’s “play-to-earn” model, which creates a digital goods economy for participants. 

Another title, NEAR Lands, is a pixelated land-based open-world game designed as much for the community as the gameplay. In the NEAR Lands online universe, players create characters and items, as well as engage with friends and other participants, while adventuring through the game’s landscape. 

As Q4 drew to a close, Inite earned a $50,000 grant to help build its NFT gaming platform. A unique type of Metaverse experience, Inite is a motivational game based on the scientific method, where players receive daily tasks designed to boost their creativity. By playing Inite, players can earn tokens by generating ideas to improve individual cognitive skills and productivity. 

NFTs 

Even more than gaming, 2021 was a strong year for NFTs. And with NFTs percolating into the public consciousness, it’s easy to see why. Paras and Mintbase, two NEAR NFT marketplaces, led the charge in bringing more NFTs to the NEAR ecosystem. 

Mintbase, which began building on NEAR in August of 2020, officially launched in 2021. The team had originally begun developing on Ethereum, but migrated over to NEAR when it became prohibitively expensive for them. With its fast transaction speeds and low costs, NEAR was the obvious choice for Mintbase, which hosts its own NFT marketplace but also has an NFT utility engine that helps people build their own.  

In early December, electronic music DJ and producer deadmau5 and indie rock band Portugal. the Man collaborated with Mintbase and NEAR to mint their NFT single “this is fine”. If deadmau5 and Portugal. the Man go platinum (sell more than 1 million records in the US), they will make blockchain history. It’s already putting Mintbase firmly on the NFT map. 

The NFT marketplace Paras offers real-world trading cards of artworks as collectibles, which users can quickly mint, buy, and sell quickly at little cost. Paras recently launched Boom Boom! the first mini digital comic series on NEAR, and PARADIGM. Both of these are part of Paras Comics, the platform’s new comics-specific feature. The Paras marketplace already has thousands of users purchasing one-of-a-kind NFT collections. It also boasts over 18,000 Twitter and 3,000 Telegram followers—a testament to its rapidly expanding community. 

From July 17th to the 25th, 2021 at the Shanghai National Exhibition and Convention Centre, Paras collaborated with Web3Games and NEAR to showcase Chinese artists who were selling NFT artworks at an exhibition. One artist, Huang Heshen, created the “Toorich City Series”, a collection of exclusive NFTs on Paras that explores Bu Tu Garden Community, a digital set of 10 luxury single-family villas.

Elsewhere in China, the NEAR dApp Feiyu recently debuted. Built atop NEAR, Feiyu is a new take on social media, where users express creativity by sharing memes and GIFs. All of this happens in an NFT-based metaverse where users don’t have to register a wallet. Driven by rewards, Feiyu users earn tokens or NFT items (skins, weapons, etc.) for participating in the community.

On the audio NFT front, DAO Records is working to reimagine the record label and to fairly pay musicians for their recordings. In the current music industry model, record labels and streaming services take the majority of musicians’ earnings. With DAO records, the founders are encouraging independent artists to release and package new music as audio NFTs. 

To Date, DAO Records has released over 150 NFTs from over 100 artists. And in the last 14 months, DAO Records has also produced over 50 virtual events, where musicians, fans, and NFT lovers can meet and socialize in custom-designed Metaverse gatherings. 

Metaverse 

While much crypto momentum found its way into DeFi and NFT apps, a number of Metaverse apps also launched on NEAR in 2021. These Metaverse apps laid the groundwork, in their own unique ways, for integration with blockchain gaming, DeFi, NFTs, and other crypto projects. 

Metaverse AI, for example, is developing an Open Metaverse for Web3. Using Metaverse AI’s advanced AI engine, users will be able to create decentralized identities and high-fidelity 3D avatars. These blockchain-based DiD (decentralization identifier) avatars give users ownership of their virtual identities and assets, and the ability to move them across the larger Metaverse. 

Another NEAR Metaverse project is Reality Chain, which will launch on Octopus Network, a substrate-based appchain network on NEAR. Reality Chain offers users gaming and social activities with the feel of immersive, multiplayer functionality and features.

A radically different take on the Metaverse can be found in the Illust Space app. Billing itself as an “open augmented reality infrastructure for the world,” the Illust Space team is building an augmented reality Metaverse. The app gives users the tools to mix the real and digital worlds for their artworks while making them collectible through NFT technology. 

Also in 2021, NEAR debuted its MetaBUILD series, a hackathon designed to encourage developers to build on NEAR. As the name indicates, building the Metaverse is a major emphasis of this hackathon. The first MetaBUILD held August 27th to September 19th, and the latest, MetaBUILD 2 (December 22 – February 10, 2022), both made $1 million in prizes available to developers and teams.

DeFi 

DeFi, or decentralized finance, has become a cornerstone of any crypto ecosystem. In little more than 12 months since mainnet launch, there are now more than 40 DeFi projects calling NEAR home. From infrastructure providers like Rainbow Bridge, Flux and Aurora, to token swap markets 1inch, Trisolaris, and Onomy Protocol, there are staking platforms, lenders, borrowers, credit scorers, and even BananaSwappers. 

