The OWS Team would like to cordially invite you to the second edition of the OWS Party on Thursday, July 29th at 5pm CET (11am EST).
As a part of our Guild agenda, we are throwing these large scale parties on a monthly basis where special NEAR core team guests and everyone from the community are invited to pitch projects they are working on.
This Party is a unique opportunity for everyone in the NEARverse to interact real-time in a more open space. We are featuring this event as a “Rainbow Party” because we want to bring up the “why’s” and “how’s” of the NEAR Rainbow Bridge adoption. Next to sharing the most cutting-edge highlights, we would like to go back to basics and delve into what it means exactly for a regular user to profit from the high-speed, low-cost advantages of the Rainbow Bridge. From there, we’ll ‘bridge’ from project pitch to project pitch from Sandboxers and NEAR Community members alike, learning about as many projects ‘under the rainbow’ as possible!
Format and Agenda
The Party is 60 minutes long and occurs live on video using the Airmeet platform. There will be break-out rooms available for those craving an Afterparty.
Do you feel that your project needs more attention from the NEAR core team, investors, guilds or other stakeholders? Use this event to voice what you are working on and find the right people to collaborate with you. The Sandbox is the NEAR Community playground for a reason so do not be afraid to play, learn, and earn with us!
Sign up on the pitch form ASAP because it’s first-come, first-serve and those on this list will be at the head of the line. Sign up here.
As a hub for Ecosystem wide projects, rolling opportunities, and networks of NEARians/NEAR Enthusiasts, Sandbox is more than ready to have a blast at the second community party!
With everything happening in the NEAR Ecosystem it’s easy to lose track of how much raw development continues – at record pace. NEAR’s newest product development guilds – INC4 and Minerall Guild each offer development services to the Ecosystem at large: INC4 offersfree prototyping and basic product development, while Minerall Guild offers custom product development negotiated on a project per project basis. In the month of July both Guilds have been extremely busy building out a number of Dapps for the NEAR Ecosystem to use:
A Native NEAR Payment App for Arroz Estudios:
Lisbon is quickly becoming a NEAR Hub. Arroz Estudios – a talented creators guild situated in Lisbon – is making sure that $NEAR can be used to pay for beverages and food at the Arroz Cafe. INC4 Guild is pleased to announce that the development of this solution has proceeded beyond the mock-up stage and is now moving to design a client and admin app for managing such purchases in $NEAR. In the coming weeks, expect your first $NEAR purchased Pizza!
Codame Prepares Collectable Punks on NEAR:
More recently, Codame has contacted INC4 Guild to request a NEAR-based App template that will enable many projects to launch their own ‘Punk Du Jour’ 10k style collectable project on NEAR. While this project remains in its infancy, it holds the promise of greatly expediting the NEAR Creator Economy specifically as it relates to collectables.
Minerall Guild: Building $NEAR Payment Gateways and Onramps
Minerall Guild is currently occupied with building a specific NEAR Wallet dApp focused on integrating the NEAR Wallet with a Fiat onramp and crypto-exchange. While the client is working on design of this solution, the Minerall Guild will be handling the layout and integration of the application. More updates on this specific project will be available in the coming weeks, although certain details may be omitted due to the private nature of this agreement.
These Guilds Exist To Fund Product Development in the NEAR Ecosystem!
Thanks to a new collaboration with the Flying Rhino’s Guild, INC4 will be featured much more frequently across Crypto Twitter, as the premier Guild of the NEAR Ecosystem offering up to 80 hours of free development support each week! If interested in creating a project with either INC4 Guild or Minerall guild, do not hesitate to fill out their respective forms (INC4) and (Minerall)
Sankore 2.0 (S2) is an Africa-focused community integrating the NEAR blockchain to projects and solutions conceived and built by local developers in Kenya. The organisation, which is named after Africa’s oldest educational institution, helps developers to make use of NEAR and adopt Web3 technologies.
S2, which has its continental headquarters in a co-working space in the city of Nairobi, integrates NEAR with technologies and solutions poised to develop in the coming decade, and not just Web3 solutions. These include enterprise and institutional blockchain development, IoT, smart agriculture solutions, digital infrastructure, food and water security, and the creator economy (just to name a few).
