March of the Ambassadors | September 6th, 2019

In the last two weeks we set a new record for pull requests on GitHub with 126 PRs! We’re really picking up steam towards shipping MainNet. Also, we’ve kicked off our ambassador program with the first call. It went really well and now we’ve got ambassadors across 17 countries. These guys are awesome, and they’re kicking off events all over the world. Stay tuned for an event in your area, and if you don’t have an ambassador or a meetup for NEAR near you (hehe), then you should become an ambassador! Finally, we’ve expanded the team across Russia, Ukraine, Germany. If you think it’s time you joined us, check out our open positions. As usual, links below in their respective sections.

COMMUNITY AND EVENTS

We’re going to be heading to China and Korea this month, and we’ll be at DevCon as well. If you’re in one of those areas, make sure to come say hi! Those events are not yet set in stone, but here are a few coming up soon! Events in Korea and Japan will be announced in the next update

• [Shanghai] 9/16; Staking in Shanghai 2 to 6pm at 外滩茂悦大酒店 Hyatt The Bund
• [Shanghai] 9/16; Math Wallet Meetup 5:30pm at The Bund
• [Shanghai] 9/17; Wanxiang Panel: Developer Friendly & User Friendly Blockchain 3:50pm to 4:30pm at the Bund
• [Shanghai] 9/17; IOSG event 5:30pm to 9pm at LAVIN Rose in The Bund
• [Shanghai] Tech workshop TBD! (stay tuned)

Also, our co-founder Illia led our very first AMA for the Chinese community. Chinese speakers: Check out the short video below!

WRITING AND CONTENT

Three new whiteboard series released! And, we’re officially a token type with Satoshi Labs. Check out this last tweet from Berlin below.

• NEAR is now officially registered coin type https://github.com/satoshilabs/slips/pull/718
• Our Beta Program participant Flux got a major engagement during ETH Berlin (good blog explaining Chainlink limitations and how Augur helped them)
• Whiteboard ep 27 with Xiaoshan Zhu from Meter https://youtu.be/7-4UNSyoK9M
• Whiteboard ep 28 with Jaynti Kanani from Matic https://youtu.be/P0hDzOzwzYw 
• Whiteboard ep 29 with Taylor Wei from TOP Network: https://youtu.be/PXLjORNlqlE 

ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS

The recent major release has fully reworked our transaction bindings. You can now atomically batch transactions. For example, you can create an account and call a function in one atomic operation. This is impossible on most other blockchains! For instance, if you create an account on Ethereum, it requires multiple transactions. If one of those fails, you might have a gremlin account or you might be stuck in limbo. Not today, failed transactions. Not today.

Additionally, we’ve moved serialization to our in house serializer, Borsh. Make sure to check out the website. This is the first binary serializer for security critical projects. And it’s fast!

A record 126 PRs across 20 repos by 18 authors. Featured repos: nearcore, nearlib, near-shell, near-wallet, near-bindgen, and borsh.

• We’ve shipped 0.3.0 of core!
• The work on Nightshade (Near Sharding Design) is merged into staging from its own branch. Thus, version 0.4.0 of the testnet will be the first sharded version.
• Reworking the block production to make it simpler and better handle some corner cases.
• A large pull request with the first implementation of the routing is merged in.
• Nodes can now explicitly specify which shards they are tracking.
• Proper propagation of errors in the storage layer.
• Proper checks for the first block after state syncing.
• Added proper verification that the block producers send correct receipts between shards.
• The stability of the branch in which we are working on the implementation of Nightshade (NEAR sharding design) is improving rapidly. With the most recent changes it passes core protocol CI.
• Updated near-bindgen to be safer and use new bindings.
• Our binary serializer now has its own website! http://borsh.io

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED

Join us: there are new jobs we’re hiring across the board!
If you want to work with one of the most talented teams in the world right now to solve incredibly hard problems, check out our careers page for openings. And tell your friends!

Learn more about NEAR in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol. Stay up to date with what we’re building by following us on Twitter for updates, joining the conversation on Discord and subscribing to our newsletter to receive updates right to your inbox.

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