NEAR Worldwide | September 24th, 2019

We’re traveling all over the world to talk to you! Hopefully we will see you (or have already seen you) at the events we are participating in at Shanghai Blockchain week, the BlockchainUA conference in Ukraine, Korea Blockchain week, and of course DevCon in Japan. As usual, if you see any one of us, don’t be shy and come say hello! We’re always happy to talk to members of our community. Speaking of which, the ambassador program is in full swing. That means you should keep an eye out for even more events near you. If there are no events near you, you can always become an ambassador for fun and excitement. Finally, for the devs out there, we’ve totally redesigned our documentation portal. On top of that NEAR app integration is working with the ledger hardware wallet (more to come!).

COMMUNITY AND EVENTS

Illia’s was in China again for the last week. He’s been talking a ton of community members in Shanghai including Math Wallet, our friends over at IOSG, and many others. He was on several panels and presented on our Nightshade Sharding Design. Thanks to everyone who came out! In other news, Max presented on Developer Experience at BlockchainUA in Ukraine and helped out (shoutout to Frol as well) with the hackathon. Here are some highlights:

Illia at Wanxiang Summit (Shanghai International Blockchain Week):

Illia at Old Friends United (Co sponsored by IOSG, NEAR, Polkadot, and CasperLab):

Max presenting at BlockchainUA:

Max and Frol helping out at the hackathon:

WRITING AND CONTENT

We’ve got a blog post for you to check out on Long Range Attacks, one of the largest unsolved problems in Proof-of-Stake blockchains. We also recently had a chance to catch up with Benny from Dapper Labs. He helped create crypto kitties, and drops some serious knowledge on creative marketing ideas in the new Fireside chat. Sasha wrote a new post on the future of Open Web. In other news: Canaan wrote a great post on migrating to NEAR from Loom SDK, and Jan from WorkbnDAO wrote a roundup of what they’ve learned in the crypto space since January 2018.

• Long Range Attacks: https://pages.near.org/blog/long-range-attacks-and-a-new-fork-choice-rule/
• Dapper Labs in Fireside Chat Ep 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww8XDdpw2Pk
• Sasha’s post on Open Web: https://hackernoon.com/power-to-the-people-how-open-web-will-reshape-the-society-in-the-next-decade-5t2wd3193
• Canaan from Stardust on why they’re moving from Loom to NEAR: https://medium.com/stardustplatform/stardust-joins-the-near-protocol-beta-program-47f3c630f2e0
• Jan from WorknB on what they’ve learned since January 2018 about the crypto space: https://medium.com/worknb/our-learnings-at-worknbdao-since-january-2018-1b4cc2a18606

ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS

Some fun stuff to announce this week. Vlad was able to get a the ledger nano hardware wallet to work with a NEAR app. (You can see it running in the pic below). Also, there’s a little peak at our documentation portal, which we’ve redesigned from scratch. Also, we’ve added two major features to core: batch transactions and System Runtime API. That means you can do stuff like creating a contract factory! Super cool.

108 PRs across 20 repos by 19 authors. Featured repos: nearcore, nearlib, near-shell, near-wallet, near-bindgen, and borsh.

• NEW DOCS PORTAL
• Proper filtering of transactions. Every transaction in a chunk is now valid.
• “Delete account” added to near shell and nearlib
• Generic decoder added to AssemblyScript runtime
• Trust wallet integration in progress
• Block queries optimized in explorer (2s -> 55ms)
• Batch transactions exposed in Rust bindgen
• Transaction signing in Ledger hardware wallet 🙂 (see pic above)
• Batched transactions implemented
• NEAR <> Ethereum bridge is underway https://github.com/nearprotocol/near-bridge 
• Shipped nearlib 0.13.3
• System Runtime API implemented
• Contract reward added to core
• Now can query block by hash, not just index in core
• Continuing epic refactor in near-runtime-ts
• Tests for invalid input added to BORSH

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.

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