One of S2’s goals is to expand outwards to other parts of Africa. S2 exists to bring full-spectrum evangelisation and development of Web3 products running on NEAR to the continent of Africa. The spectrum includes:
– Education
– Web3 Content
– Startup Promotion
– Making Policy and Regulation Recommendations for Government
– Supplying Technical Expertise to Enterprises
– Developer Recruitment
– Prototyping
– Regional Community Development
– Cross-Community/Guild Collaboration
– Events
– University Outreach
In short, S2 operates as the primary development arm of the NEAR ecosystem in Africa on multiple levels.
Short Term Roadmap
Step 1: Setting up S2 as a home for NEAR ecosystem projects in Nairobi for Kenya and for the continent of Africa: September 2021.
Step 2: Connecting with BitHub.Africa to design an engineering ecosystem with both the NEAR Protocol and Whive Protocol: October 2021
Step 3: Launching collaborations with policymakers, tech researchers and crypto experts in Africa to produce and incentivise Web3 content specific to the continent through investment, regulation & policy, while highlighting use cases and opportunities in Kenya: November 2021
In the midst of this process, S2 will continue to actively recruit, market, create, and share information about the emergence of the crypto economy in Kenya, and the larger continent of Africa.
Guild Leader:
Kevin Imani (Mazi), a member of the 4NTS Guild, will lead S2. Kevin started an affiliate marketing agency, where he taught copywriting courses to African entrepreneurs that began online businesses as affiliates. Kevin now holds a Master at the University of Oxford in African Studies. He has also done an internship at the European Commission with African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACP). 4NTS team members will support Kevin in his initial development of S2 on the ground in Nairobi.
Guild Location:
Nicknamed “Silicon Savannah,” experts consider Kenya a technological giant in East Africa. Kenya was also listed in the top five of the 2020 Global Crypto Adoption Index and is regarded by tech researchers as one of the leaders in ICT development. Kenya is a frontrunner in cryptocurrency adoption, and one of the friendliest and most progressive regulators of the industry.
Vision/Mission
Africa is an innovative frontier for Web3 products, as well as many other 4th Industrial Revolution technologies. While some in the crypto space have realised the massive potential Africa holds as both a user and developer base for Web3 solutions, the continent as a whole remains mostly unserved by crypto technologies.
S2 has three initial activities to rectify this situation:
1. Producing Web3 content in Africa that covers use cases, regulation & policy, and opportunities & potential
2. Making policy suggestions to policymakers that advance the needs of everyday people and businesses while coordinating with academics and community leaders
3. Collaborating with local developers and crypto hubs such as the Melanin Academy to incentivise students and professionals to build solutions that utilise NEAR.
Who is S2 for?
S2 is for people who want to be part of the next frontier for crypto: Web3 and Open Web solutions in and for Africa.
We welcome eager learners and budding entrepreneurs and provide training even to those who lack technical skills or professional experience in the sector. We seek to empower those that are eager to contribute to our core activities:
1. Web3 content production in Africa (including the research and the publication of articles and videos, editing, and designing)
2.Coordinating discussions with technologists, academics, business leaders, and politicians to create effective regulatory frameworks that champion pro-digital/crypto policies, IT infrastructure, and crypto education.
3. Developing Web3 solutions on NEAR
We stand by our saying that “we don’t disappoint, we execute.” This is the philosophy that guides our productivity as an organisation and the quality of our products. Our members are judged by their level of commitment and productivity, which comes in many forms.
Why Should You Participate in S2?
You belong to S2 for the following reasons:
– You believe in banking the unbanked through crypto.
– You believe in Open-Web/Decentralised solutions for developing countries.
– You believe in policy frameworks that incentivise digital-friendly businesses in Africa.
If you agree with these statements, then you’ll love S2 and should join this community. We can give many other reasons for why you’d be passionate about S2, so keep reading this blog to find out about our plans in more detail. Africa is (still) a minor market for cryptocurrencies and other blockchain applications but is poised for an explosion of such solutions. The continent’s rapid adoption of similarly-digital mobile money and its relative youthfulness (in most countries 15-35 year olds comprise 45-70% of the population) make it the new frontier for crypto. The take-off, however, has barely begun. We are EARLY. Early in a world where services are disrupting the status quo in most sectors, including finance, retail payment systems, healthcare, education, energy, water, and government services to name a few. You can be part of the disruption that comes from a more efficient and accessible financial system, not to mention the other applications of blockchain.
