NEAR Community Update: May 3, 2019

Just about every team we have, whether on the application layer or the blockchain layer, is working towards an upcoming release of their respective projects so there has been a lot of code written in the branches during what would otherwise appear to be a quiet couple of weeks. On the community side, our online hackathon will continue into the next week and we have been typically gregarious about hosting events with other high quality projects in the space so we can share knowledge and build awareness.

We’ll be in NYC for blockchain week so look us up if you’re in town!

COMMUNITY AND EVENTS

Our alpha “NEAR One” hackathon is in progress now and we’re working to support the dozen-or-so teams who are involved during the next couple of weeks before it wraps up. Peter injected his usual flair during the kickoff:

Upcoming Events

1. [ONLINE] April 27 — May 11: Hack One Online Hackathon
2. [NYC]: Consensus Week (various events)
3. [NYC] May 13: The Future of Defi: MakerDAO, Compound, Uniswap and Balance.io
4. [NYC] May 14: Blockchain Gaming in ’19: Neon District, OpenSea, Dapper Labs, Arcade Distillery
5. [NYC] May 16: Crypto Community Managers Happy Hour

If you want to collaborate on events, reach out to [email protected]

WRITING AND CONTENT

1. Recording of the multi-chain protocol panel with Polkadot, Cosmos, and Parity
2. Rust Parallelism for non-C/C++ developers by Dr Max Zavershynskyi
3. Whiteboard Series Episode 16 with Chi from Quarkchain
4. Recording of a fireside chat between CEO Alex Skidanov and Zaki Manian from Cosmos

ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS

We continue to move the wallet towards its next UX milestone while shifting from research mode to implementation mode of sharding and economics on the blockchain layer. We’ve been test driving and benchmarking against other consensus algorithms as well.

There were 29 PRs in nearcore from 7 different authors over the last couple of weeks. As always, the code is completely open source on Github.

Application/Development Layer

• Adding Access keys to Nearlib
• Cover access key functionality with tests
• Switch HTTP RPC interface to JSONRPC in both Node and nearlib
• Support configuration of multiple deployment environments for CLI tools
• Updated Chess and Memegen to use latest CLI tools / nearlib
• CLI dev tools (near-shell):
  • Use NODE_ENV-driven config in tests
  • Optimized AssemblyScript builds
  • Removed extra dependencies to allow faster installs
• NEARStudio
  • Ask user confirmation before closing tab with unsaved changes
  • Downloaded project has dev keys necessary for deploy
• Wallet
  • Working on account recovery: UI and backend

Blockchain Layer

• Added ETH headers validation as initial step for ETH <> NEAR bridge.
• Benchmarking tools and comparison with Tendermint.
• Clean up repo by splitting into runtime and chain.
• Docker containers with first version of Testnet and studio/tools are published. Added scripts to spin Testnet up on GCloud.
• Refactor transaction verification in MemPool to have validation code in one place and improve security

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. 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.

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