BUIDL with NEAR Protocol at ETHDenver 2021
Curious about BUIDLing at ETHDenver & ColoradoJam 2021 with NEAR Protocol but wanting more details on their project? Get the scoop from their recent interview with ETHDenver:
What Is NEAR?
“Hi, my name is Matt Lockyer; I’m working on Developer Relations at Near Protocol. NEAR is a scalable layer one blockchain with lots of great developer tools and resources to get started and make the developers path to market. Very fast and simple. We have lots of work that we’re doing with Etheruem. Lots of stuff going on. Very exciting.
What Else Should BUIDLers Know?
NEAR is building a bridge called the Rainbow Bridge that will allow developers to basically lock up assets or prove that certain smart contract actions and methods have been called on the Ethereum side, but we have a light client that’s implemented on the NEAR side, which we can verify that certain transactions were included on the Ethereum side. So for example, you could lock an ERC-20 token like DAI into an Ethereum contract with just a single token transfer that costs you know, 43,000 gas, and you can prove that that token has been locked in that contract on the NEAR side, in which case you can mint a synthetic version of that token, and allow your users to to basically trade, transact, swap, and do whatever they want on the NEAR side.
Now, why NEAR? Why would you want to move assets over to NEAR? Because it’s fast and cheap and scalable. So NEAR’s approach to scalability is basically to include the chunks of shards inside a single blockchain. So in a sharded blockchain, a developer has the problem of remembering sort of which shard different contracts that they want to compose with. Like, where their contracts live. So which shard is my contract on in NEAR, you don’t have to worry about that. All of that is kind of abstracted away for you. And as a developer, all you need to know is basically the contract ID, which is also not just an address, like a 0x sort of, you know, hex address, it’s a human readable address. So our account system also has basically human readable domain names built in. So there’s a lot there for developers to be able to build simply and easily on near and with the Rainbow Bridge.
There’s lots of options too, to work with, and building hybrid applications that can help existing Ethereum assets and applications to scale their functionality. So we’re talking with a lot of teams that will be using NEAR, and we’ll be using the Rainbow Bridge to bridge assets and liquidity from Ethereum onto NEAR and mint synthetic tokens. So for example, locking up DAI tokens on Ethereum and then bridging them to NEAR and minting what we would call a DAI or a synthetic representation of DAI. Now those teams are going to use that DAI as a stable coin to make purchases for, you know, NFT’s that are minted on NEAR because the gas fees for minting those NFT’s are much cheaper. Now that’s more of an asset moving across a bridge!”
Meet the team and learn more about NEAR Protocol at ETHDenver & ColoradoJam 2021, February 5–12! Apply today at ethdenver.com.
