What Do Developers Have To Say About NEAR? Figment / NEAR Update

Last month the NEAR team announced a partnership with Figment Pathway, a hub for developers to get started on the basics of different protocols including NEAR. In a recent event featuring NEAR Head of Education Sherif Abushadi, the Figment team provided an update as to the development of the NEAR Learning Pathway, alongside a number of developers taking part. Here are the most important takeaways from that update: 

Developers Are Signing Onto NEAR At Record Numbers: 

A lot of Devs are joining NEAR, starting to build on NEAR, learning how to interact with the Stack SDK, completing tutorials and learning how to deploy their first smart contract. Those users come from over 60 different countries and have created over 563 accounts on NEAR data hub. 

Notably, these developers are also eligible to earn rewards in NEAR with over 14,000 NEAR already rewarded. 

What Have The Developers Said? 

Over the course of the update, a number of developers from around the world spoke on the nature of the program as well as their perspectives on NEAR. Here are their most important insights: 

The one thing on NEAR that Ethereum Developers will especially like is that 30% of fees go to the owner of the contract.  

On the topic of NEAR and Ethereum, the Devs – many of which have been building on Ethereum or Bitcoin for more than 3 years – were clear that there was really no comparison between NEAR and ETH as separate blockchain Ecosystems:

There is no ecosystem comparison between NEAR and Ethereum – They are both different Ecosystems that can collaboratively evolve in the future: Ethereum has already 4 or 5 more years of developing the tooling, NEAR has had about a year and a half. There is not really an ecosystem comparison. NEAR has taken many lessons from Ethereum and tried to improve upon it. 

It’s easy to build on NEAR With Rust: 

“The good thing about NEAR is that if you want to experiment and play around on Test Net you can do that super easily. You can do it easily on Rust. You don’t have to learn a different language or a special book on programming.” 

And some developers think, you should only be building on Rust: 

If you are serious don’t bother with AssemblyScript, if you are serious use Rust

Many developers see themselves on the cutting edge of a new era in the NEAR Ecosystem: 

We are the pioneers. This is the dawn of a new era. The opportunities are boundless. This will have, in my opinion, the greatest impact in revolutionizing technology bigger than the internet, bigger than oil – people don’t realize what this will do. Life will be tremendously different, and we are just in the early stages. We don’t have – there is no Google, Amazon, ExxonMobile, the Microsoft, the Apple – these giants still need to be created. There is a tremendous opportunity for everyone here.

OysterPack on Figment – NEAR Learn Session