Highlights from NEAR | CON Day 1
Welcome to the end of Day 1 at NEAR | CON! We had a ton of talks, NFTs, DJs, DAOs, the works. If you missed anything, we’re here to give you the highlights of all the good things that went down at NEAR | CON Day 1.
Climate Change and NEAR
Kicking things off was Yessin Schiegg from NEAR Protocol talking about how technology needs to take part in helping the planet find better ways of tackling climate change.
NEAR’s proof of stake blockchain is a huge step forward for blockchain when it comes to creating technology that can benefit everyone, without costing the earth.
Bitcoin uses the same amont of energy for one block, which takes 10 minutes to complete as NEAR does in 10 years, said Schiegg. It’s what has allowed NEAR to become a certified climate-neutral blockchain, thanks to the team at South Pole.
Joining Yessin was Wouter Crul speaking (Director of innovation at South Pole) who spoke about his team’s mission to help other tech industries find better solutions to their impact on the environment.
Blockchain is the best approach to fighting carbon emissions as it is transparent and has large communities verifying how carbon neutral a project is, says Crul.
Speaking of crypto and carbon, Frederic Fournier, the CEO of Open Forest Protocol (OFP) who shared his moving story of how he’d been trying to find solutions to tackle climate change before discovering crypto.
Creating OFP, provided a pathway that allowed reforestation to have a transparent, and secure way of tracking efforts to re-grow the world’s forests using blockchain technology.
NEAR, looking back and forward
Next on stage was NEAR Inc. CEO Illia Polosukhin, who gave an overview of where NEAR has come from in just 12 short months since mainnet launch.
The audience clapped at the 40 million plus transactions on mainnet, 1.1 million active wallets, more than 100,000 community members, some 200 projects building on NEAR alongside more than 200 DAOs and 100 Guilds.
He also outlined the three pillars NEAR is committed to help develop to ensure the ecosystem reaches its ambitious goal of a billion users in the next five years. Those three pillars are Finance, Community and Creativity.
With the announcement of an $800 million funding programme earlier this week, NEAR is looking to provide support as and when its needed.
Another part of that support is the rollout of multiple shards. Next month, NEAR will move from one to four shards, as part of its sharding roadmap.
“No one will notice, that’s the whole point, as a developer or user, you don’t need to, it just works,” says Polosukhin.
Satori, a new NFT marketplace on NEAR
After lunch, NEAR | CON was handed over to the creators. The Satori team talked about their vision of a NFT marketplace protocol on NEAR. A major theme in the Satori team’s demo was comparing the arrival of NFTs to the creative and artistic breakthrough of the historical Renaissance period.
“Artists today aren’t valued in our society but we’re on the brink of a creative renaissance,” said Satori CEO and co-founder Peter DePaolo. “We at Satori want to dive headfirst into this, and we think what we can do is leverage NFTs to empower artists to create new markets. Today’s NFTs look a lot like yesterday — we see tomorrow’s NFTs.”
Satori’s creative director Mally Anderson added that Satori and other NFT marketplaces are fostering a new type of wealth creation. The crucial difference is that while in the Renaissance merchants financed or patronized the arts, blockchains like NEAR and NFT marketplaces like Satori will allow artists and other creatives to take their work directly to fans, buyers, collectors, etc., and cutting out unnecessary middlemen.
Minting Music remagines music licensing with NFTs
The Nashville-based Minting Music is working to empower music and artists via blockchain technology and Web 3.0. The company envisions Minting Music as a platform that revolutionizes music publishing through sync licenses and other licensing agreements. While the platform will be a white label music market, it will also mint NFTs via Mintbase and have live music functionality with mobile apps and community-building capabilities.
“We want to bring the minting and airdropping of NFTs to scale,” said Minting Music’s Quinton Armitage. “Our onboarding systems are 100% mobile first. When somebody comes to a concert they have their smartphone in hand, so how can we onboard people into the NEAR ecosystem and into minting music as easily as possible? To that end, our goal is to bring people into our development environment, and to build DAOs and other creative features.”
Minting Music’s Amber Stoneman added that a big part of the project will be simplifying the music licensing process. The current music licensing system involves a confusing network of companies collecting royalties for artists, which has frustrated both Stoneman and many other music industry professionals for far too long. Minting Music will simplify the process by removing unnecessary music licensing middleman, and by putting music artists directly in touch with their fans via the company’s ecosystem.
NFT.HipHop
Ed Young, developer of the hip hop- centric dApp NFT.HipHop, made a parallel between the rise and paradigm shift of hip hop in the 1980s and recent blockchain developments.
For Young, a co-creator and former co-owner of the influential hip hop culture magazine The Source, blockchain’s global economic potential reminds him of hip hop’s own over the last several decades.
“Blockchain is going to be the next social, cultural, economic phenomenon that powers what our future will be,” said Young. “The things that I learned to grow hip hop and its lifestyle — its global social, cultural, and economic establishment — is what we can apply to blockchain to make it go mainstream and break large.”
To that end, Young has been engaging music artists with visual arts backgrounds for NFT.HipHop. Play, one half of the duo from the iconic hip hop movie Kid and Play, did a remote guest spot on creating NFT art during Young’s presentation, as did Vinnie from Naughty by Nature, who spoke briefly about his efforts to build out his crypto and metaverse projects on the blockchain.
We’ll be keeping our eyes on NFT.HipHop, as well as Vinnie’s projects!
Web Assembly: music on blockchain smart contracts
For a completely different take on music and NFTs, NEARCON speaker Peter Salomonsen, a chiptune producer and creator of several blockchain-based music apps, spoke about WebAssembly music. In his live interactive presentation, the Norway-based Salomonsen showcased on-chain projects he created for playing, mixing, and editing music — all stored in the same smart contract.
“WebAssembly music isn’t about creating music in audio files, mp3 files, or wav files but about creating music in small computer programs — WebAssembly is a technology to be able to run these programs” said Salomonsen. “This has been going on for many years. I started originally in the Commodore Amiga demo scene, and we were experimenting with creating tiny programs that were able to play music, show graphics, and show different coding. Now it’s possible to do this using the blockchain.”
During his live interactive presentation Salomonsen used blockchain technology to synthesize music using a keyboard and WebAssembly browser. As he noted, all music is coded and generated in real-time via WebAssembly.
While this type of production environment doesn’t have a slick interface (yet) like, say, Ableton Live or Logic, Salomonsen demonstrated that blockchain-based music production will evolve quickly in the near future.
And with that, Day 1 came to a close!
We’ll be updating all the videos from the event so you can check them out in your own time!
Don’t miss Day 2!
About NEAR
NEAR is a high-performance blockchain that is designed to be super-fast, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable. NEAR’s vision is to create a network that enables people to re-imagine finance, creativity and community in new and inclusive ways.
NEAR is built by an award-winning team of engineers and entrepreneurs to be simple to use, inclusive and good for the environment. NEAR is backed by top VCs such as A16Z, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com, and Baidu Ventures.
Join NEAR’s community:
Telegram: https://t.me/cryptonear
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/UY9Xf2k
Twitter: @NEAR_Blockchain & @NEARProtocol