Click here to Join the S2 community. We would love to get in touch with you to see how you can be part of the new Africa-focused NEAR guild, S2.
A Word From S2’s Leader
I (Kevin Imani) lead S2, and I would love to welcome you to our community. It’s a place where we can be part of something much bigger than ourselves. I started this by being teachable, making mistakes, getting back up, doing, trying, and losing my ego along the way. Today I’m excited to announce to you S2 and would love to learn from you, to support you, and to build awesome things together.
If you have been in the crypto sphere for some time, you are familiar with how important a community is for the success of a crypto project. You could go even so far as to say that the value of a token is the community. You see this with Dogecoin or Cardano – for better or worse – where a fanatic community will drive the value of a token. Or with Hicetnunc, which became one of the top NFT platforms today thanks to the strong community of artists and collectors participating, despite being on a relatively small chain.
The two main features of Web3 – openness and decentralization – make it so that no central entity dictates its course. A blockchain network is not a company but a network of developers, users, artists, and businesses… Furthermore, by holding the token of the ecosystem to which we belong, we not only “use” or “like” the system, but own it. No crypto project thus far has yet to succeed without a strong community rallying behind it.
The Corpsmen are a group of people who understand this aspect of crypto very well. And because we do, we have come together to serve the community of the project we believe in.
And which project is that, you ask?
The Open Forest Protocol (OFP).
Introducing the Open Forest Protocol (OFP)
Open Forest Protocol (OFP) brings together the two topics defining the future of our world: climate change and blockchain. Think of OFP as the next-generation oracle network for reforestation, afforestation, and forest conservation data. The core idea of OFP is to secure the transparency of forest project data first by uploading it on the blockchain; second, through a collective group of stakeholders verifying the data; and third, giving the opportunity to forest projects to access carbon financing. By bringing off-chain forest data on-chain, OFP has the potential to facilitate truly data-backed carbon financing. By building on top of NEAR, OFP is able to utilize NEAR’s fast finality, cheap costs, infinite scalability, and Web 2-like user experience, for this purpose.
OFP provides the infrastructure and incentive mechanism to make today’s underdeveloped carbon financing more transparent, credible, standardized, and overall, efficient. The success of OFP will enable forest projects to scale by accessing carbon financing, and therefore lead to more carbon sequestered. The world is in dire need of a community and platform like OFP to bring us closer to the net zero CO2 target for 2050.
Who are the Corpsemen?
At this cross section of blockchain and climate change, the Corpsemen will be the crypto-public facing side of the OFP. We will be the ones communicating the project to the crypto audience and galvanizing the community surrounding its token – $OPN – which is scheduled to publicly launch early next year. In short, it is the Corpsemen’s job to make sure that the rest of the crypto world understands that the future of crypto is green and has a key place in the new carbon economy.
In the early days of OFP, before the token launch, the Corpsemen will be the early community of OFP. Our doors will be open to those early adopters looking to learn, research, and discuss all things OFP. As the early community, we will be preparing for the OFP community to come, laying out the blueprint for the ecosystem.
By the time of the token launch, the Corpsemen will be one of the pillars of the newly emerging OFP community. You may understand the “OFP Corpsemen” in the way you understand “Navy Corpsmen”: an elite task force in service to the community.
What will the Corpsemen Guild do?
The short answer is that the Corpsemen will do whatever boosts the community of OFP and in turn boosts OFP. Think of us as the OFP community accelerator.
With the official launch of OFP at the end of July, our immediate task is to educate and communicate the crypto world on what it is and why it matters – and this refers to the entire crypto world! We will be researching and writing, creating content, discussing, reaching out and networking… and so on. Another main task will be to build the infrastructure for the future OFP community; for instance, forming the Corpsemen DAO, forums, community initiatives, and so on.
Once OFP is in full effect, the Corpsemen will be spearheading various community building initiatives (AMAs, community calls, workshops), launching other dedicated community organizations, and serving as the communication channel between the OFP Foundation and the general community.
Call for action
To you, the bold venturers and adventurers and whoever has embarked with cunning sails upon dreadful seas,
OFP is spearheading climate change solutions on NEAR Protocol, and making the case for a green future on-chain. Hence, our call for action targets crypto natives seeking to join the climate opposition. We are looking for thinkers, creatives, adventurers, and in general, the bold and the curious.