As noted above, both NEAR’s $800 million global ecosystem fund and Proximity Labs’ $350 million Grants DAO will support DeFi projects and other dapps building on NEAR. NEAR’s Nightshade sharding will also supercharge DeFI by expanding the blockchain’s transaction speeds and security. 

Launched this year, Aurora is one of the most notable DeFi projects on NEAR. A platform that makes EVM contracts interoperable on NEAR, Aurora allows developers to keep using Ethereum while boosting their apps with NEAR’s super-fast transactions and low barriers to entry. Aurora is partnering with a number of other promising DeFi projects on NEAR, like the cross-chain oracle Flux and Rose, a stable swap and borrowing protocol, to level up the ecosystem’s DeFi game. 

Yet another highly visible DeFi player on NEAR is Ref Finance, a community-led and multi-purpose decentralized exchange, asset issuer, and lender. Ref Finance accomplishes all of this through a single, synchronous DeFi stack. What’s more, it’s fun and easy to use. 

If you’re looking for an interest rate market protocol, then Burrow is a dApp to check out. And if you’re looking for a token launchpad, be sure to dive into Skyward Finance, a DeFi platform that makes token launches fair and community-centric, as well as bot and attack-resistant. Another cool thing about Skyward Finance is that its DAO gives the community access to the token launch immediately instead of letting front-runners like private investors and VC firms pump and dump tokens. 

If you’re looking for more on NEAR DeFi apps, we’ll be publishing an article on the top DeFi projects building on NEAR. So, stay tuned for that in the new year. 

The DAO Community is Growing

One of the major takeaways of 2021 is that NEAR’s community of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations is rapidly growing and diversifying. This is another trend that the NEAR ecosystem and larger blockchain community can expect to carry over into 2022 and beyond. 

Sputnik DAO V1, a hub for NEAR’s DAO ecosystem, currently has a total of 248 DAOs, with a total of 17,633 transactions for a total payout of 989,598 $NEAR ($9,292,324 USD). The Sputnik DAO hub now has a Total Value Locked (TVL) of 113,969 $NEAR ($1,070,164 USD). Factoring in those decentralized organizations in the Astro DAOs ecosystem, it’s safe to say there are now over 400 DAOs on the NEAR platform. 

Much of the DAO community growth can be seen in NEAR’s blockchain infrastructure and the DeFi space. The biggest DAO by total assets is Aurora, a token exchange bridge between NEAR and Ethereum, and Octopus, a platform for building appchains (independent, custom blockchains).

2021 saw explosive growth in how DAOs experimented with governance tooling on NEAR. In the first half of the year, SputnikDAO went through two iterations—one for disseminating the Community Fund and the other to incorporate custom call ability. By the time Astro DAO launched in October, there was such demand for its offerings that hundreds of DAOs came into existence in only 2 months. And in Q4, the NEAR community did quite a lot of thinking about liability protection, legal entities, and state regulation of DAOs. 

Creatives DAO, a fully community-run DAO Vertical, launched this year to support the ecosystem’s creative Guilds and DAOs. Discussions are just beginning about MultiDAOs, and how DAOs can better coalesce for collaborative decision-making efforts. NEAR is also supporting a research initiative hosted by Governauts that is examining DAO-based reward systems. 

DAO projects are being supplemented by DAO Guilds, which support these and other blockchain sectors with different resources. Various Guilds are even acting as specialized sub-DAOs working in areas like legal, software development, and DeFi. These and other Guilds are there for when app founders and developers want to tap into specific expertise and resources to improve their own project, technology, or DAO.

DaoBox, based in Switzerland, is another resource for projects and organizations looking to design DAOs. The company offers a toolkit for DAOs building in NEAR, helping them establish the DAO, get a headquarters address, raise funds, and stay compliant through accounting. 

A Brief Look Toward 2022

A number of developers building on NEAR will launch their projects in 2022, bringing many more DeFi, NFT, Gaming, Metaverse, and other exciting and cutting projects to the NEAR ecosystem. These teams came to NEAR because they know that whether you’re developing or simply using NEAR apps, joining the ecosystem is fast, easy, and secure.

With NEAR’s $800 million global ecosystem funding initiative, expect to see many more DAOs established as we head into 2022. These funds, alongside Guilds and other blockchain-based expertise and resources, will be vital in helping DAOs succeed and, just as importantly, bringing the masses from Web2 to the Open Web. 

The post NEAR 2021: A Year in Review appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

The following postmortems on the NEAR sharding rollout and Aurora IDO summarize the incidents. They provide root cause analyses, mitigations, and the future improvements we are working on to prevent similar incidents from happening again.

Incident 1 – November 10th (12:00 UTC – 15:00 UTC) NEAR Inc RPC Service degraded during Boca Chica Aurora token sale

During the Boca Chica Aurora token sale, community members reported an inability to access the service to buy the Aurora lottery ticket. The cause: too much load on the RPC endpoint. Due to higher than expected demand during the sale, the RPC became overloaded in the EU region.

