Community Update – Beyond Launch

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

We have collectively voted to remove the training wheels from the NEAR blockchain and are now in the post-launch phase. The fate of NEAR is now in the hands of the NEAR community. Validators, token holders, users, and builders all play a significant role in what happens next … 

… which is why we would like to invite every single one of you to join us in the next NEAR Community Town Hall on Nov 2nd on Hopin! 

NEAR Core team members will share updates about our NEAR-term roadmap, wallet and staking, projects building on NEAR, and tons of cool stuff from our community of Guilds and Hackathon participants. You will also be able to interact directly with other community members in breakout sessions and find out how YOU can contribute to the NEAR ecosystem 🚀

The breakout sessions will be the following (happening in parallel):

• Deep Tech – lead and moderated by Illia and AlexS (NEAR co-founders) 
• Wallet and Staking – moderated by Kendall Cole with participation from validators
• Guilds and Hack the Rainbow – moderated by Dani and NiMA (dev community team)

Don’t forget to sign up for NEAR Town Hall here on Hopin 🙌

Balancer BUIDLing on NEAR 

Automated Market Makers (aka AMMs) are one of the core building blocks of any open finance platform. We are partnering with Balancer to provide builders on NEAR with the best tools to power their DeFi projects.
Balancer is more than just a DEX. In addition to basic DEX functionalities, Balancer can also be used for creating and managing self-balancing smart index funds, fair token launches, and much more. You can read more about our collaboration and the two bounties powering Balancer on NEAR here on our blog! 

Hack the Rainbow Winners!

Hack the Rainbow was NEAR’s first MOOH (Massive Open Online Hackathon). The event challenged community members to use the Rainbow Bridge to utilize Ethereum assets on NEAR—a fast, scalable, and low-cost environment. More than 400 participants and 80 projects from 18 countries around the world were submitted! Meet the winners.

Development Updates: 

Stakewars is ending, but we have other exciting opportunities for you:
https://pages.near.org/blog/stake-wars-is-over-but-were-just-getting-started/

Inflationary reward are live on NEAR: 

https://pages.near.org/blog/staking-rewards-are-live/

Vincent, one of our Hack the Rainbow hackers, write about bridging NFTs from Ethereum to NEAR: 

https://medium.com/@vince0656/bridging-ethereum-nfts-to-near-505a272ec949

Engineering updates: 

• We have significantly reduced our memory footprint on restart
• We now can attribute and measure memory usage by all of our Rust code
• We made some improvements to our archival nodes (1 and2)
• We decided to not micro-optimize our gas counter for now
• We made improvements to how we test cross-contract calls, based on the community feedback.

We have multiple new design discussions that we invite community to participate in:

• Discussion: Upgrade triggering mechanism. Enabling EVM
• Proposal: Solving state staking issue
• Proposal: Allowance-free safe-based token standard
• Bootstrapping native NEAR ecosystem
• Proposal: Fee upgrade process

Calling all Founders! 🚀

Batch 2 applications for OWC Accelerator are now open! Our batch 1 teams have raised over $15m this year. Ready to join the collective? Apply Now: https://www.openwebcollective.com/

Details:

• Program Dates: Jan – Mar 2021 
• Program Highlights: Over 30+ mentors, 100+ VC connections and Demo Day with 300+ attendees 
• Applicants are selected on a rolling basis. (We’ll likely find our 15 teams prior to the application deadline 12/11/20)
• Potential investment from OWC seed fund (launching this year!)

Who Should Apply:

• Early startups anywhere in the world that are post-concept, prelaunch, or recently post-launch

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

Your friends,

NiMA and the NEAR team