Near Town Hall Q2: The Creator Economy Emerges

In the most recent NEAR Town Hall, three members of the NEAR core team and community members got together to talk about NEAR’s development and future initiatives. This was an opportunity to recap on the achievements that NEAR has brought home throughout the year and for the community to understand what the coming months will bring on NEAR Protocol!

Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR, started off the event by providing an overview of all the projects and improvements that NEAR has implemented throughout the year. Erik Trautman, CEO of NEAR Foundation, then proceeded to discuss why NEAR’s provides the best infrastructure for innovation and how that supports the flourishing the creator economy. Lastly, product manager Alex Shevchenko talked about the Rainbow Bridge, one of the most exciting advancements of the year, and the future evolution.

A Year of Steady Growth

Ilia’s outline focused on discussing the MainNet’s evolution, apps highlights, the 18 protocol’ upgrades, and the launch of educational programs such as the NEAR Academy and NEAR Certified Developer program.

The NEAR Certified Developer Course and the NEAR Academy will continue NEAR’s mission to educate and onboard new developers.

“There are many reasons for NEAR team and community members to be proud. Since its launch NEAR has been breaking records almost every week.”

The weekly numbers of active accounts and number of transactions continue to see a steady growth. This is the result of the continuous work of NEAR’s team to bring value to the community and create the best environment for the flourishing of the creator economy.

Daily transactions have steadily increased and are breaking into new levels!

Check out more stats on the NEAR Explorer

The Creator Economy and Beyond

NEAR is building out the infrastructure to support a sustainable and scalable creator economy.

In the second part of the discussion Erik talked about the creator economy and how NEAR’s infrastructure is tailored for contributing to its development. The insights provided are crucial for understanding the long-term future of NEAR.

“ The creator economy is based on a triangle of creator, community, and open finance, powered by blockchain. Creator economy is perfect for the blockchain space. NEAR’s components will enable creators to monetize their work in a sustainable and flexible way. DAOs on NEAR can be configured to allow communities to become incorporated as entities. Creators don’t need to serve different communities, the communities become their own entity with a treasury.”

The flexibility, speed, and usability of NEAR result in innovative components and dApps.

A solid and scalable infrastructure, like the one that NEAR provides, is what allows these components to interact efficiently creating a more fair and democratized economic environment. As Erik explains:

“NEAR is the infrastructure for innovation which powers creators, communities, and financial markets to drive a more open, interconnected and consumer-empowered world”

Sputnik DAO on NEAR will act as the foundation for empowering communities to become entities within themselves.

NEAR’s main goal is to empower creators and communities by providing the best infrastructure to develop the applications of the future in the easiest, cheapest, and fastest way possible.

“People are starting to build apps that have Web2 experiences. That is what is unique to NEAR, it reaches consumers. It makes NEAR such a gravity well.”

It will be a multichain future… and NEAR is ready for it.

NEAR’s infrastructure has been built with people’s needs in mind and with the particular goal to make it as user and developer friendly as possible. It provides interoperability with projects like the Rainbow Bridge, Aurora, and Octopus App Chain; great financial tools, such as Ref.finance, NFT Toolkits, and it supplies funds for a wide variety of initiatives. For this reason the NEAR ecosystem continues to see the launching of new applications every week, and continues to attract more and more people to its ecosystem.

“Our goal is to make NEAR a hub of interconnections. NEAR is the hub of the future Consumer Open Web. The Creator economy is just the first step. NEAR environs a Muti-chain world and is building towards that with bridges to allow assets, function calls, etc. to flow between chains in a way that the consumer will not have to think about.”

The Creator Economy is the first step of making NEAR the hub of the Open Web in the multi-chain world.

Near is Only Getting Started: The Best is Yet to Come

The launch of the Rainbow Bridge was a huge first step for interoperability between NEAR and Ethereum.

Alex made the last presentation at the NEAR Town Hall, and he focused on sharing some of the most exciting developments on the NEAR Ecosystem: The Rainbow Bridge and Aurora.

“We would like to enable the whole ecosystem to interact with the ETH ecosystem, this is going to be a game changer for the all NEAR community.”

The Rainbow bridge was the first milestone for realizing this objective. Fully operational since the 15th of March, the Rainbow bridge allows developers to use Ethereum assets on NEAR, and NEAR assets on Ethereum, and to access application states from either chain. This is a huge step for the NEAR community and interoperability between NEAR and Ethereum, with even more to come.

The launch of the AURORA project will allow ETH smart contracts to be deployed onto NEAR Protocol.

“The most important is the launch of AURORA project, a joint project between EVM and Aurora: to allow ETH applications to be built on NEAR and also to provide liquidity. The allows for scalability to ETH and will also allow Dapps to scale.”

The launch of Aurora will be a turning point for NEAR and for the crypto space at large since it will allow developers to get the best of the two worlds. To keep an eye on its development: https://docs.near.org/docs/develop/evm/introduction.