Buchanan  brings over three decades of legal and business expertise at the intersection of federal law enforcement, global interagency cooperation, corporate compliance, digital assets, and emerging regulatory frameworks. She was the first woman and youngest person to be appointed to the position of U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania and since then has served as President, Americas and Global Chief Legal Officer for Merkle Science. A member of the Board of Directors of the Cardano Foundation, Buchanan has been at the forefront of the digital assets industry since 2013 while she was a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner leading the firm’s Digital Currency Team. 

Buchanan is among the brightest minds in crypto compliance, regulatory, and legal matters. She has prosecutorial experience and conducted ethics and reputational risk assessment for the UN. Her career has also focused on internal investigations, corporate compliance, SEC enforcement matters, congressional investigations, and digital currency work in private practice. 

Sheila Warren, who you might have seen featured at NEARCON, currently serves as the inaugural CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, the premier global alliance advancing crypto innovation worldwide. She co-hosts “Money Reimagined,” a CoinDesk TV show and podcast, is an advisor to the Filecoin Foundation, serves on the Steering Committee of the DeFi Education Fund, and is an early stage investor across the Web3 ecosystem. 

Before joining the NF Council, Warren founded the blockchain and digital assets team at the World Economic Forum, where she served as a member of the Executive Committee. As the Deputy Global Head of the Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, she oversaw strategy across 16 countries to advance the adoption of new technologies in the global public interest. 

Last, but certainly not least, Jason Warner is the former CTO of GitHub and currently the Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. Before joining GitHub, Warner was Vice President of Engineering at Heroku, the world’s leading PaaS and one of the largest cloud computing providers in the world. He is an active speaker, writer, and advisor on cloud computing, technology and leadership. 

Welcoming the appointments, Marieke Flament, CEO of the NEAR Foundation, said: “Changing the world does not happen without great people working together, and we are thrilled to be welcoming this calibre of leader on board as we continue on our goals to put usability at the heart of a global shift towards Web3. Mary Beth, Sheila, and Jason have collectively spent decades creating the infrastructure necessary for society to be ready for this momentum and shift – we could not be more excited to have them join us on our mission.”
These appointments are huge wins for NEAR Foundation and the ecosystem at large. Welcome to the NEAR family, Mary Beth, Sheila, and Jason!

The post NEAR Foundation Strengthens Governance with New Talent appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

NEAR Foundation’s role is to support the NEAR ecosystem and community. This means that the Foundation can deploy capital to help promote growth, alongside its efforts to grow awareness of NEAR and onboard a billion users to Web3. 

Among Layer 1 protocols, NEAR is in an excellent position to thrive despite the very difficult market conditions. Our 5+ years of runway will help the NEAR ecosystem weather the bear market, which is likely to last for some time. The Treasury Team’s careful spending and responsible Treasury management has equipped the ecosystem to emerge from this crypto winter with NEAR as the protocol of choice for people and projects building on Web3. 

While the market has created a new reality for the entire Web3 ecosystem, NEAR sees this as a moment of great opportunity and a time to stick to our convictions. We’ve outlined the Foundation’s new strategy around facilitating Web2.5 and making NEAR the de facto bridge from Web2 to Web3. 

Staying true to NEAR’s decentralized vision, the NEAR Digital Collective (NDC) was recently launched and led by the Governance Working Group (GWG). We’ve also delegated some decision-making to the community through grassroots DAOs: the DeveloperDAO, MarketingDAO, and CreativesDAO. 

NEAR Foundation has provided capital to many projects over the last two-plus years, with clear milestones and goals designed to maximize potential value added to the ecosystem. Grants have been a major part of that capital allocation strategy since the program was first announced in 2021. Although the Foundation has a substantial amount of runway to support the ecosystem for several years to come, we need to ensure that we are stewarding NEAR’s Treasury as responsibly and sustainably as possible.

With these long-term views in mind, NEAR Foundation is looking critically at all of its capital allocation in the last few years in order to determine what has had the most impact and where we should consider revising our approach. We will also be heavily scrutinizing upcoming capital deployments. The Foundation must focus on supporting the highest quality projects with the most potential and alignment with our vision for NEAR.

What does this mean for the community? To make NEAR the leading Web2.5 bridge, NEAR Foundation will back those projects and initiatives that help best grow and support the ecosystem for years to come. This also means that some tough decisions are coming about where not to deploy funding. 

However, in the areas where funding or granting is pared back, the Foundation will do its absolute best to support those affected by upcoming funding decisions. We will make our best efforts to help these community members find new homes with other ecosystem projects. 

NEAR Foundation will also ensure that we are as transparent as possible about the new Funding strategy as it rolls out. The Foundation will communicate as often and as much as possible, and encourage the community to continue giving feedback so we can iterate more quickly as we build the NEAR Ecosystem together.

