AMA Recap: CRYPTO MINERS X NEAR PROTOCOL
NEAR Foundation is a centralized organization championing decentralization as part of a decentralized ecosystem. Over time, NEAR Foundation’s role will continue to evolve as new funds emerge via ecosystem and regional funds, and as the community takes on more and more. NEAR is a carbon-neutral layer-1 blockchain network that is scalable and secure thanks to its unique implementation of sharding called Nightshade. NEAR is built with a focus on usability and ease of use, for both developers and users. NEAR is a simple, scalable, and secure blockchain platform designed to provide the best possible experience for developers and users, which is necessary to bridge the gap to mainstream adoption of decentralized applications. NEAR is completely carbon neutral as certified by South Pole. Unlike other blockchains, this network has been built from the ground up to be the easiest in the world for both developers and their end-users while still providing the scalability necessary to serve those users. Specifically, NEAR is designed to make it easier to: Build decentralized applications, even if you’re only used to building with “traditional” web or app concepts. Onboard users with a smooth experience, even if they have never used crypto, tokens, keys, wallets, or other blockchain artifacts. Scale your application seamlessly — the underlying platform automatically expands capacity via sharding without additional costs or effort on your part. NEAR is similar in principle to the “cloud-based” infrastructure that developers currently build applications on top of, except that the cloud is no longer controlled by a single company running a giant data center — that data center is actually made up of all the people around the world who are operating nodes on the decentralized network. Instead of a “company-operated cloud,” it’s a “community-operated cloud.” NEAR Protocol is being built by the NEAR Collective, its community that is updating the initial code and releasing updates to the ecosystem. Its declared goal is to build a platform that is “secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people.” Flux, a protocol that allows developers to create markets based on assets, commodities, real-world events, and Mintbase, an NFT minting platform are examples of projects being built on NEAR Protocol. NEAR uses its Nightshade technology to improve transaction throughput massively. Nightshade is a variation of sharding, in which individual sets of validators process transactions in parallel across multiple sharded chains, improving the overall capacity of the blockchain. In contrast to “regular” sharding, shards in Nightshade produce a fraction of the next block, called “chunks.” In doing so, NEAR Protocol is able to achieve up to 100,000 transactions per second and achieve near-instant transaction finality thanks to a one-second block cadence while simultaneously keeping transaction fees at virtually zero.
We hosted an AMA session with Near Protocol on 13th August.
Miss Uzma was the host from Crypto Miners and Mr. Matt and Mr. David was the guests. They shed us with the features and benefits of Near Protocol.
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Segment 1️⃣: Introduction
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Hello everyone 👋🏼
Welcome to the MINERRIFIC AMA with Near protocol
We have the guests Mr. Matt and Mr. David
Welcoming them 🙌🏻
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
Hello 🚀
David:
Howdy!
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Welcome here mates 🤗
Hope you both are doing well and perfect 😉
Can you guys please introduce yourself to our community before starting the AMA session !!
David TCC:
Hello Crypto Miners Community! 👋
Super hyped to be here to discuss all things NEAR and our flagship event — NEARCON — taking place in Lisbon, Portugal, Sept 11th -14th
My name’s David (as you can probably tell). I’m the Community Engagement Lead at NEAR Foundation — basically this just means shitposting memes on Twitter (kidding, (kinda)).
I’ve been in crypto professionally for around 5 years. I’ve seen all the ecosystems, been rugged on plenty, spent time with some incredible minds and builders.
BUT
I’ve found one thing to hold true; there is nowhere like NEAR — from the tech stack, to the projects, to the community. I’ve truly found my home (and I think you can find yours, too ❤️)
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
Hello, I am a crypto developer and evangelist since 2017. Contributed to infrastructure, standards, education, and community projects for several protocols, notably Ethereum and NEAR. My hard skills as a lead developer are matched by my enthusiasm to grow the crypto ecosystem and use cases. I am currently with Proximity, helping DeFi teams achieve their goals on NEAR.
Very excited about NEARCON.org in Lisbon Sep 11–14!
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Nice to meet you guys 😊
Now lets start the AMA session if you guys are ready 😃
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
LFG 🔥
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
So firstly, give us a concise and brief introduction to ‘Near Protocol’. Also tell us the features of Near Protocol that makes it superior and special as compared to its competitors?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
NEAR is a layer 1 blockchain that is Proof of Stake. It has async sharding (more in a bit) and runs on a WASM based smart contract runtime we simply call NEAR Native or the NEAR SDK. NEAR was built entirely from scratch and from the ground up. Contrast this to chains like Elrond or Harmony where they use golang and are forks of go Ethereum (geth). NEAR has 1s blocks and 2s finality thanks to really novel consensus design. It was built by a team of AMAZING programmers from around the world. Great leadership, ecosystem, NFTs, DeFi, DAO tooling and teams. I’m just really proud of how far and fast NEAR is moving!