As the first community of its kind, the Corpsemen look forward to actively recruiting crypto natives from existing communities in a multi-chain alliance, centered around sequestering carbon and building out a new carbon economy.
This is not simply a matter of participating in something new and exciting. This is your chance to be early, to become founders and future leaders of a community that will be a wave of change in the world.
The purpose of NEARNft Club is to create an ecosystem for our NEAR NFT community and enthusiasts to showcase their talents, and build a bridge between the larger world and the NEAR NFT community through digital platforms.
NFTs as an Emerging Economy
Digital transformation has been the most feasible answer to economic weakness in scenarios of a pandemic and natural disasters, and has regularised cash flow to sustain the lifestyle of many people. Unlike physical assets, digital assets are typically not lost during natural calamities.
In 2020, NFTs began trending as a digital asset with a total market valuation of $250 million. Across the crypto space, NFT’s have created new revenue streams and opportunities for digital content creators of all backgrounds. In March 16, 2021, the NFT space also witnessed the NFT sale of a digital art collectable by Beeple for over $69M along with Jack Dorsey’s (CEO of Twitter) first-ever tweet for just under $3M on March 22, 2021. According to the reports by NonFungible.com, in the first quarter of 2021, NFT sales have already exceeded $2 billion, with twice as many buyers as sellers.
The global adoption of NFTs from 2018 to 2020 has shown promising growth in terms of Market Capitalization,Smart Contracts and Active Wallets.
NFT Market Capitalization (2018 to 2020) src:nonfungible.com
NEARNft Club
This guild is started with the vision to create a single centralized platform to promote the activities of NFT Marketplaces, Artists, Collectors and Enthusiasts. The activities on NEARNft Club will be categorised for the following segments:
Segment 1: NFT Enthusiasts
Here the posts about NFTs and different segments of NFTs will be published to create awareness on NFT segments like Art, Utility, Metaverse, Collectible, Game, and Sports happening on the different marketplaces on NEAR. This segment will target to create awareness posts for the non technical blockchain enthusiasts to understand and create NFTs.
Segment 2: NFT Marketplaces
At this moment, NEAR Protocol has more than 14 marketplaces that are active and in development. Here is the list of those amazing marketplaces: Mintbase, Paras, NFT.HIPHOP, Snark.Art, UpshotHQ, Metamon, Pixelpets, Transform, Upshot One, WebAssembly Music, Pixelparty, Corgis, Pluminite, and ARterra. This segment will cover the posts about the regular notifications and announcements from NEAR marketplaces.
Segment 3: Artists and Collectors
This segment will promote Artists with their NFT work as well as showcase their journey as an NFT Artist. In short, we intend to help tell stories about Artists on NEAR as they rise and grow in this new digital economy. The Artists will also be allowed to promote their digital art by NEARNft Club. The purpose of this segment is to introduce the Collectors (Buyers) to our Artists, with a motivation that the Artists get paid well for their genuine work.
Connect with NEARNft Club
The NEARNft club welcomes all the experts and enthusiasts to explore the trending activities going on in the NEAR Nft community. Get connected with our official social media channels for all the exciting updates.
Sit back, relax, and envision what inspired Flying Rhino Guild in the first place- a lowly Rhino staring up at a unicorn poster and dreaming of being just as fabulous one day. The talent, skills, and potential are all sitting there- the rhino simply needs a little boost! Well, we have news for you. If you’re building a project on NEAR, you ARE a flying rhino (in the best sense possible).
The Flying Rhino Guild is here to help your NEAR project grow into a unicorn through the magic that is social media! We can give you you’re wings to fly into the NEAR ecosystem. The Flying Rhino Guild provides free social media management and advising to send forth the best version of your part of the NEAR ecosystem and grow your following.
We believe that connection and community are vital for growing NEAR Protocol into the Web3, decentralized future we are all heading towards. Social media, from Twitter to Tik Tok to Reddit, has the unique position to allow visibility and promotion for various projects and developers on the protocol from anywhere in the world- it simply must be utilized. By providing a service to the ecosystem in the form of social media, we are hoping to contribute to the collective by growing the NEAR community of guilds and contributors, building out following and virtual interaction, and making NEAR specifically, and crypto in general, more accessible to everyone around the globe.
