Lately it’s been a blur of events as we talk to developers both in and outside of the blockchain ecosystem and learn more about what they need in a decentralized platform. This weekend, we’re at the SF Developer Week hackathon helping developers work with the platform (and awarding a number of challenge prizes). If you’re in town, stop by and say hi!
Community and Events
We’ve touched Denver, Boston, San Francisco and multiple locations in Asia with no sign of stopping yet. A key upcoming event actually doesn’t have a specific location — on March 5 at 4pm PT / 7pm ET, we’ll host an online Decentralized App Development Workshop where anyone can code along and see what the platform can do.
If you want to host a local NEAR meetup in your city or see if we can meet with yours, reach out to hello@nearprotocol.com.
Recent Highlights
Now that our single-node DevNet is active, we’re focusing on making the user experience better and the technology behind it more robust. That means continuing to build out documentation, stabilize the node and smooth out the user experience throughout the NEAR Studio IDE. Upcoming weeks will see big upgrades in all of these areas as well.
The next blockchain milestone is the multi-node AlphaNet, expected out in early March. We’ve updated to a newer, simpler consensus called Nightshade.
There were 40 PRs in nearcore from 8 different authors over the last couple weeks.DevNet update
Initial working API for cross-contract calls using AssemblyScript.
Benchmarks for the client excluding network and consensus.
Launched NEAR Place app (https://app.near.ai/amsuwo78d/) as a showcase for the current development and user experience.
AlphaNet update
Finalized the design and implementation of a new consensus for beacon and shard chains called “Nightshade”, replacing previously used consensus “TxFlow”. See a draft of a paper for an early DAG-based version of Nightshade here, and a simplified version without a DAG here.
Started integrating Nightshade with the existing infrastructure.
Implemented an initial version of mempool and starting hooking it in, replacing the gossip DAG that was used previously.
NEARlib update
Improved API for connecting to DevNet
Integration tests for connecting to DevNet
Switched from Parity WASM interpreter to WASMER JIT. Got 100x raw improvement and 18x improvement when other components factored in.
NEARStudio update
Updated nearlib and corresponding fixes
Minor fixes to templates
AssemblyScript/bindgen
Updated bindgen to work with latest version of AssemblyScript
Fixed bug with duplicate bindings generated for encoding arrays of base types
How You Can Get Involved
Join us! If you want to work with one of the most talented (and humble?) teams in the world right now to solve incredibly hard problems, check out our careers page for openings.
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.
