Highlights from NEAR | CON Day 2
That’s a wrap! NEAR | CON is over but there’s still so much to talk about. If you missed our Day 1 highlights, you can catch the whole thing here.
But before you go and do that, we’ve got a ton of new stuff to show you from Day 2!
What’s new in developer tooling
Day 2 kicked off with a keynote from Josh Quintal, a product manager for the developer platform at NEAR. His talk was all about NEAR’s focus on making complex tools simple to use.
The developer platform team has been super busy re-writing the NEAR command lane interface (CLI) from the ground up. In that re-write there are range of new features, including interactive prompts, structured logs, key management and a lot more.
The team has created additional language support. So on top of Rust and Assembly Script, you can now work on NEAR in Grain and Zig languages.
All of these new features are due to be released and rolled out later this year, so stay tuned!
Creating Decentralized leadership with OWS
Next up we had Sofia Kachula and Vasilya Rafikova from the Open Web Sandbox who were sharing key insights from helping hundreds of people get to grips with NEAR.
One of the biggest learnings from OWS. says Kachula was the shift from top-down hierarchical structures to flat, empowering ones.
“Creating a safe place where people feel welcomed — to enable collaboration between contributors has become our main goal.”
But Rafikova countered the idea of endlessly flat hierarchies with no leadership. In her talk, she discussed that leadership was necessary, but it needed structure around it to help ensure it was effective.
The cornerstone of being a leader in the decentralized world is all about consistent communication and understanding that influence and leadership go hand in hand. “The goal is to move beyond centralized governance.”
Homecoming
Next up was NEAR CEO Erik Trautman, who took the main stage to discuss the creator economy and how NEAR is trying to build all the tools necessary for creators and developers and entrepreneurs to create the new and more inclusive worlds.
“When I ask people why this is an interesting place to be a part of, they don’t talk about scalability or sharding, they talk about energy, a feeling, this is what it felt like 10 years ago in the tech industry,” said Trautman.
He went on to discuss how NEAR’s evolution has been to harness that energy to create simple, scalable and secure technology that anyone can use, before inviting people, especially from outside the crypto world to dip their toes in NEAR’s water.
Sharding is NEAR
“If you wanted a very tech-heavy, deep down, low level presentation at NEARCON, this is the one,” were Near Inc’s Maksym’s Zavershynski’s first words for his talk “Sharding and Things to Come.” And tech-heavy it most certainly was!
Maksym’s presentation focused on Sharding, TPS, and Scalability. Before getting into the details, he noted that NEAR blockchain was built with the ability to be an ever-evolving ecosystem, uniquely adapted to the community. As Maksym emphasized, NEAR Inc met its Simple Nightshade sharding deadline because of a culture of constant protocol upgrades to the blockchain.
Maksym commended NEAR sharding team members Bowen Wang, Min Zhang, and the Core and Node X groups for their work. He also shared a sharding roadmap, showing that NEAR currently lies between Phase 0 (Sharded State) and Phase 1 (Some Sharded Processing, hitting the platform in January 2022), with Phases 2 (Fully Sharded Processing) and 3 (Dynamic Scalability) arriving in Q3 and Q4, respectively.
When Q3 rolls around, NEAR will be a fully-sharded blockchain, both in state and processing.
Currently, 13% of the shard is being used, which means that developers can currently validate by bridging NEAR to almost anything and vice versa. As Maksym noted, developers won’t have to change their dApps to adjust to full sharding. And as NEAR moves through the phases toward full sharding, hardware costs incurred by validators will decrease dramatically. Ultimately, all of this will lead to much, much faster transaction speeds (TPS) and scalability.
For the full details, watch the recording of Maksym’s talk.
Aurora CEO Alex Shevchenko talks “token consistency”
With so many bridges, tokens, and networks comes a lack of token consistency. In his talk, “Token Consistency,” Aurora CEO Alex Shevchenko spoke to the NEARCON audience about his app’s solution to this problem arising from interconnected blockchains.
“A bridge is not only about moving the tokens from one blockchain to another, it’s about being able to call other blockchains, get the data from the other blockchains, maybe move some messages between the blockchains,” said Shevchenko. “However, there is already a lot of ‘terminology mess’ around the bridges.”
As a prime example of terminology mess, Shevchenko contrasted bridges (issuers of IOU tokens) and exchanges (for token trading). He noted how the wider crypto community refers to exchanges “bridges” as well. “However, the difference is drastic,” said Shevchenko.
Within bridges and exchanges, Shevchenko noted, the terminology of the tokens from different blockchains creates confusion for users and developers. There are several potential solutions, some better than others.
Check out Alex’s talk at NEARCON for full details.
Web3 Founders’ Journey
The concluding spot of NEARCON was reserved for the Web3 Founders’ Journey panel and discussion. Hosted by Rune Bentien of Move Capital, the panel featured Richard Muirhead of Fabric Ventures, Jake Brukman of CoinFund, OP Fund’s David Gan, and NEAR Foundation CEO Erik Trautman.
Each Web3 panelist detailed their respective journeys into founding and/or funding blockchain projects. The talk then turned to conversation on how the role of entrepreneur and founder is evolving with Web3 apps compared to Web 2 development.
“I want to talk about the nature of entrepreneurship in this [Web3] space,” said Fabric Venture’s Richard Muirhead. “I think that more than any time ever anybody can be a founder because this is proximity to a problem, a clear understanding of the problem you want to solve, something around which you could coordinate the action of people in the way your described to solve it, is the most important thing and it’s the most democratized wave of software ever seen.”
As a former Web2 founder, OP Fund’s David Gan said the thing he focused on the most was talent acquisition and focusing on markets. In Web3, he said some of the best talent isn’t even hireable.
“I think for the Web3 space it’s people designing the right incentive structures or frameworks to be in the protocol or organization,” said Gan. “Nowadays, you’re able to flip the script and ask for and leverage help outside of wherever you’re located in a siloed market and instead open it up to a global user base and global contributors, and give away ownership of the company you’re running to other people and properly incentivize anyone and everyone to participate.”
“Frankly, anyone can be a founder,” Gan added. “The tools and resources are much more available than they were before.”
In response, Trautman noted that the founders’ journey in Web3 still parallels Web2 in many ways.
“You still have to raise money, you still have to eat, find your first users, build a product that people want,” said Trautman. “What’s different is that the access to some of those things is changing and hiring great people is different too. So, I do think that on the capital side, which I’m sure is on the minds of everyone here, is the preponderance of investment DAOs and things like that creates not only these ideas and these entrepreneurs that emerge from the community but it turns out they can also access community-driven fundraising mechanisms, which means they have access to competitive capital to traditional fundraising mechanisms.”
To watch the full Web3 Founders’ Journey panel, check out the NEARCON Day 2 recording on YouTube.
This wrap up was just the tip of the iceberg, and we’ll be providing a full index of all the content recorded at NEAR | CON so you can watch back all of the amazing content we captured.
We’ll leave you with this tweet thread from an attendee of NEAR | CON who summed up all the announcements perfectly!
See you next year!
