Closing Keynote: A Near Future

Transcript

so last but not least let me introduce to you marik flamont the ceo of the near foundation she is an absolute female powerhouse she has worked for lvmh boston consulting expedia circle and then now of course she's heading up the near foundation but i do not want to take any of her time marieke the floor is yours [Applause] hi hello um thank you for staying here for being here um it's always humbling to hear your own intro hopefully you can have you had a great day and hopefully you've learned a lot

and you've actually seen how close the future of how near the future that everybody here is envisioning is actually starting to uh to happen and to be presented so i'm delighted to be here and to present to you a little bit of the vision that we have actually for the near future i'll start by telling you and by explaining a little bit how we think about nir and what actually near is so anir we believe in decentralization we believe that the world will actually be a better place if people can control their assets their data and their power of governance that means creating an open well world that means shifting a lot of what we see today and actually making that happen differently so that people can actually truly own the content and the data that

they make the near protocol is a layer one so that's the space within which we are and not all layer ones are created equal but actually near was created in 2018 at the bottom of the bear market the last one so this is we are right one right now in one it's probably not the last one and i'll probably be more but near was created in 2018. the fundamental principle on which near as a layer one have been created number one is actually simplicity it is of utmost importance that actually if we want to adoption if we want to get two billion bless you users last low if we want to get to billion of users who are actually going to use the blockchain we really need something

simple it's impossible for anyone to actually remember 64 digits but it's possible to remember marek.near or to remember your last name and dotner and something like that so that's what simplicity means to us simplicity also means simplicity for developers there are tens of millions of javascript developers and very very few rust and solidity developers near is actually enabled for javascript developers through the principle of actually sharding and we are proof of stake blockchain that's actually very important not proof of work fully sharded often we are called what eth 2.0 will be or could be and so through that near is actually extremely scalable and secure we have

over 100 validators and a number that is continuously growing and increasing those fundamental features enable us actually to be truly climate neutral i believe we were one of the first actually protocol and layer one to actually work through being fully accredited and audited we're super proud to work with southpaw on an ongoing basis not only to look at the footprint of what our chain is doing or what our validators are doing but also to things through the ecosystem what's actually the carbon footprint of the ecosystem and guess what the highest carbon footprint usage is actually us traveling something to remind ourselves that sometimes we criticize the technology we use but we are ultimately we are the culprit

anyway super proud to be partnering with south pole but also this means that as a blockchain we've seen more and more projects being built on near that are trying to change also and help what's happening on on climate change our ecosystem is continuously growing today we have over thousands of different projects i think over 600 of them are continuously being registered and very very high quality uh over 300 400 dows it's it's it's continuously growing but the way we think about our ecosystem is to think that at the core of it you actually have the protocol which is open source and on which different infrastructure player can actually play a role continuously help actually enhance and and uh create more goodness for the protocol

for example pagoda is a web street tooling for creators and entrepreneurs that want to build on on web3 um aurora is what we call our evm machine that's ethereum virtual machine it means that whatever has been built on ethereum actually can be translated and brought to near with the economic and the scalability of neo so pretty powerful on the right hand side here what you can see is actually how we actually continuously decentralize our ecosystem and so at the bottom you have the foundation that's the part that i lead and some of my colleagues who are here we work on but we're not the only one we're just a pebble within actually a very large a very large layer of the land of different pebbles we think through regional ecosystem funds we believe it's actually very

important to have local presence yes we are in very global world but it's still a privilege to this day to speak english so nothing replaced actually having very local community we think in terms of ecosystem funds there are specialists out there who know everything about entertainment who know everything about nft who know anything about dao while we try to actually empower them to distribute proximity lab is one of such ecosystem funds they are very focused on d5 within our ecosystem and and that's what they do so uh as a foundation and not you know again i think it's one thing that's fascinating within the the crypto blockchain ecosystem space is that there is a lot of different crypto foundations uh there is a lot of different ways to actually go at tackling the same problem of decentralization and actually

harnessing the power of of what we have and how we can actually help at the adoption of the chains that we work for so this is the view of how we think about a foundation at near the foundation exists for three three main things number one is actually we're here to help raise awareness of near and that means actually we do do that through education program but also the creation of event and also creating strategic partnership that can actually help show what you can do with the technology the second pillar of what we do is supporting projects that want to build on here or entrepreneurs and for that we have a large grant program but also we can actually help refine and actually

help other people find within our ecosystem the place where they should be going and the last path is governance and decentralization i think it was interesting on the previous panel actually to to hear about what the future role of regulation should be and we should make no mistake that actually regulation has a very important place it's at the end ultimately it's to protect consumers and yet there is still a clash in understanding between actually what protocols and what actually different places within the ecosystem are trying to do and and where regulators come out so we believe it's of most important that we make our share that we actually try to help also explain what we do and that we collaborate on that front um

one of the large thing that we believe is important is also educating right so the whole space needs a tremendous amount of talent and not only actually just developers but just talent in general right we need we need economists we need marketing people we need people who actually understand what good user experience is so there's a humongous amount of talent that is needed within the space and so as a foundation we invest a lot of money into actually creating the next generation and actually trying to help people understand anything super simple from what is web street to actually uh more advanced certification on becoming a rust developer for example on year today we've trained over 50 000 students we distribute grants and we have

different programs and courses for that the second product that we have is funding we have under asset over 800 million in funding that we can help distribute um two different projects and different founders that come through and we've created and launched different ecosystem funds but not only that we can also help refer projects actually to our backer network uh to date near has raised over half a billion in uh in dollar and so we also have that very deep network and again on the panel before it was mentioned that to go through the winter and the and the round that's happening now uh it's actually important to have the capital to deploy that very smartly well we think we have

