NEAR Community Update: March 8, 2019

It has been enormously gratifying to sit down with some of the top teams from across the ecosystem and watch them get excited about what this platform can provide both their developers and end-users. We certainly have a long way yet to go but our goal of making blockchain development and usage intuitive is resonating in all the right places.

Every week we have more to show off. We’re rapidly closing in on our multi-node AlphaNet release and are upgrading the developer tools from proofs-of-concept to professional grade.

We’ve also released our new website and will soon introduce a new member of the family to help guide the user journey:

Community and Events

Another weekend, another hackathon! This time you can find us at ETH Paris giving away coffee and showing off our new development environment. More on that in the next update.

We’ve now run dozens of in-person workshops across multiple continents and are starting to enter the online space as well to help give the community more opportunities to learn about the platform. Our first online event was the Decentralized App Development Workshop but it certainly won’t be the last.

If you want to host a local NEAR meetup in your city or see if we can support yours, reach out to hello@nearprotocol.com.

Recent Events

1. [San Francisco] Feb 23–24: Developer Week Hackathon
2. [Boston] Feb 23: Harvard Business School 2019 Crypto Club (with Alex Skidanov)
3. [Beijing] Feb 23: Blockchain 3.0 — The Evolution in Blockchain DApps
4. [SF] Feb 26: Giving power back to developers: Preview of a new computing platform (@Github)
5. [Oakland] Feb 27: Near Protocol — DevNet Workshop (@Oakland Developers)
6. [Shanghai] Feb 28: Blockchain 3.0 — The Evolution in Blockchain DApps
7. [Mountainview] Feb 28: Learn Blockchain Tools and Technologies that Enable Smart Contracts
8. [ONLINE] March 5 @ 4pm PT / 7pm ET: Decentralized App Development Workshop (video)

Upcoming Events

1. [Paris] March 8–10: Events around Eth Paris
2. [Tokyo] March 8: NEAR at Waseda University
3. [Tokyo] March 9: NEAR at HashHub
4. [Beijing] March 11: NEAR at Beijing AI
5. [Beijing] March 13: NEAR at Tsinghua University
6. [SF] March 20: Building on a Blockchain DevNet (Workshop)
7. [San Jose] March 21: Blockchain Developer Meetup
8. [SF] Mar 28: Decentralized Computing with WASM @ Github
9. [SF] Mar 29: Rust Latam conference
10. [San Mateo] Mar 30: San Mateo HS Hackathon
11. [Sydney] April 8: EdCon

If you want to collaborate on events, reach out to hello@nearprotocol.com

Writing and Content

Aliaksandr Hudzillin wrote about Richard Stallman’s vision and how blockchain enables an open future in his piece on The Future of Software Innovation.

The Whiteboard Series continues strong with several new videos:

1. Harmony’s Rongjian Lan
2. Interledger’s Dan Robinson
3. Plasma Group’s Ben Jones

Engineering Highlights

On the application/development layer, we’ve built out the command line tools necessary to build, test and deploy apps to either a local DevNet or our hosted DevNet and upgraded the UI on our wallet. On the blockchain layer, we are finishing up what’s needed to release our multi-node AlphaNet.

There were 48 PRs in nearcore from 12 different authors over the last couple of weeks.

Blockchain Layer

• TestNet “Alpha” version is finalized: NightShade consensus runs across multiple nodes with syncing & announcement of blocks, transaction and block proposal gossiping. See documentation on how to run multiple nodes locally.
• Sped up BLS signature aggregation

Application/Development Layer

• Released command line tools for local development, testing, and deployment
• Improved NEAR Studio UI and added more templates.
• Exposed cross-contract APIs in AssemblyScript and published an example with using another token contract.
• Released new designs for the NEAR Wallet and NEAR website.
• Released an image that deploys entire NEAR stack (NEARStudio, nearlib, wallet, DevNet, block explorer), which is useful for local development or continuous deployment.

How You Can Get Involved

Join us! 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.

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.

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