Near Protocol Collision 21: Easy Building on Blockchain
With Matt Lockyer
For the first time this year, NEAR Protocol has participated in the 2021 Collision Conference on “the studding future of tech conferences”. This event brings together over a thousand startups, journalists and 40.000 attendees from all around the world to discuss the latest developments in the tech industry. On the 20th of April, NEAR Protocol’s Matt Lockyer gave a masterclass on how to build on blockchain exploring the newest NEAR’s features such as the account model, the rainbow bridge and more, while elaborating on NEAR’s values and mission.
“ We believe everyone should be able to create, own and exchange value on the internet.”
Matt’s masterclass on how to build on NEAR blockchain started off with a few remarks on what NEAR values and mission are. NEAR’s primary objective is to facilitate the creation, ownership and exchange of value on the internet. It strives to make this process as accessible as possible and as user friendly as it can get.
“We’ve got the internet, we’ve got this great kind of global exchange of information but now it’s time to liberate people and kind of exchange value as well.”
These are the core principles that orient NEAR’s work and that are reflected on its outputs. As Matt remarks:
“It is easy to develop contracts and apps, it is fast, inexpensive and scalable — it was specifically designed to be efficient and scalable — it has a flexible account system, it is connected to Ethereum through a trestles decentralized bridge, and it has an amazing ecosystem.”
Usability and Scalability are NEAR’s Strengths
NEAR focuses on improving usability and scalability, two essential components that many other Protocols are struggling to achieve. Matt’s masterclass provided a hands-on demonstration of how developer and end-user friendly NEAR is by outlining the interactions between the various components that make up the NEAR ecosystem.
Matt then went on to reveal the code samples behind NEAR’s account and wallets and give a practical demonstration of the simplicity that characterizes NEAR’s functioning.
The NEAR Ecosystem is Flourishing
The last part of Matt’s presentation was dedicated to the possibilities for building new applications and to showcase the applications that have been successfully deployed in NEAR, such as Paras, the Rainbow Bridge, and Ref.finance.
The NEAR ecosystem displays a vital ecosystem where finance, governance, and creator space meet each other. As Matt remarks:
“I like to think about this convergence that is happening in the blockchain and crypto space. We kind of started with regular vanilla cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and financial applications. And then there was a lot of talk around DAOs and NFTs. So now there are these three main topics: Finance, Governance, and Creator space.”
NEAR combines these different components to promote ownership economy and foster the creation of social applications that create value and share their value across the parties involved in a more equitable and democratic way. The masterclass then ends up with a call to developers to come together for the realization of a more fair and democratic economy.
“We are calling all the Web, iOS, Android, Devs and those that are trying to create social applications and are more fair, user owned, and democratized and that align the incentives of the users and the creators of those applications with the development of the application itself. And that’s what this movement is all about. That’s all what this Web3 movement is all about, it’s about the ownership economy, it’s about the passion economy. It’s about bringing all these participants to the table so they can have a voice that it’s heard. The NEAR ecosystem is really flourishing right now and we are now calling for your amazing SDK, API, Protocols and apps that will change the world!”
NEAR has open funding opportunities for OSS, tools, APIS, contracts and more, for more info check: https://near.org/grants.
