Welcome to Day 0 – It’s Just the Beginning

Welcome to Day 0! It’s been an exciting few days of announcements and even more exciting past 24 hours with Millions of $NEAR being transferred and over 160 Million NEAR Staked.

Echoing our mission to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world, we’re all hands on deck to answer the community’s burning questions about what comes next for NEAR and clarify any questions that have surfaced since transfers were enabled yesterday.

In case you missed it, here’s a recording link of our open community town hall from this morning with members of the NEAR core team live answering community questions.

Here’s a quick roundup of the excitement:

NEAR is Live with Transfers

NEAR is now fully permissionless, decentralized & community-governed. This means it’s now possible for anyone to create accounts, transfer and trade NEAR tokens, and build and launch applications on a performant blockchain that prioritizes ease of use for developers and end users.

Staking & Transfers are Live in the NEAR Wallet!

Earlier this week we released an exciting update to the NEAR Wallet; it now has a staking user interface built directly into the web app. Join the wallet team on Discord in the wallet channel if you have any questions or feedback.

New Foundation Delegation Rewards

With the announcement that Stake Wars was ending, the NEAR Foundation announced three new ways for the community to stay involved with Validators and earn rewards from the NEAR Foundation to promote ecosystem growth.

New Governance Forum 

With the official launch of the decentralized community, we created a new open governance forum on our website. Join community conversations on the protocol, the future of decentralization, governance structures on NEAR, and more! Erik kicked us off with a thread about clarifying day 1 supply in circulation and to review Phase II governance in the first governance work group session.

$NEAR is listed on Exchanges

With transfers enabled on chain, open trading and deposits were announced by Binance and Huobi making it possible for new Token holders to join the community.

Applications Live on the NEAR:

We’ve been working closely with the developer community to onboard great applications to NEAR across a variety of use cases like marketplaces, gaming, and NFTs. There are a lot more amazing partners we’ll be announcing in the NEAR future, so stay tuned! For now, here are three exciting applications we’re welcoming to the NEAR Community:

Zed Run – Gaming – a futuristic horse racing universe where users can trade, breed, and race majestic, digital racehorses.

Flux – Open Markets – an open market protocol that enables developers to create markets on anything.

Mintbase – Minting NFTs – Shopify for NFTs, making it easy for anyone to create NFTs.

Updates are coming! Here’s what’s next:

The community came out in full force today to start staking, trading, and using NEAR applications from the moment we went live. This was a huge feat, and something we couldn’t be more excited and thankful for. 

As with all product launches, it’s only the beginning. We wanted to take a moment to address some of the common issues we’re hearing from the community and speak to immediate updates planned for the NEAR Wallet on our roadmap that will make using NEAR even easier than before.

1. Staking in the NEAR Wallet is for Locked Tokens only…for now. Very soon, you’ll be able to stake all tokens, whether locked or unlocked. We built the interface for Locked Tokens first because that represents the vast majority of token holders in the community. This means if your tokens aren’t locked, you can’t use the NEAR Wallet for staking just yet, including viewing any stake positions you have created through Dokia or the command line.
2. In designing a secure and stable first version of the Wallet, we chose top SMS and Email providers for 2FA. In our coming release, we’ll be optimizing how we deliver through those providers to ensure that any failures to send or lag in delivery won’t affect the end user experience and you’ll receive clear error messages. Currently, there may be a slight delay at times based on your geolocation in receiving an SMS or Email for your 2FA. Tightening partner integrations is a high priority for the team.
3. We’re working on a bunch of enhancements to how we handle error messages to keep you informed of what’s happening. Keep in mind if you see a scary (or vague) error message, your keys are safe and your Tokens are not lost.

   This is especially true for any Recovery issues at the moment. For example, if you see the message “Error: Exceeded maximum attempts for this transaction,” this could be caused by a number of networking issues or simply a slight delay from the RPC nodes. Don’t worry, your keys aren’t lost, try again in a few minutes and it should work.

4. Staking and Unstaking was the focus of our release Monday and we’re excited to see it being widely used across the community with more than 160 Million NEAR Staked to the network. This participation is what enabled the Validators to pass the vote and move us into Phase 2.

   Now that transfers are live and applications are running on NEAR, we are working on improvements to the Unstaking process to allow you to Unstake a partial balance that you may want to trade, transfer, or use in some other way.

5. Finally, one of the greatest things about NEAR that developers and users will love is the flexible contract-based account model that support many keys per account. This allows you to create very customizable experiences with advanced permissions improving usability for users.

   Accounts can be either user-defined (human readable, less than 64 characters) or implicit (derived from a private key, always exactly 64 characters). When creating an account through the NEAR Wallet, your account name will usually be user-defined, and will end in .near. If you use Trust Wallet, or an exchange, they will likely provide you an implicit account to use (Trust Wallet) or deposit to (an exchange). Adding ‘.near’ to the end of an implicit account will result in an error because you will have too many characters in your account name. We’re working on ways to better handle and manage your accounts both ‘.near’ and implicit accounts to make using your accounts on NEAR even easier.

The Wallet team’s roadmap continues to grow and there will be more to come soon. If you have any immediate questions or concerns, join the community discussion on Discord and reach out to the wallet team in their channel.

Join the Community

Once again, thank YOU for being the best part of the NEAR ecosystem and coming with us on this ride. The last few days have been incredibly exciting, but what’s even more exciting is that this is only just the beginning. We’ve got a ton of great partners joining with applications set to launch on NEAR very soon.

If you’re just learning about NEAR for the first time and are seeing this post, we invite you to join us on the journey to make blockchain accessible to everyday people who are excited for the future of the Open Web with NEAR. If you’re a developer, be sure to sign up for our developer program and join the conversation in our Discord chat. You can also keep up to date on future releases, announcements, and event invitations by subscribing to our newsletter for the latest news on NEAR.