NEAR Foundation has already made significant steps to make NEAR’s funding more transparent. Through the NEAR Digital Collective (NDC), we are empowering the community to evolve governance and coordinate together through the ecosystem DAOs. (Read more and get involved at the NDC gov.nearpages.wpengine.com page.) In September, NEAR formed a working group to set standards for this on-chain style of self-governance. The Foundation has been calling this the “bottom-up” approach to supporting the community, encouraging grassroots coordination and decentralized decision-making that works in parallel with the Foundation’s more “top-down” stewardship and funding strategy.  

The Foundation also started publishing a regular Transparency Report in the spirit of accountability to the ecosystem. The first Transparency report, which came out just before NEARCON, was an important start—but we want to make it even better for the community. The next report will be coming out in a couple of weeks and will include more granularity where possible. You can also check out a recent update from the NEAR Grants team titled “Funding Beyond Grants”. 

It’s also important for the community to understand that while transparency and open communication are an essential part of NEAR Foundation’s commitment to all of you, we cannot be entirely transparent about every funding decision or commercial agreement we make. This is primarily due to legal restrictions that can be imposed on NEAR Foundation in its dealings with third parties. The Foundation will share as much as possible  about the exciting collaborations being made in the months ahead.

NEAR Foundation highly encourages people to get involved with the NEAR community. By becoming more participatory, community members can take ownership in the new bottom-up approach to decision making we are helping foster across the ecosystem.

NEAR Foundation is keeping an eye on the long term for the entire NEAR ecosystem. By being fiscally responsible and deploying capital in a sustainable way, the Foundation can ensure that NEAR emerges from this bear market stronger than ever, and well positioned to help builders keep building the future of Web3.

The post Evolving NEAR Foundation’s Funding Strategy appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

The Foundation received an incredible amount of thoughtful feedback about the NDC and how it would function. As a result, the Foundation has been working with its partners on how best to take this project forward. This post is an update about the progress so far. 

Why does decentralization matter?

Decentralization is shifting the locus of power away from a central node to several smaller nodes and setting up processes to establish group consensus without relying on hierarchies or top-down structures. NEAR was always designed to be run and owned by its community. The Foundation believes the unique properties of a fully decentralized ecosystem make NEAR: 

Antifragile and resilient: having no single honeypot or single legal entity will make NEAR stronger against attacks and challenges.

Censorship resistant: without central parties, no one party can control the network nor take over the ecosystem. 

Adaptable: the system can learn and adapt quickly in different directions to find the right levers of growth.

Inclusive: more voices are involved and heard. 

How will we measure our progress?

It’s important that the progress of this work is measurable and transparent. The intention is to decrease the ownership percentage of key infrastructure by both the NEAR Foundation and Pagoda over time. Those groups identify the following metrics as the key indicators of a successful ecosystem: 

• Funding: treasury management and diversification
• Protocol operations: validator ecosystem & decentralization
• Core development: the protocol and developer ecosystem
• Governance and decision-making: decentralization and transparency
• Brand: awareness, traction, consistency
• Ecosystem services: founder support (legal, marketing, ops, community) 
• App layer: tooling, number of projects building, active users

How will we achieve optimal decentralization?

This is the project of the next several months, under the continuing stewardship of the Foundation and Pagoda. The goal here is to simplify and align while encouraging the broadest possible participation from contributors to our ecosystem and community. 

A node architecture applies to the NEAR ecosystem as well as to the tech: every company, DAO, validator, fund is a hub in the NEAR constellation of nodes, all on an equal playing field in terms of their ability to contribute to decision-making and development. This constellation of nodes will work together in a decentralized but coordinated way. The Foundation is currently applying structure around nodes to define levels of accountability and extent of participation in governance processes. 

What is the role of NDC? 

The NEAR Digital Collective (NDC) is a new way of organizing the fast-growing community of users, projects, stakeholders, partners, and backers building inside the NEAR ecosystem. Its ultimate goal is to create a cohesive structure that allows all the component parts of the NEAR ecosystem to collectively decide how NEAR should be run. The NDC will work with the Foundation, Pagoda, and other ecosystem nodes over the coming months to develop a structure and make its first proposals to the community. 

Version one of the governance framework is underway. This framework is the NDC’s vision for a decentralized governance system and core governance components. When complete it will provide details of roles, responsibilities, participation rules, and dispute resolution processes.

In addition, a communications strategy is being developed which will help the community stay up to date with the NDC’s progress.

NDC updates will be posted on the NEAR Forum. If you’d like to get involved with the NDC, you can do so here. 

The NEAR Foundation would like to thank the community for your enthusiasm and input throughout this decentralization process. Striking the right balance between moving fast and growing wisely is always a challenge in the fast-paced world of Web3 and it’s more important than ever to work together. NEAR is well-positioned for the next phase of growth and making sure everyone is strategically and operationally aligned now will help achieve much greater success in the future.

The post Ecosystem Update on Decentralizing Governance appeared first on NEAR Protocol.