On sharding and scaling specifically:
NEAR’s sharding is one of a kind. Every contract can be its own shard. Cross contract calls are done with async/promises and the protocol handles everything so users and developers don’t see or feel difference between a simple transaction and one involving multiple contracts across multiple shards.
What about modularity? Each contract can also run its own execution environment, like Aurora with the EVM. Live on mainnet today, using Ref.finance, you can use your NEAR wallet to make a cross contract call to Aurora, execute a swap on an EVM based DEX and then return to NEAR with swapped tokens. NOT EVEN Ethereum 2.0 will be able to claim this level of interoperability among its shards and/or L2s, rollups etc… Because users will still have to execute multiple transactions to move liquidity back and forth. This is a bad design for scaling with many developer and user experience problems that NEAR already has the solution for!
David:
In addition to Matt’s answers, and as someone who is not a developer, I’d like to highlight something which makes NEAR Protocol stand out.
Usability
This has been a top priority for those building out the tooling from day 1 and that ethos perforates every dApp and project building on NEAR.
Here’s a concrete example; beyond 2s finality and sub $0.01 tx fees.
When you create a wallet on most chains, you’re given an address like this (or something similar):
0x3rjfi0ni20fnieownf3kfneFIJaifefAEJFEIOfajaf
On NEAR, you’re prompted to create your own human-readable wallet address, e.g — cryptominer.near
It makes it infinitely easier to navigate and share your wallet. That’s a small portion of what drew me to this ecosystem 🔥
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Now give a brief introduction to ‘Proximity’. What popped up in your mind to create such a platform?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
Proximity is a research and development firm supporting projects building decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on NEAR and Aurora through grants, advisory services, and developer support.
The NEAR Foundation sought to create ecosystem vertical groups to tackle various topics of crypto early on, in the spirit of decentralization.
It’s hard for me to elaborate on Proximity beyond simply being your best resource go to market if you are interested in building DeFi on NEAR.
You can fill out a form and speak to one of our analysts at proximity.dev
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Tell us the features of Proximity and how it is playing its role in development of DeFi?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
Proximity does a number of things such as grants, advisory and development support. More importantly, Proximity only works with relatively strong teams that are fairly pure DeFi. Our network of teams and other supportive individuals in the NEAR ecosystem is excellent, and we try to leverage this to expand the DeFi ecosystem on NEAR. Our key areas of focus right now are: Orderbook DEXs, real world loans and assets, and composability with respect to NEAR’s sharding capabilities, for example: new execution environments e.g. ZK for privacy, lower fees and throughput.
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Great man 👌🏻👌🏻
Now tell us about the EVM created by Near team, ‘Aurora’. What are its features as compared to its competitors?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
The Aurora team is excellent. They built our Rainbow Bridge (which still has not been hacked *knocks on wood*) that has moved hundreds of millions in crypto and is quite a pleasant experience. Personally, I have used it up, down, left and right (just kidding, from ETH to NEAR and back again), and it’s very smooth!
Aurora EVEM is also a smooth experience for developers and for users. It’s running on top of NEAR as a smart contract so it inherits the 1s blocks and 2s finality. The cross contract calls I mentioned earlier are working right now from NEAR -> Aurora -> NEAR on mainnet and soon they will be launching Aurora -> NEAR -> Aurora. Why this matters is mostly interoperability between execution environments and making sure liquidity doesn’t get trapped in one L2 or another forcing users to bridge several times to get the tokens they want.
I remember asking one of the most knowledgeable persons building rollups when they will be able to swap a token from one rollup to another and they said “maybe in 3 years”. Yikes… NEAR can do cross execution environment swaps… TODAY. That’s incredible and it’s only going to get better with more environments like ZK and others on NEAR.
The Aurora team has done an incredible job of hiding all the complexity of running your dapps on top of NEAR and moving to from ETH or other chains to Aurora. There’s virtually nothing new to learn and you can use all the same tools, when moving your dapp to Aurora which as a developer I really like!
David:
Again, to compound on what Matt has said and reaffirm the usability aspect of the ecosystem — if you’re already Web3 native and are used to the MetaMask experience, then Aurora provides all that (and more) with the speed, security, and finality of NEAR Protocol.