The Flying Rhino’s will offer individual, one-time Tweets, Tik Toks, and graphics to anyone in the ecosystem looking to promote a certain event, launch, announcement, or partnership, as well as long term, ongoing social media management for those needing an extra boost. Whether you already have accounts on social media or you’re starting from scratch, we are excited to work with any and every level of the ecosystem.
Ready to get started? Here’s how it works:Reach out to us via the form on our website. We’ll discuss strategy, best practices, accounts, and medium. This relates to tone, frequency, types of tweets you can make, and much more.
1. Long Term Partners: We’ll send you a form every week where you’ll provide us with links, updates, and achievements. We’ll use the content you provide here to create relevant social media posts.
2. Short, One-Time Partners: Based on your preferred time frame and desired services/services, we will send you your tweets, Tik Tok, or graphic in a timely and accurate manner
3. You can decide when and how you’d like to share your personally curated content on social media and ask us for any tips or advice along the way! Consider us your personal marketing helpers. Over the course of the coming months, the Flying Rhinos will also focus on sharing best practices and tactics for growing a social media presence in crypto, specifically on twitter and tik tok. Expect personalized guides and support
So, why participate and work with us? By allowing us to manage and aid in your social media presence, that’s simply extra time for you and your ecosystem project or initiative to continue to build and grow in all the ways that matter. Once your product is ready for launch or to be shared, we can help get the word out and connect parts of the NEAR online community in a way never seen before! Kickstart your part of the ecosystem, especially as an emerging developer and innovator.
Who are We?
Finally, let us introduce ourselves so you feel comfortable putting the trust of your online presence in our very trustworthy hands! You can call us Crypto Cate and Blockchain Ben- the founders of the Flying Rhino Guild. Ben’s background: “I began investing in cryptocurrency and struggled a lot. I didn’t know what to invest in or where to start. I created a crypto TikTok account to help solidify my understanding and hopefully help other eager investors too. As I grew my account and engaged myself in the crypto community, As I grew my account and engaged myself in the crypto community, I met Cate! She’s a Twitter pro.”
Cate’s background: “I got started promoting various projects in the NEAR ecosystem and doing official social media account management within the crypto space. I have an ongoing design education and a passion for connecting parts of the ecosystem to seamlessly operate.”
Seeing so much potential within the online community of NEAR but knowing that projects deserved more visibility and promotion, we combined our passions to bring the power of social media and global connection to the ecosystem!
Interested in joining the guild to offer your social media services, advice, expertise, or to simply learn the trade and be a part of a growing social media network on NEAR Protocol? Just get in touch! Reach out to us on Twitter, Telegram at @Foliage10 or @powdahboii, or fill out the form on our website. What are you waiting for? Become a Flying Rhino today!
The NEAR Legal Guild is being formed to provide legal expertise and support to NEAR projects, DAOs, and entrepreneurs, at a time when different regulations on crypto and blockchain can be problematic for industry enthusiasts. From research and direction, to working with specific projects, to outlining boundaries for DAOs and the issuance of tokens, the NEAR Legal Guild is setting up shop to provide a first-of-its kind ecosystem vehicle about the legal challenges emerging in this new and innovative space.
A Tangled Reality
The current blockchain world can in many ways be too complex. From a legal perspective, essential keywords such as Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), tokenization, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO’s) are becoming more familiar and understandable as blockchain and crypto continue to develop. Nevertheless, there remains a considerable amount of uncertainty and ‘grey-area’ in most jurisdictions across the globe.
If you are already interacting with cryptocurrencies and blockchain based solutions it’s highly probable that you have encountered several legal, regulatory or compliance issues while shaping, launching and growing your project.
The lack of existence of a directly applicable, worldwide regulation has significant impact in the usability of decentralized technologies:
– Regulation and compliance requirements related to financial crime and taxation are specially relevant with Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) practices,
– Meanwhile Data Protection Regulations all around the world (GDPR or CCPA) also introduce heavy legal compliance requirements with the processing and storage of such sensitive information.
– Last but not least, consumer protection requirements among other considerations, must also be taken into consideration among other legal issues.
Some jurisdictions are consolidating regulation towards blockchain and DLT shaped solutions:
– In the EU orbit, The European Union announced in 2019 a proposal for the regulation on Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCa) as a response to the emergence of crypto -assets, the need to address concernings over fraud, cyber-attacks and market manipulation;
– In the United States, U.S financial regulation assumes the presence of intermediaries and applies by extension to regulation for financial markets and derived activities.
