NEAR Town Hall, June Edition

The NEAR Town Hall is a great place for the growing global NEAR community to see these new projects in action, as well as recap what we’ve accomplished over the course of the month. 

In June 2022, the NEAR Foundation saw an explosion of activity in the ecosystem. Here are some updates from the NEAR Town Hall, which can be seen on NEAR’s YouTube channel or my article below:

Highlights of over the past 12 months

In his opening remarks, NEAR Foundation Co-founder Illia gave an update on the NEAR ecosystem’s highlights:

• Through a year, the NEAR community has onboarded 500,000 qualified members and over 600 qualified projects, while active users grew to a 50,000 a week. The ecosystem also grew to over 600 new projects and 300 DAOs, over $1 billion TVL, and over 13.8 million wallets.

• >6000% growth in the numbers of accounts, >2500% growth in the numbers of transactions.

• Near becomes one of the biggest and the fastest developer ecosystems (over 2500 developers are active monthly)

Illia also highlighted recent protocol update on Near Ecosystem:

• NEAR’s JS SDK runs hosted as a guest VM in the WebAssembly host in the NEAR Protocol blockchain nodes.

• NEAR is the first blockchain supporting full fledged javascript integration. Developers will then be able to build in JavaScript and ship code directly to NEAR.

• NEAR becomes the first non-EVM chain with MetaMask Compatibility.

• Near aims to launch more regional hubs to lead blockchain innovation and talent development across over the world.

• According to Sharding Roadmap, the next phase Chunk-Only is coming in September 2022. 

You can check more battle-test at https://near.org/decentralized

Milestones over the past 6 months

Marieke Flament, NEAR Foundation’s CEO, went into great detail on the milestones from January–June 2022.

January: 

• NEAR completed a fund raise of $150M to help accelerate mass adoption of Web3

• ParasHQ has reached $5M+ volume trade in 30 days

• 2 play-to-earn games went live on Near including CryptoHeroes and Land to Empire. 

February: 

• Pagoda Platform introduced the first-ever Web3 startup platform runs on NEAR Protocol.

• NearTracker is the first Near NFT Analytical website helping users track the Near NFT Market and have access to the best trading tools.

• Near Social launched beta platform.

• Ref finance raised $4.8 million that was led by Jump Crypto and many top VCs.

• Ref finance & Spin join forces to bring more liquidity to order book trading on Near protocol.

March:

• Unchain fund kicked off and raised over $10M across 14 different crypto currencies.

• SailGP and Oranged Dao announced the partnership with NEAR Protocol.

• NearPay launched its first beta version.

• Kyber Swap and Bastion went live on Aurora.

• Near officially hit over 100M total transactions.

April:

• Burrowcash has successfully raised $5M right before their mainnet launch.

• Antisocial Ape Club became the first Near NFT project to surpass 200k Near in volume.

• Flux just hit $3 billion in total value secured.

• OFP partners with the Ivory Coast

• $USN stablecoin went live on NEAR Protocol.

• Results of the MetaBuild Hackathon by NEAR Protocol has been released.

• Sweats coin is in a partnership with NEAR Foundation

• NEARProtocol raised $350M, more than double what it got just three months ago

May: 

• Over 6M new Sweats coin wallets created in less than a month.

• InsurAce is the first decentralized insurance protocol on Near.

• Near launched regional hub in Kenya to lead blockchain innovation and talent development in Africa.

• Curve finance intergrated with Aurora Network.

• Tamago raised a $1 million seed round.

• Aurora launched AuroraPlus, elevating users’ experience to a new level.

June:

• NEAR Protocol is hitting Consensus in Austin from June 9–12th.

• NEAR Foundation launched the Balkans Regional Hub.

• Stader is coming to NEAR with their liquid staking platform.

• Coinhall from the Terra Ecosystem will support the NEAR ecosystem in Q3 2022.

Next, Jack Collier, new CMO at NEAR Foundation, spoke on 3 big consensus announcements:

• Armored Kingdom 

• Sweat hits 10M wallets through sweat app

• Brave is leveraging Aurora to launch its own Brave wallet bridging ETH and NEAR communities.

Event Updates

Yadira Blocker, NEAR Foundation’s Head of Events, announced 2 big events that are coming up in the next quarter: 

• NearCon will take place in Lisbon from 12–14 September.

• ETHCC will take place in Paris, France from 19–21 July.

You can check more interesting events at https://near.events

Panel on Armored Kingdom

The June Town Hall also featured a panel on Armored Kingdom, moderated by Cathy Hackl.  Armored Kingdom is a new multi-platform global entertainment universe comes to Near to reshape web3 trading card games, digital comics animation and film.

Visit official website here: https://near.org/

Watch the Near Town Hall, June Edition event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd38YOVAJuE