NEAR Community Update: May 17th, 2019
COMMUNITY
May 17, 2019
We had a blast in NYC, kicking off Consensus week on Monday with a DeFi panel in a completely packed room. We followed it up the next day with a fascinating panel exploring the future of gaming in blockchain (meme of the week right below from this panel!). We also jumped on a panel on Staking and Validation. High quality edits will be available soon, so make sure to keep an eye on our twitter! On the development side, the major push has been the new wallet, economics design and the new version of Nightshade consensus. In community news, we’ve wrapped up the hackathon and have been having a great time in New York, collaborating and discussing the future of blockchain with some very smart and cool crypto teams!

Au revoir New York! Until next time!

Blockchain Gaming in 2019
Apparently “we’re starting!!!” @Mitch_Kosowski @NEARProtocol @neondistrictRPG @opensea pic.twitter.com/6ku8N0JeXh

— Matt Lockyer (@mattdlockyer) May 14, 2019

COMMUNITY AND EVENTS
NY Consensus Week

It has been a HUGE week for NEAR events while we’ve been in New York for Consensus Week.

First off on Monday was a panel on the Future of DeFi, moderated by NEAR’s cofounder Illia, which had a completely packed house despite the rainy weather.


If you missed the livestream you can watch it here; we will be releasing the full videos of both our panels next week.

Also on Monday, Alex spoke on a panel about sharding with Quarkchain, Harmony, Thunder, Ontology, ETH and Zilliqa.

 

Fun meetup here in NYC, a lot of different teams presenting their take on blockchain sharding: @harmonyprotocol @Quark_Chain @zilliqa @OntologyNetwork @NEARProtocol @ethereum and more.#Consensus2019 #BlockchainWeekNYC pic.twitter.com/HFjF4yesIp

— protolambda (@protolambda) May 14, 2019

 

On Tuesday we ran two events simultaneously – a Crypto Community Managers’ Happy Hour hosted by Jess, where we met community managers from around the globe.

 

We also had a panel on the Future of Gaming hosted by Sasha from NEAR. The livestream is here if you missed it and the full video will be up soon.


We are so grateful to Nomadworks NY for hosting us for all NEAR’s events in New York; everyone on the team there is amazing and we had a blast!

Finally, Illia presented on a panel on Proof of Stake networks alongside Tezos, Cosmos, Parity, and Solana Labs. Livestream here. Illia will also be presenting on the economics of validation at this event tonight.

 

Talking next gen proof of stake protocols with @SolanaLabs, @cosmos, @NEARProtocol, @tezos and @ParityTech pic.twitter.com/Iw5QQdGYXm

— Wilson Withiam (@WilsonWithiam) May 15, 2019

Hackathon 

NEAR’s first hackathon, Hack.One, is closed, the judging completed, and the winners announced. Thanks so much to our esteemed judges Linda Xie (Co-founder & Managing Director of Scalar Capital), Peter Kieltyka (Co-Founder & CEO at Horizon Blockchain Games Inc.), and Sina Habibian (Advisor at the Ethereum Foundation) for their thoughtful and constructive feedback.


*Drumroll*
And our winners are:

1st place ($5000) – Team twitr, with a blockchain implementation of Twitter
2nd place ($3000) – Team Zod.TV,  with a decentralized video transcoder
3rd place ($1000) – Team azban, with a decentralized economy for data storage
Thanks to all the teams that participated, and keep an eye out for our next hackathon.

ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS
The Wallet has gone through even more iterations and is very close to release. We’ve started breaking the mega Pull Request (that encapsulates all of the new consensus research up this point) into merge-able PRs. Lastly, we’ve begun the process of breaking our mono repo into many smaller ones, so that contributing is much easier.

There were 34 PRs in our multiple repos from 6 different authors over the last couple of weeks. As always, the code is completely open source on Github.

Application/Development Layer

Implemented RLP in assemblyscript.
Added testing to near-runtime-ts.
Nearlib
Extracted into separate GitHub repository and re-configured continuous integration
Improved error handling
Make continuous integration tests work with shared TestNet
Two version releases of near-shell, the dApp command line tool
NEARStudio
Tracking downloads in Google Analytics to see who moves from online IDE to local development
Improving downloaded code compatibility with CLI development tools
Wallet
Completed phone verification service
Integrated phone verification with blockchain
Integrated app-specific access keys into the wallet
Introduced common request error handling components
Added base64 encoding and decoding to near-runtime-ts
Blockchain Layer

Implemented economics that deducts fees directly from the balance instead of using gas/mana
Discussed new Nightshade consensus in Santa Clara
Currently breaking the gigantic research PR on the new consensus into smaller, mergeable PRs
Big refactoring PR of existing consensus to prepare for merge of Nightshade
HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED
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