Twitter Space Recap: How the NEAR Blockchain Operating System Empowers the Ecosystem
In our most recent Twitter Spaces, we invited Amos Zhang (MetaWeb Ventures) and Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol) to deep dive into NEAR’s Blockchain Operating System (BOS).
Watch Full Recap of the AMA
Highlights
- BOS is a platform to discover and experience open web applications that is compatible with any blockchain protocol. Users can navigate applications seamlessly on a single platform.
- NEAR recently launched FastAuth, which provides the fastest way to onboard users. New users can sign up, create an account, and start using blockchain in about five seconds, without the use of seed phrases or any gas fees.
- BOS provides a wide variety of use case scenarios ranging from DeFi to gaming and social networks. It removes onboarding hurdles and provides a high level of censorship-resistance and verifiability.
- In a sense, BOS is similar to a decentralized version of a super app like WeChat or Alipay. It also has the potential to become the super powerful framework that powers AI.
- All the accounts, functionalities and content underneath BOS are NEAR blockchain transactions. By interacting with NEAR Protocol and its development tools, BOS will drive more transactions on NEAR.
- BOS will lead to more organic usage, generate more transactions, and expand the user base. BOS is powering the NEAR ecosystem as a whole from a value capture perspective.
Anling: Can you give us a short introduction to BOS and its current status?
Illia：BOS is a platform to discover and experience open web applications that is compatible with any blockchain protocol. The idea behind the BOS is to create something that for a normal user, you don’t need to think about what blockchain is used underneath, or how exactly specific technology works, allowing users to navigate applications on different blockchains on a single platform.
From a current status perspective, we’ve recently released an initial set of features for BOS , and one of the exciting innovations is what we call “Discovery”, which identifies decentralized apps that you can leverage across different blockchains.
If you go to near.org, you can see that and the source code of the website itself is coming from the blockchain. So, it’s actually a fully decentralized application on its own, and everything you see is based on a blockchain.
But BOS is more than that. There’s a lot of other layers that power this, for example navigation that enables this kind of discovery across different blockchain ecosystems. If you type in “LIDO”, you can see applications of other blockchains (supported by BOS) on this platform.
One of the biggest challenges we are facing is onboarding and obtaining initial engagement of users. With that in mind, we’ve launched FastAuth, which provides the fastest way to onboard users across Web2 and Web3, by providing the simplest way for users to sign up, create an account, and start using blockchain in about five seconds.
You don’t need seed phrases or create a wallet. Users can set up a BOS account with an email. And developers can deliver their Web3 components, apps, and experiences more seamlessly than ever.
It’s as easy as inputting an email. There’s obviously still a lot to build, but the initial version is out there, and we see developers starting to adopt and leverage it.
Anling: Let’s walk through a few use cases of the BOS? Can you share more about some use cases for end users?
Illia: A lot of DeFi applications are already built on the Blockchain Operating System, because they can deploy smart contracts and the front-end at the same time. More importantly, it gives them the new level of censorship resistance and verifiability with the use of DAO and multisig, making sure that users are not getting phished by a fake website.
Games and entertainment applications can also leverage the Blockchain Operating System as it helps remove the onboarding hurdles. One of the other technologies that facilitates user acquisition is Keypom. It creates a very smooth onboarding experience by allowing NFT or token drops as well as ticket distribution and account creation with specific permissions and target audience. All together it creates very powerful interactive tools for marketing and engaging users.
Now you have all these users that are able to interact with each other on-chain, you can provide this smooth transitioning for users who are not familiar to Web3 use the technology.
Amos: What’s the motivation for NEAR to move towards the Blockchain Operating System from the branding perspective?
Illia: From the very beginning, we are committed to making NEAR a scalable blockchain with focus on usability. As we launched the mainnet and started growing the ecosystem, the next step is to upgrade the development tools. This isn’t about making developers learn new programming languages. Developers want to be able to start building right away. So, the JavaScript SDK quickly moved this thing forward.
Now, with all those accomplished, user onboarding has become the next challenge for the developers. We are able to build dapps quickly on NEAR, but we also face this challenge of having a complex onboarding process, as well as a very fragmented user base across all different chains. This eventually leads to tribalism among users.
The fundamental solution here is to continue simplifying the complexity of blockchain technology. We want to think about how we can onboard more ethereum users to start using the platform, how we can enable new users who don’t have any cryptocurrency background to start participating in this space, and how we get users to re-engage.
Another challenge that developers face is re-engaging your existing users. For example, when you run an airdrop campaign, you attract a group of people to participate, but then you have no way to engage them again, you cannot even send a notification of new features to those people who have tried your product before.
All these obstacles gave us the motivation to build BOS, and create a framework that inherits all web3 innovations while enabling developers to build applications that are user friendly, attractive, easy to pick up and navigate, and also able to create network effects around them.