– All the while in countries such as Switzerland, there is a broader acceptance both legally and technologically of crypto-assets, most notably manifested through a positive attitude by both the Swiss federal government and the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory (FINMA).
– And of course, more recently, El Salvador made history with the publication of the first bitcoin Law, categorizing Bitcoin as Legal tender.
What all of these case-studies illustrate is that the crypto-verse is developing differently across different legal jurisdictions and there is a clear need for direction and insight depending on the type of project and purpose in mind. Looking ahead, it is clear that the regulation of blockchain and crypto assets will remain extremely complicated since governments and regulators have been unable to encode a technology that is not limited to a concrete territory. To date, there is no existence of an internationally coordinated normative framework for blockchain and cryptocurrencies; what can be found are concrete initiatives and directives enacted by different international bodies who are currently working towards an international standardization.
Why a Legal Guild?
The NEAR Legal Guild is being formed with a clear intention: to grow the NEAR ecosystem directing it’s members towards a better understanding of their legal necessities. Knowledge is power, so we aim to provide directives that can create beneficial use-cases for the whole community and that could set up good legal practices for upcoming projects.
Following further consolidation of these good legal practices we aim to shape a useful legal framework made by and for our community. This means that the ecosystem itself will feed the main areas of focus.
In order to achieve this goal, we defined a chain of actions that will make possible the adoption of a symbiosis between the Legal Guild and the whole community based in proactivity and an active relationship with the larger NEAR community – its entrepreneurs, the many different guilds, and the many developers building dApps on the protocol:
The idea is simple: if we are able to hear directly from the other guilds and projects about their concerns, we will be more capable of guiding you in the right direction.
How will the Legal Guild operate?
A clear set of initial actions and objectives has been designed to achieve the goals of the NEAR Legal Guild:
1. In the first instance, we intend to conduct a survey directed at the entire ecosystem so as to better understand the current legal concerns and needs of Ecosystem wide projects. At the same time, we also hope to identify the main areas of interest such as tokenization, DAO’s and Governance.
2. Shaping phase: In the next instance, we plan on recognizing the top projects inside of the community and developing tailored legal directives for these specific projects, in a manner that can eventually be generalized for larger NEAR Legal concerns. While doing this, the Legal Guild will be laying a foundation of the first steps to create the core elements of a NEAR legal framework.
3. Ecosystem Engagement: In parallel to phase 2, the NEAR Legal guild will remain proactively connected. We are listening but also asking the right questions. In this phase the communication channels will be defined and operative. The more we know about you, the more we will be able to help.
It is also mandatory for us to reach out in this phase to other existing communities to create mutually beneficial relations: law schools and universities, parallel ecosystems, sibling projects, etc. Integrating with NEAR City Node Planning will help expand the research, development, and problem solving capacity of the NEAR Legal Guild.
4. Sharing and marketing our legal content: Originally defined by our existing projects, needs and experiences, content that is created to solve existing legal challenges will be distributed far and wide. In the first stage such content is intended to be more community driven and oriented, while in the next ones, the legal assistance will focus on a more general framework.
In parallel to this process the NEAR Legal Guild will be recruiting trained and up-and-coming lawyers from many geographical areas and walks of life, in order to bolster legal engagement with the ecosystem. It’s only the beginning of a new form of legal guidance, and the NEAR Legal Guild sits at the very forefront of this new mission!
You Can Already Start by Reaching out to the Legal Guild
We also have a Telegram group set up where we are currently setting up all of what is needed to start operating. If you are interested in participating as a member or to raise a concern we are looking forward to hearing from you!
The NEAR Intelligence Agency (NIA) aims to bring about a complete revolution in how marketing tactics are deployed in the cryptocurrency space by and for the community. We are a diverse and unconventional group of NEAR ambassadors (or NEARkats if you will), who are not bound by the hard and fast rules of marketing, community outreach, social engagement and research.
We don’t play by the rules – we make our own rules and set our own standards. NEAR Intelligence Agency, as the name suggests will basically operate within the realm of covert networking and stealth hacking for the growth and promotion of NEAR Protocol.
