Community Update: All our Node are Belong to You

Hello citizens of NEARverse! This is NiMA coming to you from a NEARby planet in the Milky Chain …

TL;DR: “For the first time, we can say that NEAR is officially and undeniably community operated.” – Erik “Twain” Trautman

We are collectively NEARing a new chapter in the journey of the NEAR community and network. The foundation has shut down all its nodes and effectively handed over the reigns of the network to a subset of pioneering node operators from the community and our NEAR Validator Advisory Board (aka NVAB).

In parallel we have also been doubling down on growing our builder community non-stop 24/7. Hack the Rainbow and our webinar series welcomed hundreds of new NEAR enthusiasts and developers to our ecosystem. We will also be sponsoring ETHOnline where we will introduce NEAR to the larger web 3 dev ecosystem with special focus on NEAR’s A++ usability.

MainNet Phase II: what it means for you …

NEAR’s transition to a fully community-governed permissionless network is unique and arguably a first of its kind in the blockchain space. In our Community Town Hall #1, Viktor (protocol specialist at BisonTrails) laid out a set of proposed processes and criteria for the upgrade to Phase II. A detailed overview of these criteria can be found on Github, but here we will go over some of the most important elements …

Important to note is that Phase II involves two distinct actions by the validators. An on-chain vote to unlock token transfers and an upgrade of the nearcore software to enable inflationary rewards. To ensure community members can participate, the vote will not happen until 100 million of tokens are claimed by the token holders. In aggregate there needs to be 200 million of the total 750 million tokens staked.

We understand that some of the participants in our recent Coinlist token sale have not yet received or claimed their tokens. Rest assured, since token transfer has not yet been unlocked for anyone. That will only happen after a successful vote to transition to Phase 2. The exact date for unlocking of tokens will be 40 days (reg. requirement) from Aug 25th or Oct 4th. Whichever is latest.

In case you have already received your tokens and would like to delegate to a staking pool you can do that by following the instruction on this page. The primary method for delegation described in this doc relies on CLI (command line interface), but one of our active ecosystem members (Dokia Capital) have developed a web interface for those who are not comfortable with CLI.

Lastly, we invite you to join the conversation on near.chat  #validator-lounge to get to know our validators and ask all your staking related questions!

Engineering Updates

Our engineering team is dedicating more resources to EVM on NEAR and Rainbow Bridge which should make it even easier for web 3 projects to add support for NEAR to their projects.

• We made some improvements to our core testing infrastructure (1, 2, 3, 4);
• We have redirected more engineering resources into polishing bridge and EVM. Approximately half of the core engineering team is now working on bridge and EVM;
• We matched EVM gas to NEAR gas;
• We are actively researching the idea of adding synchronous calls and we have brainstormed several designs in the last two weeks.

Edu Updates

Our devX and Edu teams, in collaboration with members of our dev community, have been producing tons of educational materials and workshops during Hack the Rainbow hackathon and webinar series.

Here’s a short list with direct links for your convenience 🤓

• WASM v. EVM on NEAR: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/hacktherainbow/17
• NEAR 102 – intro to NEAR for Web 3/Ethereum devs: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/hacktherainbow/13
• NEAR Accounts and key registration 🔑 : https://www.crowdcast.io/e/hacktherainbow/7
• Deep dive into ETH<>NEAR Rainbow Bridge 🌉: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/hacktherainbow/2
• SkyNet (Sia) on NEAR 💥 : https://www.crowdcast.io/e/hacktherainbow/8
• The State of DAOs (spoiler alert! NEAR is a perfffect match for DAOs): https://www.crowdcast.io/e/hacktherainbow/9

This week we’re reading, watching, …

Watch 👁 Open Web Collective held their final demo day for the first batch of projects on Crowdcast!

Read 📖 NEAR MainNet is now Community-Operated

Listen 👂 Mona El Isa joins Sasha on Building the Open Web podcast to talk about her journey from a trad. hedge fund manager to building the protocol for managing onchain assets.

That’s it for this update. See you in the next one!

Your friends,

NiMA and the NEAR team