The Importance of NEAR Guilds and NEAR Ecosystem
Ultimately, crypto seeks for adoption. Without its ecosystem, NEAR tokens would be just a collection; you could collect NEAR tokens but they are not useful. The money we have nowadays are useful due to their many use cases; you can buy groceries with it, you can go online shopping with it, you can pay for learning courses with it, you can pay your child's school fee with it. People using today's money appreciate their presence (well, they most probably took it for granted), and their usefulness derives from their wide adoption and admittance of their value. That's the goal that NEAR tokens are aiming for.
Having a core team to create the NEAR token is insufficient. At most, that means you successfully proves that (NEAR) cryptocurrency is useful in trading, has its own value, and have a potential future use cases. Potential is potential. Without public adoption, potential will never become adoption. This is where NEAR Guilds and Projects comes in and give meaning to the token. This is where NEAR Guilds could offer a widespread use of the token, and where people could admit that holding (HODLing) the token is worth their value. End users don't care about how NEAR tokens are design, what Nightshade are, or how sharding works. They care about ease-of-use, its value, widespread adoption, low gas-fee (without knowing the technical behind-the-scene), and whether they could get what they want with the token. NEAR Guilds aims for that.
Some Guilds/Projects, their use cases, and adoption
When you are visiting another country, one thing you want to do is swapping your currency to their local currency. How wonderful if you don't need to swap your currency. However, if one country adopted Bitcoin Cash (well, read.cash uses Bitcoin cash, so let's speak BCH instead of BTC), another Ethereum, and your country NEAR, then Rainbow Bridge could help. It's just like a money exchange; you can swap your currency to another currency and use it there. People holding two different currencies could continue trading in their adopted currencies, and Rainbow Bridge will take care of currency conversion.
Then, you might create a startup (an application) that supports NEAR tokens, but people adopting Ethereum or Bitcoin Cash cannot buy from you. Users need to pay extra time and effort to swap their adopted currencies to your currency. It's best if you could build your startup that support their adopted currencies, and support multiple currencies. To solve this issue, we introduce Aurora. Aurora provides applications to reach out to more users adopting different currencies, like Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash. Just like you can use your Europe credit cards to buy stuff from America via PayPal, paying in your local currency via auto-conversions by PayPal for a small fee; here we even skip the conversions and accept payment in local currencies.
To create startup in the first place, traditionally you might get a all-in-one platform like Google Cloud or AWS to build and deploy your solution. With everything in one place, integration makes easy. You don't need to search everywhere and use different products. However, things aren't so easy in the currently young Web3, what says NEAR is younger than most ecosystem like Ethereum? In the near future, you could get access to a similar product called Pagoda that works just like Cloud solution, but in the Web3 metaverse.
So where do you store your NEAR tokens? In your NEAR wallet? But NEAR wallet creation requires paying for storage cost and reserved transaction cost at the time of creation. People like free of charge. Metamask don't need you to deposit an amount, WAX doesn't need either; and NEAR requires one? Sender Wallet is a browser extension wallet like Metamask, and it doesn't need you to pay upon creation. Free!
Storing data on-chain is expensive. In fact, checking my testnet account, it costs 2.08545 NEAR (about USD 24.09) to store 209 kB of data on-chain. That's not feasible. You could use cloud storage nowadays for storing instead, but you never know if their servers would be down, their companies bankrupt, or other reasons that lets you lose your data because they don't have funds to continue supporting their server even for you to retrieve your data. Furthermore, it requires trusting your data to them. Therefore, you should store data off-chain if it's not that private (which you should store it with yourself, not even online!) Machina provides off-chain decentralizes storage, planning to be available by Q4 2022. Machina uses Proof-of-Stake and Nightshade mechanism, which is what NEAR Protocol is using; unlike Filecoin and Arweave using Proof-of-Work.
Nothing beats joining a community in your local area when targeting local adoption. Many NEAR Guilds are related to countries, like NEAR UK, NEAR Vietnam, NEAR Phillippines, and many other countries. When locals started trading in NEAR tokens, other locals will be curious and try to get hold of the token itself, tried it, and if they feel it worth its value, they would adopt to it.
Conclusion
And these are just some projects of many. Other projects like Debio Network focusing on medical and bioinformatics services, Play-to-Earn (P2E) games like Galaxy Online and CryptoHeroes, and Mintbase for creating NFTs. They target different audiences; Debio targeting medical stuffs and patients, P2E games targeting gamers, Mintbase targeting content creators that convert their contents to NFTs and sale online. End users adopting NEAR Guilds means adopting NEAR tokens. NEAR Guilds provide value and meaning to end-users to hold and trade NEAR tokens, which is what they really care about. Hopefully one day, people would appreciate NEAR tokens, just like they appreciate fiat currencies today.
(For more info, check out NEAR Guilds)
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