the capital and now it's it's ours to actually make sure that we develop that to get to the adoption that is needed and the last point i wanted to show on on actually the foundation is the regional hubs and again speaking english is a huge privilege in our world not everybody does that and so we work very actively with local communities to enable having translation and material that is actually available in local languages so that community can crack the local problems that they see and also train the next generation of talent so if we think of what the near future is and actually that's probably a vision that is shared across most within uh within crypto and within blockchain it's a lot of different things and i

want to talk about three things one is actually how it's changing access how it's changing community and how we think about self-organizing and how it's changing actually incentives and so the goal of the second part of the presentation is to show you some of the examples of what we're seeing starting being built today on on near how do we empower individuals by eliminating gatekeepers one first example uh today if you're in on instagram the first thing you do when you sign up is actually you give up your content you give that up to the platform and you actually say that this content is not yours anymore well you mentor is trying to flip that on its head what if you had actually an instagram whereby the account truly believes to you and

the pictures truly believe to you and if you want to sell pictures or accounts you can actually do that so that's one such example capsule social is a fascinating example of how can you actually write and actually earn when you write but also have a better and fairer share of the content that you're writing when you're voted up or voted voted against tamago is a platform that's cracking a problem that a lot of people are trying to crack within the within the blockchain and crypto space which is how can you if you're an artist and a musician get a fairer better share of the music that you're creating so this is going after how can you actually decentralize players for example such as spotify so these are some of the examples trying to show that actually

very actively on the near blockchain today you have cases that are being built to actually decentralize very large players community um the nine to five very hierarchical company is gone and dao's decentralized autonomous organizations are playing a huge role into that in helping communities and people who share a common interest to actually participate and work together on that on here we have over 400 different dows that are very active and one platform in particular which is called astro dao which is extremely simple in a few clicks you can actually start setting up your group and have a multi-sig wallet whereby people can actually participate and start working together but some people thought that was not

enough so niche which has ex bumble actually team founder is aiming at actually making that a step even further and making the adoption of dao looking like social media there's a whole movement actually of recreating social media and thinking about that completely differently and the last example i wanted to share here is when the ukraine war uh actually started and happened we created in less than two hours unchained dao which is actually i became a full ngo in less than two hours raised close to seven million and these funds were able to be distributed extremely fast to the end point of where people needed it so very powerful very powerful example which was led by our founder who is

ukrainian so absolutely admirative incentives thank you for him thank you [Applause] so incentives there is a whole flip happening in our society internally we call that x to earn learn to earn walk to earn right to earn that shift is happening and that's enabling us to actually rethink how we spend our time and how actually we can truly leverage the potential that we have learn near club is such example forget about the days when you have to pay for going to university what if actually if you learn you earn open forest protocol extremely powerful

what if you reforest you can actually earn and all of that can be put very transparently on the blockchain so that the carbon credit that you create and that others can actually earn is very transparent for all to see and the last example i wanted to share with you um we've been partnering with uh sweat and sweat economy and it's basically an app that some of you may know when you walk you get sweat points and that app up to very recently was just what we call web 2 so it was not actually on anything crypto they've chosen near as the underlying platform that has enabled to create in less than a couple of months seven million wallets and so now you have this is the fastest on boarding uh in the crypto world from web to people going into web three and

this is creating a place where if you walk and if you're active actually you get rewarded for doing that so hopefully healthier healthier people and that's that but my my point is here i'm sure you've been very inspired by the content that you heard from different people and thank you so much for being here for the last talk of the day um but the future is near and it's very it's actually closer than what we think and yes we are in a bear market and it might be long and it might be brutal but actually the capital is here there is a lot of talent and actually there is no better time to build than when we are in a bear market thank you very much and i'm happy to take questions if you have questions [Applause] yes

okay so the question i've been told i need to repeat the question thank you for the question you showed us a lot of exam of great examples what about gaming um we are very actively uh looking at gaming we actually have a guild which is called human guild that has over uh 60 different games that are being developed and so it's something that i could have mentioned yes it is it exists thank you any other questions yes thank you for the question so the question is a lot of protocols focus

specifically on d5 and so what's the view of near from that i didn't talk specifically about defy we do have actually a lot of defy products that exist the reality is um if you think of what a protocol or an economy is trying to do is actually reinvent an economy in a society and you can't do that unless you actually have functioning markets and finance markets so i would say nier has been late to the game of defy and now we actually have any and every product that you could think of from uh you know loan lending decks and so on and so forth but very active also on that front so the question is what's the mechanism

when you go to web browser and do you go to metamask or other so here's how things work in the in the crypto blockchain world that for example for near to be in metamask this is like an infrastructure partnership that needs to happen uh so it's we're not yet in metamask would be my answer but we do have our own wallet which is web wallet and actually fully available um and you don't actually the web wallet of near is extremely simple and probably one of the simplest things to use that is out there yes great question so um i talked about dao

what's actually the governance of the near foundation um so right now the governance of the near foundation is i would say much more traditional versus being fully on chain we are working on that and so for example to give you a concrete example our grand program when it goes through right now has something that looks like a dow and needs to be actually developed as a dao i would say we're less advanced than other chains and we have work to do on that front but that's definitely the aspiration thanks for the question but my question is okay thanks so question um assembly

script versus rust where would you recommend to use what and um so i'm not i used to be a computer science engineer but i sucked so i stopped okay but then there are some materials from here well i think here's my humble opinion i think actually there is some time a bit of purity and it depends actually what's best for what application and what we see is that for some more core applications it might be actually better to go to rust and for others it might be

actually better to go to assembly script would be my but i'll come back to you something more solid next time well i think we may end on the technical note now thank you thank you very much [Applause]