NEAR June Town Hall
NEAR strives to create a world where people control their assets, data, and power of governance. We can achieve this by building the next generation platform for decentralized applications (dApps): something simple, scalable, sustainable, and secure. We want to onboard users that aren't in the ecosystem yet into the ecosystem: like using Aurora+, Sweatcoin, etc.
NEAR Goal is onboard 1B users; and 18 months since mainnet launches, it's 1% complete. Though, from one's perspective, one doubt whether multiple accounts held by a single user is counted many times or once.
After mainnet launched on April 2021, there had been lots of projects building on the NEAR Protocol. Quite a lot of these are open source, integrated into the NEAR ecosystem, like Ref Finance smart contract, Mintbase smart contract, DAOs smart contract, etc. Others have closed source programs (both frontend and smart contract) like CryptoHeroes game by PixelDApps.
The NEAR Protocol strives for continuous progression and continuous innovation; never to stop when reaching a goal that it looks at the beginning. 19 Protocol updates had been made, and the team focused on stability and performance. They made major performance improvement to WASM, allowing the new Javascript VM (writing smart contract in javascript) possible.
We are currently in Phase 0 of sharding, with 100 validators. In the next phase, coming up on September 2021, chunk-only block producers will validate a single shard; while the total number of validators will increase to 300 in the meantime. Each validation won't just depend on chunk-only producers, but block producers too!
To prepare for Phase 1 sharding, the stake wars will begin. We had stake wars before phase 0, transferring validators from testnet to mainnet during mainnet launch. Now, the second stake war come to decide who will become validators next.
As NEAR becomes more accepted, popular wallets like Metamask start adding NEAR to their supported chains.
NEAR don't only decentralizes the platform, but also decentralizes the funding. Find the best developers and fund them.
Regional hubs are built around the world. It's not centralizes around a certain country, but distributes across the world. Local presence, local events, local community, and local funding, to bring NEAR infrastructure into local use cases.
There are three big announcement at the consensus mentioned: Armored Kingdom will be bringing new comics and games to the digital ecosystem. Sweat Economy had brought 7 million wallets (of 13+ million wallets as of video) to the ecosystem. Finally, Brave Browser and Aurora partners to bridge Aurora tokens in the Brave wallets, for privacy preserving in-browser wallets.
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