Soon… | NEAR Update: June 14, 2019

We’re extremely close to getting our new consensus, Nightshade, deployed to TestNet! Over the last two weeks we’ve been merging big blocks of it into master branches repos that will be affected. Bear with us during the transition, there will be breaking changes. You can now send money in the wallet, as well as see and manage authorized applications. In addition, you can deploy contracts in Rust to our TestNet. Co-founder Illia has been traveling through China for talks and demos with the Web3 Foundation.

COMMUNITY AND EVENTS

⛓ What blockchain-native project do you want to build?

? Why do you believe it is something the world needs?

? Tweet a one-screenshot micro-pitch for your dApp idea and the hashtag #FutureisNEAR, to compete for a ticket to #DWebCamp (valued at $800). pic.twitter.com/Cm0X0eINtO

— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) June 13, 2019

• We want everybody to be able to take part in building the decentralized web with us. So we’re sponsoring a Twitter pitch competition for the next 6 days to give away a free ticket to DWeb Camp. Check out the tweet above for how to enter.
• Illia is in China! He has been presenting alongside Polkadot, Chainsafe, Edgeware and others in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing about NEAR, usability and sharding.

Great time with Illia from Near Protocol. pic.twitter.com/UNv5mzDj1l

— Kaikai Yang (@KKYohlala) June 14, 2019

• We’ve partnered with the Web3 Foundation to host regular Twitter chats on topics relevant to the crypto community. Our first chat was on usability; the second on blockchain gaming. Tweet at us (@NEARProtocol) if you’d like to suggest a topic!

Upcoming events:

• Alex is giving a talk on usability and scalability at IBM’s Blockchain Developer Summit on June 21 at Galvanize, San Francisco. Tickets available here.
• Max is giving a talk on using Rust to build smart contracts at RustLab in Florence, Italy on June 29. Tickets available here.
• Jess, Peter and Vlad will be running a Crypto-Prototyping Series at DWeb Camp, south of San Francisco (July 18-21). It will be a multi-day immersive experience for the decentralized web community run by the Internet Archive. Tickets available here.
• Alex will be talking at the Web3 Summit in Berlin (August 21-25). Tickets available here.

WRITING AND CONTENT

We’re happy to release the two videos from the blockchain gaming panel and the DeFi panel we recorded in New York. We’ve also got a new whiteboard session with Monica from Kadena, and a new series we’re launching called Fireside Chats. These are going to cover war stories from blockchain founders, starting with blockchain gaming. Lastly, we released another article on avalanche. Links below!

Videos

• Future of DeFi — Panel | NY Blockchain Week
• Blockchain Blockchain Gaming in 2019 — Panel | NY Blockchain Week
• Fireside Chat with Devin Finzer | NY Blockchain Week
• Whiteboard Series Ep 19 with Monica Quaintance from Kadena
• Whiteboard Series Ep 20 with John Pacific from NuCypher
• We Sponsored Nueva Hacks. Here’s the video.

Writing

• Avalanche vs The new IOTA consensus algorithm, with a touch of Spacemesh

ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS

We’ve had 58 PRs across 9 repos and 10 authors in the last two weeks. Featured repos: nearcore, nearlib, near-shell, and near-wallet. Don’t forget, it’s all open source.

Overall, a lot of progress in the app layer and merged Nightshade into master.

Application Layer

• Wallet
  • Authorized apps management
  • Various UI fixes
  • Display proper username in profile
  • Send money fixes
  • Account recovery fixes
  • Fix login redirect (when recovering account / setting up new)
• Nearlib
  • Setup CI for Nightshade integration
  • Refactored to TypeScript with relevant updates for Nightshade and cleaner and extensible API.
  • Support adding keys to accounts
• AssemblyScript/bindings
  • Merge with latest upstream
• AssemblyScript JSON
  • Update to work with latest upstream
  • Use as-pect for tests
• Studio
  • Wait properly for compiler loading
  • Basic end-to-end tests for studio workflow (running on CI)
• Rust Smart Contracts
  • We now support smart contracts written in Rust
• Near CLI
  • Command syntax improvements
  • Attach tokens to calls
  • Send tokens
  • View account

Blockchain

• Added self-call for contract-based account.
• Major progress on separating large logical blocks into chunks for the new Nightshade sharding design (commits 1 and 2). Still WIP.
• Switched to u128 for balances / stakes across the board.
• Implemented validator rotation and staking transaction
• Restored all integration tests

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.

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

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