They just released Aurora Plus which is a revolutionary piece of kit. It provides you with 50 FREE transactions per month in addition to airdrops, staking tools, and more. Would encourage everyone to check it out 🎉
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
+1 for Aurora Plus
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Now tell our users about ‘Near University’ which is an amazing opportunity. What benefits can users take from it?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
It’s been a while for me since I’ve touched base with this program. Incredible founders I worked with back in 2020 and early 2021. David has more info though 🔥
David:
It’s an incredible education arm of the NEAR Ecosystem and powers a tonne of different courses and learning experiences.
Check it out here
You can walk away with certifications for anything from developing on NEAR to becoming a NEAR Certified Analyst.
It’s an opportunity for you to learn, earn, and create — check it out 🔥
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
I personally obsessed with this university 🙌🏻
I was checking it and find much content about Near and web3 🔥
Now moving to the last question of this segment
What important updates and developments we’ll get in coming months and years in Near Ecosystem and Proximity?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
Proximity is focusing on a few narratives as I mentioned: Orderbook DEXs, real world loans and assets, and composability with respect to NEAR’s sharding capabilities and new execution environments e.g. ZK for privacy, lower fees and throughput. What I’m excited about is that the NEAR Foundation seems to be liking the Proximity model of a vertical specific group and fund. That being said, I believe they are working on establishing more for other verticals such as: NFTs, DAOs. Exciting stuff!
David:
Well, just in case you missed it — NEAR has just launched support for its JavaScript SDK which opens the doors to 20m+ developers globally, allowing them to write and deploy smart contracts all in JS
I’m not going to drop too much alpha rn (of which there is plenty), but, what I will say, is that NEARCON is often home to incredible announcements, parties, and talks 🔥
Don’t miss the #1 event of the crypto-calendar year!
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
That’s the end of introduction segment 🙌🏻
Now moving to the Twitter Questions
If you guys are ready 😃
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
Let’s go!
David:
lfg
Segment 2️⃣: Twitter Questions
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
i heard NEAR Foundation is hosting the NEAR Grant Program that aids projects to improve the $NEAR ecosystem, so could you explain the requirements for developers who could be benefited from this event of yours?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
I don’t have much info about this (not officially at NEAR) but grants are great for infrastructure and attracting devs for sure!
David:
YES! Great question 🎉
There are a tonne of grants and funding avenues available for builders in the Web3 world (and beyond).
Check them out here -> https://near.org/grants
As for the requirements; simply have a good idea and the ability to execute on it. Our eyes and ears are open to all types of funding requests from the entire breadth of the Web3 world.
The grants team will work with you to develop a plan and a roadmap. As you continue to meet your goals you’ll receive funding in increments to ensure that your project is sustained throughout its lifecycle — until you become self-sufficient 🔥
So, if you’re a builder and you’re looking to make the leap to NEAR — CHECK OUT THE GRANTS PAGE
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Hacking incidents are very common nowadays after the LUNA’s incident, so naturally people became skeptical about the security of blockchains. In this respect, can you talk about the precautions #NEAR has taken in terms of security and the security mechanism it has developed so far?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
At Proximity we work with some top auditing firms and help all teams get connected with the right firms in a timely manner. Ottersec (Osec) and Blocksec are some we particularly like working with, but there’s many that NEAR, Pagoda and Proximity all work with. We have a great relationship as auditors seem to like the NEAR runtime and SDKs.
David:
Great Q — I’d love to highlight this thread
https://twitter.com/NEARProtocol/status/1555271136254066690?t=vR1kk7fIMQMPoZltF46l5A&s=19
Which was a (swift) response to security concerns which were disclosed to the infrastructure team.
NEAR and its ecosystem understand that, without a secure foundation, there’s not much point in building (why create all this value if it can be stolen in 2s (finality of NEAR 😏))
We recently launched the Smart Contract Auditing Program, too — https://medium.com/nearprotocol/near-foundation-launches-smart-contract-audit-program-f138c5a55caa
This will ensure projects building on NEAR have access to top-tier audits from the best firms in the biz 🔥
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
I’m seeing $NEAR as one of the biggest competitors to Ethereum. In this situation, what are the key features that you can offer which can considerably make Ethereum bites the dust?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
I mentioned this before: async sharding as it’s already been solved. Most of Ethereum’s roadmap will take until 2026 and doesn’t even include how to handle cross shard or composability with L2s. Being a hub chain for many L2s without solving the bridging experience for developers and users, is not a great solution to scaling, since users and developers will really struggle here…
David:
I’d like to point out that, in the future we envision, Ethereum doesn’t ‘bite the dust’. Instead, we have a multi chain world with NEAR taking pride of place.
