NEAR @ ETHDenver (bulleted takeaways)

5 min readFeb 26, 2021

A few themes permeated every conversation at ETHDenver 2021… NFTs, Scaling, and Interoperability. Below you can dig further into these themes with bulleted take-aways from sessions featuring (or run by) NEAR team members. Biggest CTAs:

Developers: Dive into NEAR 101 + 102 to see how a focus on DevEx makes NEAR the fastest way to get a dApp to market.
Artists and Collectors: Get a YourNameOn.NEAR wallet by following & messaging Createbase on twitter or joining the Telegram chat.
Anyone: Submit your a creative project proposal to the Createbase DAO and receive a grant up to 10 $NEAR.
Entrepreneurs: Contact community+dao@near.org with a proposal for your own Decentralized Autonomous Organization to access more than 100 million $NEAR in community fund.
Bonus: If you enjoy synthesis extracts from talks and articles, follow staRpauSe on mastodon or twitter 😁

Onto the details!

NEAR PROTOCOL Sponsor Feature, ETHDenver & ColoradoJam 2021 Feb 5th-12th

NearProtocol (L1 chain) is focused on speed to market for apps and scalability for everyday usability.
Rainbow Bridge will let ETH developers benefit from NEAR transaction speed & scale.
NEAR addresses are human readable (like ENS).

ETHDenver 2021 Opening Ceremonies: NEAR Protocol — Peter Depaulo

NEAR supplements ETH with its own EVM & trustless Rainbow Bridge.
$1M of grants position NEAR as developer experience leader in the ecosystem.
Projects focused on usability, adoption, & onboarding can apply for funds at http://near.org/grants.

Rusty NFTs on NEAR — Nate Geier (Mintbase)

For artists:

Mintbase is a NiftyGateway or SuperRare factory, allowing you to launch & own smart contract storefronts.
UI supports split revenue & royalties, also linking to liquidity & utility tie ins (defi, games, unlocks, ticketing, etc).
NFTs are on ARWEAVE & cryptographically hashed.

For developers:

Mintbase users launched more than 1,014 stores on ETH over 2.5 years.
High ETH gas fees rob NFTs of utility and Nate researched many workaround chains.
Mintbase is happy 6 months into rebuilding their platform on NEAR.
Mintbase rewrote their own indexer in RUST, new applications built on NEAR can use TheGraph.

Interoperability via the Rainbow Bridge

Update: @near-eth/clientand @near-eth/nep141-erc20library npm packages are now in beta!

Example Rainbow Bridge Use Cases:

Use ERC20 tokens in NEAR.
Make NFTs in NEAR then send to Ethereum to list in larger marketplaces.
Balance liquidity and arbitrage across markets on both chains.

Tech overview (details in the slides):

Bridge pieces are: Clients, Provers, and Connectors (in pairs).
With 2 chains there are 4 directions (each implements send & receive).
4 steps to add to app: Dependencies, Initiate, List, Check in.
This is working on testnet and a March ETA for libraries.

War and Peace: The Multi-Chain Reality — Alex Skidanov (NEAR)

Hot take: The most adopted interop solution will be a killer app rather than a pure interop play.
Finality, permission/less, centralization, EVM support, and scaling are interoperability design choices. No single choice can be one size fits all.
Ease of building and integration are something that new platforms like NEAR offer projects.

WHERE ARE MY KEYS? Onboarding the Masses with NEAR Protocol — Matt Lockyer

NEAR Timeline:

2020 May: Mainnet launched
2020 Oct: tokens unlocked, Mainnet decentralized, Paras & Berry Club launched.
DevRel team releasing loads of working demos that can be build upon and combined into full apps.
NEAR is L1 but tools like Rainbow Bridge and EVM allow ETH developers to use it like an L2.

Progressive Onboarding Demo:

NEAR Account Model enables new ways to onboard users while still being non custodial and enjoying all the power of readable account names.
Without any NEAR, user signs in as a guest. Guest account can only call certain functions in an app & has a gas limit.
Guest mints a new NFT and puts it on sale for 5Ⓝ. Someone buys it 😉😉 Funds are waiting in escrow.
Guest makes a new account at wallet.near.org. They send Ⓝ to the funding address via onboarding demo app. +1 NEAR user!
Rust contract and app review. Steal the code and build cool isht!

New Standards for DAOs — NiMA (NEAR), Illia (NEAR), James Young (Createbase)

CTA:

Contact DAO@NEAR.org with a proposal to access more than 100 million $NEAR in community fund!

Standards:

We haven’t solved governance in human history so crypto won’t magically solve it. DAOs are just another tool & the social layer remains the most important.
For DAOs, standardization is an exercise in balancing the formalism of smart contracts with the fuzziness of managing an organization or community.
Elements to standardize include membership, token roles, voting/nonvoting chairs, and how to interface (API) with other DAOs.
Interoperability is an crypto industry wide issue. Standards are the most widely adopted solution rather than the best solution.

DAOs:

DAOs reduce coordination cost by automating mechanical parts of governance & management.
Small, focused, composable DAOs enable more fluid, dynamic, and innovative companies.
Social tokens offer informal DAO functionality like membership, implicit identity, and asset access. There are often different social tokens in play on any given discord or telegram chat.

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