Get in my Beta Program! | July 12, 2019

We’ve just announced our funding! We had a big press release this week announcing we’ve raised $12.1 million dollars in a round led by Metastable and Accomplice. We’re using this to power our growth to become the greatest blockchain the world has ever seen. We’re doing this in the form of a new Beta Program and we’ve opened new positions across the board. If you think you could see yourself working at Near, shoot us an email or application. Check out open positions here.

With the funding we’ve also released the Nightshade Paper (link), which is the most comprehensive overview to date of our approach to sharding, validation and consensus in the NEAR Protocol.

COMMUNITY AND EVENTS

• Our main update on the community front is that we’ve opened applications for our developer beta program. We’re looking for high-quality dApp projects to launch alongside the NEAR Protocol on Day 1 of mainnet, as well as receiving tokens, technical support and a dedicated adviser from NEAR. If you have a blockchain project idea, learn more and apply for the beta program here.
• With our funding announcement, we have received a lot of press – including from CoinDesk, TheBlock, Coin Telegraph, and of course, the Daily HODL.There are mentions of us in the media as far afield as Russia and China.
• There were also some wonderful posts by Near investors, including IDEO Lab, Greenfield and Xspring.
• Illia is back in China (I know, wasn’t he just there?) to present at StakingCon and give a workshop on developing blockchain smart contracts in Beijing.
• (Caption: Illia presenting with Chinese slides to developers in Beijing. One day his Chinese will be good enough to do the whole presentation in Chinese! Until then we have interpreters.)
• Coming up, we’ll be presenting a multi-part series on Crypto-Prototyping at Dweb Camp July 18-21 south of San Francisco. There are some tickets still available so register here.

WRITING AND CONTENT

• Videos
  • Saito Whiteboard Session: https://youtu.be/KGOZ7udYz0A
  • Fireside Chat with Chase Freo from Alto.io: https://youtu.be/sZCJarxVZpg
  • Alex Skidanov on Usability and Scalability at IBM Blockchain Dev Summit: https://youtu.be/U9WBW3R06oI
• Blog
  • WASM for Blockchain in 2019 by Maksym Zavershynskyi — https://medium.com/nearprotocol/wasm-for-blockchain-2019-d093bfeb6133
  • NEAR fundraise and beta program announcement — /blog/fundraise/
• We’ve published the sharding paper with more details on the approach NEAR Protocol is built upon: /downloads/Nightshade.pdf

ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS

1/ We finally published our Sharding paper yesterday:https://t.co/609oGaeSK0

We started research on sharding from the first day @NearProtocol started in August 2018. pic.twitter.com/KY9i3g7Etb

— Alex Skidanov (@AlexSkidanov) July 11, 2019

A lot of our recent efforts have been dedicated to preparing for our announcement of funding. We’re still dealing with updating our libraries with new user flows. 

Over 30 PRs across 12 repos and 14 authors. Featured repos: nearcore, nearlib, near-shell, and near-wallet.

• Beta Program has launched: /beta
• Published the sharding paper with more details on the approach NEAR Protocol is built upon: /downloads/Nightshade.pdf
• We’ve opened new positions: /careers 
• Application Layer
  • Integration testing near-shell and wallet
  • Added blockchain interface to the runtime in rust
• Blockchain
  • Stabilizing cross-shard transactions and receipts.
  • Implemented validator kick out

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED

Join us: there are new jobs we’re hiring across the board!
If you want to work with one of the most talented teams in the world right now to solve incredibly hard problems, check out our careers page for openings. And tell your friends!

Learn more about NEAR in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol. 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.

Reminder: you can help out significantly by adding your thoughts in our 2-minute Developer Survey.

https://upscri.be/633436/