In June, the NEAR Ecosystem welcomed SEVEN new guilds into the community – joining close to a dozen existing guilds spread across the globe. The Guilded Age has officially begun on NEAR Protocol, at a time when Decentralized Governance, Ecosystem Development, and Community Building are poised to take center stage of crypto-protocol developments.
Here is a quick look at what the different Guilds in the NEAR Ecosystem have been up to in the month of June:
INC4 Guild and Minerall Guild: Free and Custom Development Support For The Creator Economy
The two newest development Guilds on NEAR Protocol offer free prototype, and custom product development for creators and entrepreneurs getting off the ground in the NEAR Ecosystem. In the month of June, these two guilds kicked off: INC4 has begun prototyping a mobile application for Arroz Studios to allow the purchases of food and beverages in $NEAR.
“We have defined the flow for them and started on the mock-up for the app. The whole project will consist of 2 apps – for clients and for operators. So clients could pay and operators could check the payment right on the spot and serve food and drinks.”
With two more requests already being processed, INC4 Guild is still open for more requests! Minerall Guild has started work on two private projects, contracted under NDA. These projects are respectively situated in the areas of Wallet Development, and Marketplace development for different stakeholders of the NEAR Ecosystem.
Merchants of NEAR: Weekly Insights Into NEAR Price Action
The Merchants of NEAR started to provide financials to the NEAR Ecosystem in terms of price action, macro analysis, and long-term price development (for and within the Ecosystem). Their telegram group remains active with weekly contests surrounding NEAR price action. In addition, multiple Merchant Analysts, provide routine updates on short term price action and technical analysis. Future developments including fundamental analysis surrounding NEAR, the next crypto bull market, Skyward Finance, Ref Finance and Octopus Network.
The Silicon Craftsmen: Product Demos and Community Hub
The Silicon Craftsmen launched their Community Hub: the home for all things Product, Design and UX/UI in the Near ecosystem. The Hub is deliberately asynchronous to encourage more thoughtful, insightful conversations in dedicated channels which are easy to organise in searchable threads. The Hub is experiencing steady growth as more community members, projects building on Near, and Near Core team members continue to join. One of the first Demos of the Silicon Craftsmen has been for the Skyward Finance Token Sale! With Ref, Octopus, and Flux on the Horizon, the Silicon Craftsmen are preparing a suite of demos for the month of July.
The Sandbox has Relaunched!
Amidst a very ‘crypto’ Sandbox relaunch party involving technical challenges, trolls, and stand up pitches, the Sandbox relaunch party was a roaring success with more than 50 participants. As part of the relaunch, weekly AMA’s were launched within the Sandbox in order to expedite growth in the NEAR Ecosystem.
In addition to the successful relaunch of the OWS, the Sandbox DAO is now fully operational, accompanied by a tutorial on how to use it! Beyond the DAO launch, the new Bi-weekly series ‘Humans of the Open Web Sandbox’ launched, with Samtoshi and Orvard taking the stage. Last but not least the Sandbox Guild has developed a proper database for contributors, with a new form for filling in their information now available on the contributor channel and Airtable.
NEAR Hispano Continues to Grow
The NEAR Hispano Guild’s Website is now launched! As one of the most active geographical guilds in the NEAR Ecosystem, NEAR Hispano has had a busy month of June. Beyond launching a new Logo, NEAR Hispano is actively collaborating with the NEAR Education Team to update and create videos for their project NEAR in Minutes. With the help of NEAR’s Head of Education, Sherif Abushadi, NEAR Hispano organized a NEAR Certified Developer Bootcamp for 23 members of the Guild. In collaboration with NEAR’s Ross Gates, NEAR Hispano also participated in a Growth experiment to airdrop NFTs to Twitter users.
NEAR’s Meme Guild – Swine Guild – has been making waves since its initial launch. The NEAR community welcomed their boarish energy with overwhelming enthusiasm, partially shown through their memes about Swine Guild itself:
As promised, Swine’s focus has been on crafting purposeful memes that play roles in enhancing NEAR’s culture online, informing the ecosystem about current updates and projects, and increasing general NEAR visibility, as their memes have become increasingly viewed and now reach about an average 2,000 views per tweet. Swine Guild is not the first group to work in the industry of NEAR meme creation, but it’s launch seems to have jump-started activity within the community.