That’s why BOS contains fast onboarding, trial accounts, and guest accounts. It also features social engagement, discovery, notifications, search, meta-transactions, and more. Users do not need to pay initial setup or transaction fees, and we will be launching more components this year in order to create a complete platform that developers can leverage.
Amos：In a traditional sense, all the different public chains are kind of competing with each other. So, what is your take on that, and why would other blockchains want to support BOS and more specifically, is there any big partnership you have planned or such integration already happening?
Illia：We definitely want to go away from this traditional thinking. When we witnessed the rise of Ethereum from the Bitcoin era, there used to be a lot of people who were against this idea of running powerful smart contracts on the blockchain. We might face a similar challenge like we used to, but we are here to change the mentality in a good direction.
From the other blockchains’ perspective, such as layer1, layer2, etc. The product or service we provide is very simple: BOS is a combination of tools that speed up users’ onboarding and make their applications easier to be discovered for better retention and user re-engagement.
I would say we actually break down tribalism and can help solve the problems that developers and entrepreneurs are having right now.
We have some collaborations in the pipeline, but I’m not going to announce them here. What I can tell you is that in the next few weeks, some exciting things are going to happen. So, stay tuned! But for those who really want to dive deep, you can actually try and see if you can discover something on-chain. Once again, everything on BOS is fully on chain. Maybe that’s an alpha leak?
Amos: There are indeed a lot of hurdles for a new user to start using a Dapp on Ethereum, for example. First, you need to open an exchange account, go through KYC, and then transfer some ETH to your MetaMask wallet, because users need to pay gas fees to play some applications. After that, users still need to discover which apps are available to them, which app is not a scam and safe to use, etc.
Therefore, I think BOS can solve all these problems by recreating a simple user journey. Opening a NEAR account now does not cost any gas fees, and it will not cost a penny for you to open an account either. You can then immediately start engaging with all apps through the curated list on the “Discover” page. This reminds me of the WeChat or Alipay mini programs. They are the biggest gateways for people to navigate apps or online services in China. I guess you probably also got some inspiration during your time in China.
Illia: Yeah. This is like how we can create an Open Wechat right? This is a question I’ve been asking myself for the past almost six years now. WeChat and Alipay are Web2 platforms for a billion users. And I think the mini program has been a very powerful tool to do that. But being a closed platform, it has its limitations. And so here we have technology that can power something that is truly open, and people can benefit from community commerce and create new economies. And we just need to give them the tools they need.
NearCrowd, which is a platform for data labeling. It’s been renewed now with a new team working behind it. They allow people who don’t know anything about crypto or blockchain, to start doing some small tasks and earning from that. The fees that you’re paying to transact with the blockchain have been paid by the applications.
The benefit is now you have new users who have earned directly on the platform. they don’t even have their exchange account. They can kickstart from the blockchain (self-custody account). And so they can start interacting with DeFi and start earning and transacting businesses.
We’re creating a new wave of people who start with crypto, not by buying it, but by earning it. And from there, they can start interacting with and experiencing different new applications. I think that’s what excites me. By solving the fundamental supply chain problem, we can facilitate people’s participation in the crypto space. Not being able to afford cryptocurrencies hold many of these potential users back.
Amos: Yeah, it is quite counterintuitive in the sense that like, traditionally in Web2, there’s always “Free Trial” , but crypto is doing the complete opposite and that’s actually a very common barrier to entry for new crypto users. However, we also see a lot of airdrops going on in the space which is just not healthy in most cases. There are always stories about people spending months to get as many airdrops as possible to maximize their earnings, but none of them retain to be an actual user.
I think NEAR Crowd truly onboards users who are new to crypto. But through some small tasks, and earning a very small amount of crypto, it helps engage with the user in a positive way. By using the platform directly, these users put more focus on building and learning the technology rather than speculating and trading tokens to maximize their profits.
Amos: You also mentioned “Machine Learning” earlier, can you further explain a little bit more how NEAR Crowd and other BOS tools can empower AI?
Illia: AI is a powerful instrument that is already changing and going to be changing more of our lives. I don’t think most of our society’s infrastructure is prepared for that. I think a lot of the blockchain innovations and cryptography especially, is a tool to innovate the operating system of our
I think this is where BOS can be put to use. Let me give you some examples — most of the government services are run on language, you send them a form, a document or even a lawsuit, these are all based on language, and it’s all structured, but then you will need a person to interpret and process the information. And prior to this, people always tried to exploit these loopholes and thus created some illegal or criminal problems .
AI language models can efficiently create very targeted text and language context. Imagine you can create an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) , say a tax return with millions of pages long, that needs someone to read all of them. But the existing system just wasn’t designed for this level of extensible language generation.