We’ve increased our RPC capacity by rolling out new RPC nodes across all regions. In particular, we’ve bumped up the number of nodes in the EU region. In the meantime, we’ve made and are working on several other improvements to increase the RPC throughput and reliability.

Incident 2 – November 16th (19:00 UTC – 19:30 UTC) Near Inc Services down due to global cloud provider outage

All Near Inc services stopped working to some extent for a short period of time including RPC, Indexers, Explorer, and Wallet. Issues were reported from across the community and internally all alerts started to fire. 

We rapidly identified the root cause: an outage affecting the load balancing stack hit our cloud provider, which impacted RPC and therefore made all other dependent services unavailable as well. Unfortunately, there was no quick mitigation we could do on our side. We had to wait for the cloud provider to resolve the issue to get our services operational again. The cloud provider was able to quickly detect and restore service in under 20 minutes.

Currently, we use one cloud provider for the services we host. We do this for simplicity of maintenance. Due to the decentralized nature of NEAR, anyone is able to run their own RPC services, providing alternative ways to access the network. Making it easy for users to switch RPC nodes is something that both wallets and developer tooling will be looking into. 

To prevent issues like this from happening to Near Inc services, we are also looking into implementing a multi-cloud deployment with client-side fallbacks in case the primary service goes down.

Incident 3 – November 17th(03:00 UTC – 19:00 UTC)Near Inc services degraded including Skyward during Aurora IDO, Wallet, and Explorer

During the sharding rollout on mainnet we encountered two issues caused by state splitting as part of the protocol upgrade: 1) high disk usage affecting the RPC service, and 2) the inability of archival nodes to split state within one epoch.

Let’s discuss them separately.

The first issue was caused by high disk usage (IOPS) during the process of splitting state. Even though the RPC traffic was very low across the network, performance of our RPC nodes drastically deteriorated and we observed that RPC latency in some regions jumped from 1s to 60s. 

This was not a capacity problem: each RPC request takes longer to respond and adding more nodes wouldn’t help much. Most services were almost unavailable, but due to client side retries they could be used with high response times. Most affected users were in Europe and Asia.

The second issue was caused by archival nodes being unable to finish state splitting within one epoch as expected and, therefore, they got stuck when the new epoch arrived. This issue arose unexpectedly, as we ran simulations beforehand for regular RPC for the sharding upgrade using mainnet data. The edge case we missed was running the simulation on archival nodes, which took significantly longer. The issue had not been previously identified on testnet, as archival data is smaller there. 

The failure of archival nodes affected all services depending on them: Indexer, Explorer, Wallet, Aurora, etc. The Infrastructure team was able to rapidly redirect traffic to non-archival nodes as a patch until archival nodes were restored. We waited until archival nodes finished splitting their states, and once the first node synced we generated a backup and started the rest of the archival nodes from there. This was a failure of not testing for all cases and we plan to invest more time and effort in making sure releases go as smoothly as previous ones.

Some Final Thoughts

It’s important to note that, despite all the aforementioned incidents, the network was always functioning as expected and only RPC services were affected, causing dependent services to have issues.

We want to be transparent about all past and future issues we face. We believe the community members will understand that “NEAR stands for iteration” and we are doing our best to prevent such incidents from happening in the future.

The post NEAR Sharding Rollout and Aurora IDO Postmortems appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

The partnership aims to empower both the NEAR and Ethereum ecosystems by improving developer facilities – through the availability of the product suite – with the goal of increasing cross-chain interoperability. 

The product suite features projects including MetaMask, Infura, ConsenSys Quorum, Truffle, Codefi, and Diligence. MetaMask is the primary way a global user base of over 21 million monthly active users interact with applications on Web3. Over 350,000 developers use Infura to access Ethereum, IPFS and Layer 2 networks. In addition, 4.7 million developers create and deploy smart contracts using Truffle and ConsenSys Diligence has secured more than $25 billion in smart contracts with its hands-on dapp audits and testing tools. 

“We are thrilled to join forces with ConsenSys on our shared mission of empowering the Ethereum ecosystem and extending its economy,” said Alex Shevchenko, the CEO of Aurora Labs.

The partnership means ConsenSys will now have official participation in the ongoing development of the AuroraDAO. 

“We are excited to be partnering with the talented Aurora and NEAR protocol teams. Developer interest in EVM-compatible scaling solutions continues to grow at the same pace as the rapid expansion of the Web3 ecosystem, says E.G. Galano, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Infura.

“We believe developers will benefit from the addition of Aurora to the Infura product suite by enabling them to utilize the NEAR network with the EVM tooling they are already familiar with.”

Infura is directly involved in the AuroraDAO, which hands over key decision making to its community as a part of its vision to create a scaling solution that is as decentralized as possible.

About Aurora

Aurora is an EVM built on the NEAR Protocol, delivering a turn-key solution for developers to operate their apps on an Ethereum-compatible, high-throughput, scalable and future-safe platform, with low transaction costs for their users.

Join Aurora’s community

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The post Aurora Partners With ConsenSys, Bringing MetaMask, Infura and More Ethereum Tools to NEAR appeared first on NEAR Protocol.