Their first monthly meme contest popped off, for lack of a better term, with 57 participants who submitted and voted on memes in the #swineguild channel of the Open Web Sandbox’s discord server, and 100 NEAR was given out in total for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners. The Guild also began disseminate a pack of memes every Monday with the tag #MemeDropMonday to keep the content flowing. After laying down some layers of the foundation, Swine is gearing up to reach out to facets of the NEAR Ecosystem directly to offer meme services and advertise that they are open for requests!
NEAR Arabia Guild
During June, our biggest focus was on educating people about Blockchain and NEAR, In context of that we launched two educational initiatives: The first, is known as the “Learn and Earn” competition, from which more than 350 people competed in the “Learn and Earn” competition through the NEAR Arabia Group on Telegram. In this competition, participants learned about NEAR and its most important features. Secondly, two educational webinars were held by the NEAR Arabia Guild – the first one was focused on Aurora, and while the other was a more general webinar focused on Blockchain basics and NEAR platform, with over 50 participants.
Open Shards Alliance (OSA) – Guild
The validators in the OSA continue to forge blocks on GuildNet (A sharded community governed TestNet), with the number of validators joining the network growing monthly.
Why another network?
– Community Governed and Managed TestNet
– Validator Bootcamp and Training
– MainNet Validator Funnel / Sourcing
– Dev ENV for dApps
– Sharding Enabled 8 Shards
Key Moments:
– Network Upgrade to 1.19.0
– Guild Vote Passed – Reimburse validators on a quarterly basis with at least 90% uptime.
– Added 9 new validators for total of 25
– GuildNet PR accepted into NEAR-CLI core (KaBoom!)
– NPM update pending.
Short-Term Goals:
– Decentralize RPC Services
– PR to NearUp for inclusion
– Validator Recruiting Campaign
– Refer a validator and receive a 75 NEAR bounty after 3 months of uptime.
Conclusion: The Guilded Age Is Off To A Roaring Start
New Guilds are already in the works. And this next wave will continue to accelerate the fast growing development of communities and activities within the NEAR Ecosystem. In parallel to many of these digital communities, another trend also looms large on the horizon: The development of physical city nodes for the NEAR Ecosystem, set up in different geographical hubs around the world. In the coming month expect a suit of new guilds, as well as the announcement of two future hubs of NEAR Ecosystem Development!
On the 18th of June, the first ever Open Web Sandbox online party was held by the community moderators on the Sandbox discord channel, as a part of the series of activities tied to the relaunch of the OWS Guild. Well, how was it?
The main goal of this event was to kick off the beginning of the new Guilded Age within the NEARverse and the OWS becoming home for all NEARians and Sanboxers. Moreover, we wanted to create and highlight the networking opportunities for all members of this open-source community and let’s be honest: this goal was achieved.
With approximately 70 attendees, every one of which had a chance to pitch their own project built within the NEAR ecosystem, around 10 projects got the place in the spotlight. Among them, Gene, who presented Decentraland, Chloe, who talked about Marma J and Sachamat pitched the idea of creating a Legal Guild within the NEAR community. Also, guilds like the Swine Guild and the Hispano Guild were represented by their core team members.
The party was also joined by the NEAR core team members such as the full stack developer Matt Lockyer and the community wizard Shreyas. Shreyas has shared possible opportunities within the NEAR community:
“We are excited to be a part of this onboarding of the Sandbox and there is a lot of stuff going on within the community at the moment, including DAO’s and platforms for the community systems. If you are interested in contributing to any of these, do let someone from the community know. You can find us on the forum, we are pretty active there, we are about 8 people in the team and we are still hiring and growing”.
Besides, we were honoured with the presence of multiple NEAR community members such as Grace, James, Ross, Joep and of course the glorious founding father of the Open Web Sandbox – Ozymandius. Many thanks to the charming new Sandbox co-lead Rebecca (@mecsbecs) who helped to organize the party and ensured everything ran smoothly during the event.
This digital party could not be complete without digital giveaways: Doctor NEAR NFT cards created by one of the OWS moderators Samtoshi_F_Baby. We handed out these amazing tokens for free to all guests of this unique get-together as proof of “partYcipation” through Collab.land.
This being said, we would like to thank everyone who made it to the party and helped create this awesome sphere that we all love Sandbox for. This event was only the first one in line; there are many more to come, so definitely stay tuned and keep an eye on the OWS discord channel and Twitter for the freshest community updates!