This is where blockchain and blockchain operating systems come in, which can advance the technology used by the government of social services, such as enabling cryptography and improving data security and privacy etc.
What we’re trying to do is build an operating system for the post-AI world. When we do have very powerful AI, we can use blockchains as a way to interact with the real world and regulate internet behaviors. Blockchain also provides a platform to verify the authenticity of a person or service through on-chain data.
Amos: That’s awesome. BOS is not just a really powerful decentralized form of “wechat”. It also has the potential to become the super powerful framework that powers AI
Anling：So, can you specify the reasons why someone might choose to deploy front-end and build on Blockchain Operating System versus IPFS?
Illia: IPFS is a decentralized storage and data sharing platform that is really good with static content. You know when you have an image, you store it on top of IPFS, and that image is there forever, and it’s the same image, it doesn’t change. But that’s not how a website or application works, you constantly update it and launch new versions. New versions are constantly being rolled out, and the team is constantly doing things.
You also might want to use other people’s content and leverage the resources . So, in order to discover and search things, you need a place where all of the information is registered and linked. That’s what BOS Discovery Layer provides. It’s a protocol where all the front-end components are interlinked.
When you go to the website (near.org), it pulls all necessary data from the blockchain. Maybe there’s a button component, maybe there’s an NFT component. Then it renders all of them for the user. So now you can easily conduct A-B tests for components you choose.
In the past, developers needed to redeploy to IPFS if you want to revamp your website, and then vote for your DAO to update the link. But building on BOS allows you to link to the updated version of an NFT and so you can pull the updated version directly on your website for the users.
Therefore, developers can be more flexible and have a rapid server development environment. From what we’ve seen, developers who typically use this component system can develop the front end three times faster than Web2, because you don’t need scaffolding, you don’t need hosting, you can reuse a lot of existing components. Currently, we have more than 4000 components that developers can use on the Blockchain Operating System.
For example, someone builds an application that allows swapping on Ethereum, and you need to swap on zkSync or zkEVM, then you can use Ref Finance to realize the swap in one UI.
There would be more and more technology applications. But as a user, you don’t really need to know what that means. You just need to use it and now we are hoping to advance the user experience so they will want to interact with the platform.
Amos：You’re right. It’s like how internet users today don’t care what https is, I think it’s the next step in the evolution of blockchain. We just have to focus on abstracting away the complexities associated with blockchain and make it easy for general users.
Anling：How can BOS contribute to the NEAR ecosystem and on-chain activities, and token demand, especially from a value capture perspective?
Illia: Every account that’s created on near.org right now is a NEAR account. All the functionality and content you can see including FastAuth and social feed underneath are NEAR transactions, There is also a storage cost associated with the actions. So all of that is actually powering the NEAR economy.
One of the newer tools we’re launching is called Query API, which provides developers with a simple fixed frame data. The Query API allows you to deploy the index you want almost as part of the smart contract, so you have the full potential of the application end-to-end. The Query API will also be run by nodes, so these nodes require staking.
Therefore, more layers of tokenomics are being added to the full stack on top of the existing NEAR economy. By interacting with NEAR Protocol and the development tools, BOS will drive more transactions on NEAR.
Also, we are creating a platform that can attract users from other blockchain platforms. The biggest benefit here is that now users from other chains can easily experience what NEAR is.
Through BOS, NEAR’s applications are more used and the NEAR ecosystem as a whole can gain more traction. BOS is about powering all of these and making the flywheel even stronger.
Amos: So, in other words, BOS will lead to more organic usage, generate more transactions, and expand the user base. Some of the users may as well switch to more NEAR-native apps once they discover the capabilities of NEAR Protocol and how easy the system is. BOS is powering the NEAR ecosystem as a whole from a value capture perspective.
Anling: So, what’s up next for BOS?
Illia: We’ll be making some big announcements before the end of the year. We will keep refining the product, and at the same time, we will cooperate with other ecosystems and applications, and assist with Web 2 enterprises to transform into Web 3.
BOS is giving them this peace of mind to start using this technology, onboard users and enjoy the flexibility that comes with the fundamentals.
We hope the developers can see its value and why this tool is useful for them to build innovative applications. In addition, we will also work around blockchain clubs, bootcamps, Node.js communities, JavaScript communities, and develop bottom-up developer groups. So, it’s almost a three-pronged approach, closely tied to each other, but with dedicated programs for different audiences.
We will continue to build the platform and get more and more developers. The NEAR DevHub is a place where the developer community can organize or build things around projects themselves. The entire ZK community is building excellent cross-chain bridges and privacy technologies. Much of the development of BOS itself will take place there. Its mechanism is similar to organizing developers from all over the world to contribute to the platform.
More and more integrations and use cases are being built, and many enterprises are choosing to build on BOS. So please try to build on BOS and get in touch with us if you are interested!
