Community Update: July 17th, 2020

We are consistently working on improving the NEAR developer experience by taking note of queries, jumping on a call with developers in the community and iterating on our products and tooling. In this community update, we introduce the NEAR Indexer, share updates on the path towards a decentralised MainNet, and showcase content highlights from the community.

If you would like to share your work, provide feedback or give props to someone in the community, please join us on Discord.

3, 2, 1 … NEAR Indexer

Introducing the NEAR Indexer Framework! As dApps onboard to NEAR’s mainnet, our engineering team has been working diligently to ensure they’re able to quickly and efficiently access state from our deployed smart contracts, and cut out the cruft.

Contracts may grow to have complex data structures and querying the network RPC may not be the optimal way to access state data. The NEAR Indexer Framework allows for streams to be captured and indexed in a customized manner. The typical use-case for this data is to make its way to a relational database. Seeing as this is custom per project, there is engineering work involved in using this framework.

NEAR Indexer is already in use for several new projects, namely, we index all the events for NEAR Blockchain Explorer, and we also dig into Access Keys and index all of them for NEAR Wallet passphrase recovery and multi-factor authentication. With NEAR Indexer you can do high-level aggregation as well as low-level introspection of all the events inside the blockchain.

We are going to build more Indexers in the future, and will also consider building Indexer integrations with streaming solutions like Kafka, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, and NoSQL databases. Feel free to join our discussions on Discord.

TestNet Consensus

TestNet consensus is now decentralized; the network is now being run by 12 selected Stake Wars participants and members of the NEAR Validator Advisory Board. You can join Stake Wars today, complete the challenges, and take your chance to join them on the way to MainNet Restricted launch and its token rewards.

Join the path towards a decentralised MainNet

Engineering Updates

• Multiple changes to improve parallelization in the nearcore: https://github.com/nearprotocol/nearcore/commit/a14446fedec28ebf1ccd09870cda9bd1951fc976, https://github.com/nearprotocol/nearcore/pull/2983
• Better infrastructure to run load testing on the mocknet: https://github.com/nearprotocol/nearcore/commit/e4b47c29272b8b2dd89c739933ae10dc6a058a02
• We’ve updated our walk-through for making cross-contract calls with AssemblyScript! https://docs.near.org/docs/tutorials/how-to-write-contracts-that-talk-to-each-other
• One of our contributors is working on a golang client library to interact with NEAR Protocol via RPC API: https://github.com/akme/nearclient

Bounty Highlight

Hey Vue experts! Learn NEAR and earn NEAR – we have a bounty out for adding a Vue template to create-near-app that should take a Vue expert 8 hours or less.

Content Highlights

Decentralised Storage — NEAR & Textile

Aaron, one of our amazing community members, wrote about NEAR Accounts and Access Keys as Identities for Textile Integration in his submission for HackSF. The article also talks about the conversation Aaron had with our core engineers. Go follow Aaron for Part 2!

OWC Podcast

Looking for something to listen to during your next commute? Our recommendation: the latest episode by the Open Web Collective in which Sasha talks with Raphael Gaudreault about “Competing Against Uber”. Raphael Gaudreault is Chief Technology Officer at Eva Coop, a cooperative ride-sharing application based on blockchain.

Spotted in the Community

1. The role of Validators on Flux
2. Stakin published an introduction to NEAR Protocol
3. Translated interview with Alex discussing why Bitcoin’s level of security is not necessary for all blockchain

How You Can Get Involved

We have something for everyone

• Join the NEAR Contributor Program to contribute to our engineering efforts.
• You love hosting events, engaging communities, and creating content? Then head over to our Guild Program.
• If you are in the process of setting up your own start-up in the Web3 space, the Open Web Collective will provide guidance.

If you’re just getting started, learn more in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol or read the official White Paper. Stay up to date with what we’re building by following us on Twitter for updates, join the conversation on Discord, and subscribing to our newsletter to receive updates right to your inbox.