The contributions of the Ethereum ecosystem have been fundamental in building the decentralised ecosystems we have today. The difference is that NEAR are on track to execute this in a way which is more scalable, secure, and accessible for the everyday individual — hence our goal of onboarding 1B users to the ecosystem.
Let’s build bridges without burning down the other side 💪
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
I wonder how Near Protocol may get liquidity from Ethereum even though Near Protocol has recently launched rainbow Bridge for connecting Near Protocol with ETH, also let us know if you have any thoughts on doing the same with other block chains through similar network bridging mechanism in near future
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
The rainbow bridge, exchanges and layer zero solutions.
There are now many teams working with the Rainbow Bridge code base (all open source) and bridging to other chains (or improving their bridges) which we really love to see. At it’s core NEAR is decentralized and we’re seeing more and more building and liquidity providing coming from third parties direction which makes us very proud!
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
I saw your announcement of your flagship event: NEARCON Beta with the theme “Building Beyond the Hype”. Quite interesting, so can you explain a little bit about this event? Who can attend this event? How did we get our Near con Tickets? And what will happen at Near con?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
NEARCON is September 11–14, in Lisbon, Portugal.
Expect 2,500+ attendees and hundreds of hackers! Amazing sponsors like Brave, Circle, FTX, Covalent and more. Meet Dragonfly, Electric and excellent VCs too!
Join community: t.me/NEARCON22
Apply to hack or buy tickets: NEARCON.org
Sunday
2pm Registration with DJ, drinks, venue tours, until 8pm
9pm Opening Night party till late 🥳
Monday — Wednesday
10am Breakfast
11am Talks and workshops
5pm DJ until sunset
9pm Parties till late 🔥
Wednesday, hackathon “Dragon’s Den” and a Closing Night RAGER with a major European DJ 💖
David:
🔥🔥🔥🔥 OKAY THE BIG ONE — LFG 🔥🔥🔥🔥
NEARCON:
Lisbon, Portugal
Sept 11–14th
INCREDIBLE SPEAKERS
INCREDIBLE PARTIES
48hr IRL Hackathon
70,000 sq ft warehouse — on the beach side
Events all week (sept 10–17th)
Meet the best and the brightest in Web3 and get hacking on your next big project! Not interested in that? Chat the world to rights whilst listening to some incredible speakers and having an AMAZING TIME!
GRAB TICKETS HERE -» -» https://nearcon.org/
OH, WHAT’S THAT? A 35% DISCOUNT CODE — NEARCONFRENS
—
Gonna drown this place out with memes now, gl
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
we have a “few” memes
David:
https://twitter.com/David___Mo/status/1556648420525412353
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
🔥
Go go go😀
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
haha ok
I think that’s enough
David:
Lmao
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
lolz
thanks 🙏
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
So that is the end of Twitter Questions
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
amazing time thank you! great questions
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Now we are close to the most exciting part of Live QnA
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
We’re ready!
David:
Thank you, it was a blast! 🎉
💯
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Lets see it
Segment 3️⃣: Live QnA
(In this segment group was opened for 60 seconds and Miners sent hundreds of questions. Guest choose some best to answer)
1) Bilal Kaan:
Are you going to organize events in different countries and cities in addition to the event you will be holding in Lisbon soon? As a Turk, if you have an event in Istanbul, I would love to participate, I think you can enlighten us in the field of web3.0.
David:
YES!
Check out one of the NEAR Turkish communities here — https://mobile.twitter.com/near_turkey
They just had an event in Istanbul a few weeks ago.
Wherever you are in the world, there is likely to be some NEAR presence there. If not, and you share the same vision we do, why not start one?!
We’re launching what’s called ‘regional hubs’ around the world — we’ve presence in Ukraine (now relocated to Portugal 🇺🇦), Kenya, Latin America, and a few more to be announced at the flagship event — NEARCON
https://near.org/blog/near-community-in-focus-near-regional-hubs/
If you’re looking for your local community, just search for ‘NEAR + your area/country) and you’ll more than likely find something 🔥
2) ⚡️𝙎𝙏𝘼𝙍𝘾⚡️:
What do you mean by climate neutral platform can you elaborate? 🤔🤔
#NEAR
David:
100%
Since the offset, the team have always been aware of the impact technology can have on the climate.
