Community Update: MainNet Phase I 🚀 , Hack the Rainbow 🌈 , OWC Demo Day

Hello citizens of NEARverse! This is NiMA coming to you from a NEARby planet in the Milky Chain …

These coming two weeks will be packed with a ton of exciting news and events for all stakeholders in the NEAR community and our wider ecosystem of projects, validators, and token holders.

Starting on September 24th, NEAR will be transitioning into Phase I, aka “MainNet Restricted”, which will prepare NEAR for becoming a fully permissionless community-governed network. Read the section below on Phase I to find out what this means for you!

This week we will also be kicking off Hack the Rainbow hackathon and webinar series. Even if you are not planning to participate in the hackathon, we invite you to join us on Crowdcast to watch and participate in some of the exciting panels and workshops that we have planned for you!

3, 2, 1 … ready for Phase I

Phase I, as previously described in this post, is the final stage on our roadmap before NEAR fully transitions to a permissionless community-governed network. The decision to upgrade the network to Phase II is up to validators and token holders (via delegation). NEAR Foundation (NF) will stop running its PoA nodes and will only facilitate this transition by temporarily delegating 40 million NEAR tokens to a set of validators composed of NVAB and the first 30 validators from the community who will be invited to participate!

You can read more about the details of validation/delegation during Phase I in this post by Stefano, our chief staking sorcerer.

As a token holder you have the option to already delegate your tokens to the validator of your choice. At launch this will only be possible for more technically savvy community members who are familiar with near-cli (command line tool). As we derisk the process, delegation will also be offered via NEAR Wallet graphical user interface (GUI) and 3rd party validator services.

Important to note: there will be no staking rewards during Phase I, but your participation will support further decentralisation of the governance process during this transitory phase. It will also allow you to familiarise yourself with NEAR validators early on before the launch of Phase II.

What’s next?

As soon as 2/3rd of all staked funds (during Phase I) vote to unlock transfers, lock-up smart contracts begin unlocking tokens as scheduled. A separate update of nearcore software will enable inflationary staking rewards. It’s worth mentioning that staking rewards are immediately transferable and have no lock-up. All tokens in circulation, regardless of lock-up schedule, can be staked to earn staking reward! 🚀

Hack the Rainbow: workshops, panels, bounties and more 🎉

Hack the Rainbow 🌈 is officially starting on Sep 15th with a series of talks and workshops hosted on Crowdcast!

If you’re a builder/hacker, you can sign-up on Gitcoin to start working on your project or meet other hackers to form teams. In case you’re not sure what to work on during the hackathon … worry no more! We have put together a list of cool ideas on Notion which you can use as a starting point for your own hackathon project.

You can see the full list of webinars on Crowdcast, but here are some of the highlights:

Grilling the Rainbow with Justin Drake (Ethereum 2.0 research lead) and Illia Polosukhin (NEAR co-founder)
DAOs, DAOs, DAOs with Burrrata (Aragon/RaidGuild), James (Moloch/Abridged), …
DeFi: Food, Farming, and Philanthropy moderated by Simona Pop with star 💫 guest $ALEX
Several demos and workshops with our partner projects: Balancer, ChainLink, Sia/SkyNet, …
Introduction to Rainbow 🌈 Bridge, cross-chain demo, NEAR 101 and 102, …

We would like to give a special shout-out to Aaron from Vital Point AI Guild who has put together this amazing overview of his project using Textile, NEAR, and Moloch! Feel free to reach out to Aaron to start BUIDLing the future of decentralised community platforms ✌️

Engineering Updates

Our engineering team is focused on improving bridge devX, working on upgradeability of the bridge and adding native support for EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) to NEAR. This should make onboarding Ethereum applications much easier, and together with the ETH<>NEAR bridge, will position NEAR as one of the best choices for near-term scaling of DApps in the blockchain space.

Generalized token locker for the Rainbow bridge is implemented;
Implicit account creation to match DevX and UX of Ethereum ecosystem is implemented;
Runtime documentation is improved;
We are working combining Wasmer and Wasmtime runtimes;
Native EVM support is ready and is currently undergoing review and testing;

Edu updates

NEAR 101 “NEAR for Web Developers” shipped. Slides and recordings available (bit.ly/near-101)
NEAR 102 “NEAR for Ethereum Developers” available next week (will be bit.ly/near-102)
“Show and Tell: Rainbow Bridge” makes explaining the bridge more fun

As always looking for YOUR input to our educational priorities. If you have any suggestions, ideas or preferences and would like them to be heard, email me directly at [email protected] or find me on Telegram (amgando) or Discord (Sherif#5201)

Open Web Collective (OWC) Demo Day 🎉

Are you joining the most anticipated blockchain Demo Day?

Attend the Open Web Collective Demo Day, organised by NEAR, and get an exclusive look into the future of blockchain projects and DeFi. Nine pioneering startups will showcase their DApps and pitch their projects to top crypto investors!

Join us on September 23, 2020 at 8am PST. Save your free spot now 👉https://www.crowdcast.io/e/ace93fjx/register

The Open Web Collective is an innovative blockchain accelerator designed by NEAR to help passionate entrepreneurs grow their startups into scalable & successful companies. Our founders have worked with leading partners and investors such as IDEO, Deloitte, Pantera Capital and more and have already closed funding rounds of more than $3.5M. Join the Demo Day and be at the forefront of blockchain developments.

If you’re an entrepreneur or working at a blockchain startup and would like to participate in our program, please reach out. Connect with us on Twitter, Medium, YouTube, and Email.