Start a Guild

No, your Guild can be focused on specific tech stack or programming language, social sciences with a connection to the open web, or anything in between. It can be a validator community, a market-driven community or a developer community. It can be based broadly around interesting new technologies or specifically about the NEAR platform.

The goal of this program is to drive interest and engagement to the open web ecosystem. The incentives will most strongly reward those guilds who have strong alignment with the NEAR ecosystem but there is no requirement that the guild be 100% focused on NEAR.

Yes, we highly encourage you to sign-up with your existing community. When you do, feel free to reach out to the community for help rolling out the Guild to your members.

No, only the Guild Leader registers with us. But a Guild is most effective when it has many members.

Yes, though it should be consensual. Most of the incentive tracking will tie back to having a NEAR account so only those members who are engaged with NEAR will end up counted in the rewards.

Yes, definitely, based on what’s healthy for the ecosystem overall and long-term. Some incentives may be too easy to game. Guilds which are deliberately gaming incentives will be asked to de-affiliate themselves.

The earlier you start or register your Guild, the more momentum you can build as the NEAR community grows and local members look for education and support. The League Ranking system also provides incentives for communities to establish themselves early and maintain their ranking.

Anyone counts and they don’t need to register officially. But they might if they’re part of something that’s counted in the Guild rewards like a Developer Program person, a Validator or a dApp creator.

Most of the incentives for the Guild Program are non-competitive so there are many reasons for Guilds to support each other. The League Rankings are intended to provide a baseline level of recognition and predictable reward to Guilds who are doing a fantastic job and who will have expenses that require them to rely on predictable rewards.

Regardless, the incentives of the program strongly emphasize quality and engagement over quantity. If you build a substantive, long-term community you can count on the program supporting you and rewarding you accordingly.

Guilds are intended to be both local and diverse. There is plenty of room for multiple Guilds in a given geography and some Guilds may have a large and international presence. If there is already a Guild in your region with the same focus area as yours, consider combining forces with them. If they focus on providing technical education around building web applications, you might focus on engaging potential users of decentralized apps instead.

Only one Guild leader will connect with us, access initiatives, and receive rewards. We expect the Guild leader to communicate and share information with other Guild leaders. Note that you will not necessarily receive more rewards if you have more Guild leaders within your Guild. However, the additional efforts within your Guild might engage more members, allowing your Guild to scale up faster.

Most of the rewards will be calculated using automated tools, for example linking Guild Members with NEAR accounts to Developer Program participants and the apps they deploy. These tools are under development so early efforts will be somewhat manual. Rewards will be available in the Portal.