Since shortly after Mainnet, NEAR has been certified climate neutral by South Pole — an independent climate certification firm.
In fact, I’d go so far to see we’re now carbon NEGATIVE as projects like Open Forest Protocol are building on top of NEAR to ensure we can fight climate change as efficiently as possible 🌎💪
3) Orhan 🔺| 🔶 | ⋈:
What exactly do parities like $stNear $Linear have to do with Near?
I know $stNear is obtained by staking, but why is it not equal in price to NEAR?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
Great question. NEAR has many liquid staking options. stNEAR and Linear are 2 of 3 (and I believe there are more coming).
How they work is like this:
NEAR is PoS and validators generate rewards for producing blocks. Staking on NEAR requires you to lock your tokens but that means you cannot spend them or use them in DeFi protocols e.g. you can’t lend them out.
Liquid staking tokens like stNEAR (MetaPool) and Linear allow you to earn the benefits of staking, the rewards, while being able to move these tokens around. This increases liquidity.
How do you earn the rewards? The price of liquid staking tokens is fixed and increasing against the price of NEAR.
Every epoch in NEAR the rewards earned by the NEAR in Treasury of a liquid staking protocol are redistributed to all the holders of the liquid NEAR tokens by raising the price of the peg.
Buy stNEAR at X and NEAR is Z and in some months it is possible that stNEAR is X + Y, while NEAR will always be Z (the price of NEAR on the market).
Hope this helps!!
4) David Killed:
Your project name seems to be very interesting. Does it have any story behind it? Can you share us with the inspiron for approaching to this name?
David:
I ❤️ this question!
NEAR was a machine learning project before it became a blockchain development platform.
Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov started NEAR.ai in early 2017 to explore program synthesis: the field of automating programs from a human specification.
Named for the science fiction novel The Singularity Is Near, the NEAR project drew from Illia’s work as a lead contributor for TensorFlow at Google and Alexander’s as the lead engineer at MemSQL.
The co-founders are absolute giga-brains and are far smarter than I thought to be humanly possible. What they’re building (NEAR Protocol) is, in the field of computer science, spectacular.
5) Aloaca:
Can you explain to me why I should trust your Near online Wallet? Is it really secure?
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
This is a great question because it’s a current topic in crypto.
A web wallet has drawbacks. It’s very convenient and easy to use (nothing to install) but it comes with issues.
The current transition plan is to mynearwallet.com and encouraging all users to use a seed phrase or ledger.
Ledger will always be as secure as your ledger is secure.
Seed phrase has issues WRT the web, DNS or malicious extensions.
The team that took over the original NEAR Web Wallet mynearwallet.com are working on launching new features that will increase the security of using the web wallet without compromising the usability. I know the team and think they are outstanding.
I would also look to the web wallet as being the single greatest onboarding tool we have in crypto in addition to NEAR’s amazing account model and 1 account, many keys design.
Keep your eyes peeled for some incredible onboarding tools in the future. I’m announcing a side project myself at NEARCON called “Keypom” that will blow you away with how easily we can support use cases like onboarding and ticketing!!!
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO NEARCON.org — t.me/NEARCON22
*This segment ends here*
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
Keypom, much hype, much onboarding!
hehe
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Btw you can choose more if you want to…😀
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
I think it’s best if we wrap up now
it’s 1 hour
but would you like some more NEARCON memes?
lol
David:
Thank you all so much for hosting. It’s been a pleasure 🔥
DON’T FORGET TO COME TO NEARCON — 35% OFF WITH NEARCONFRENS
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Great 🤗
David:
lmao
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Why not😄
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
classy ones
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Thankew guys for your valuable and useful information ❤️
David:
I’ll take NEARCON for $500, Matt
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
It was a pleasure to hosting you here ❤️
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
We had a great time
thank you very much!!!
David:
💯
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
DAVID
drop the code!
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Is there anything else you want to share with us?
David:
DON’T FORGET TO COME TO NEARCON — 35% OFF WITH NEARCONFRENS
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
🔥
Matt Lockyer | Proximity:
Thanks everyone we love you and hope to see you at NEARCON.org Sep 11–14 Lisbon! It’s gonna be WILD!
Uzma || CRYPTO MINERS:
Thankew again 🙌🏻
Time to conclude this wonderful AMA session 🔥
Learn more about Near protocol here:
Website: https://near.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NEARProtocol
Telegram: https://t.me/cryptonear
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuKdIYVN8iE3fv8alyk1aMw
Medium: NEAR Team
