Community Update: April 24th, 2020

The past two weeks have been quite eventful. We have been busy preparing for Ready Layer One while hosting community events and sharing our engineering updates with the community. To stay up to date with our community events, check out the events calendar.

Open Blockchain Week: Ready Layer One

It has been amazing to see various speakers and projects, from across the ecosystem, come together to work on one shared experience. Confirmed talks include:

• Laura Shin hosting a live podcast with L1 Founders: Zaki Manian (Cosmos), Illia Polosukhin (NEAR), Dr. Gavin Wood (Polkadot), Arthur Breitman (Tezos)
• Mike Masnick, author of Protocols, not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech will discuss a decentralized approach to content moderation
• Chris Dixon from a16z Crypto in a fireside chat with Robert Hackett of Fortune Magazine

We still have some tickets available for the NEAR community. The event will take place from the 4th to the 6th of May. Please let us know if you would like to attend and we can send you a ticket.  [caption id="attachment_3341" align="aligncenter" width="926"] Featured Speakers RL1 -- Head over to the website to see the full list[/caption]

The Road to MainNet and Beyond

This blog post details the roadmap to a community governed MainNet, divided into stages. The goal for the first stage is to distribute initial tokens to contributors and get the initial set of validators onboard. Developers who are ready to deploy their applications to MainNet will be able to apply to the NEAR Foundation and get an account to deploy their application. Each stage is identified by the restrictions that it has and each stage has different goals. To learn more about our path to MainNet and the road ahead, please head over to our article. 

Uniting the Creators of Tomorrow: The Open Web Collective 

This is for the go-getters, the risk-takers, the crypto entrepreneurs moving past the hype of decentralization and building the projects that will bring the vision of the Open Web to reality. OWC helps projects at all stages, from ideation to growth through access to exclusive curriculum, events, networks, and mentors.  Collaborate, discuss new products and partnerships, build your team, get feedback, or even find a co-founder with OWC.  Ready to accelerate your project and grow your network? Apply now and join the Collective at https://openwebcollective.com/   [caption id="attachment_3342" align="alignnone" width="1470"] Thursday Jam -- Join us in the next one![/caption]

Content

Introduction to NEAR Protocol’s Economics This article explores the economic principles governing NEAR Protocol, and how they keep aligned the interests of its community. Private Transactions We take a deep dive into the internals of how private transactions will be implemented on NEAR so that no information about the participants or amounts are revealed—all without sacrificing the ability to validate the correctness. NEAR Hacker’s Diaries For those of you who are interested in the technical challenges in NEAR Protocol, we wrote an article explaining the gas metering estimation.

Call for Validators

If you want to join phase one on the road to a community governed MainNet and provide validation services to our community of users and contributors, please apply through the link below. We will contact every applicant, one by one, with further instructions to test your infrastructure on NEAR's BetaNet and plan accordingly together: https://forms.gle/rQ6YTfvGVkMJLuS97

How You Can Get Involved

Join the NEAR Contributor Program. If you would like to host events, create content or provide developer feedback, we would love to hear from you! To learn more about the program and ways to participate, please head over to the website. If you’re just getting started, learn more in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol or read the official White Paper. Stay up to date with what we’re building by following us on Twitter for updates, joining the conversation on Discord and subscribing to our newsletter to receive updates right to your inbox.