Category: Near Without Noise

NEAR without the Noise Episode 10 featured an exclusive conversation between Ozymandius, Arto Bendiken and Frank Braun on the recent launch of the Cypherpunk Guild. The topics discussed ranged from the origins and history of Cypherpunks, to the need for privacy in the world today, NEAR Protocol’s value proposition, and the many different privacy solutions awaiting development and funding. A full video of the conversation can be found here.

What are Cypherpunks? 

For many, the term ‘Cypherpunk’ is a foreign concept that is often confused with other terms like ‘Cyberpunk’ or ‘Crypto-Anarchist’. At the very beginning of the discussion both Arto and Frank – 2nd generation Cypherpunks – take the time to explain a little bit about the history and values of the Cypherpunk movement: 

“Cypherpunks are advocates for the widespread use of strong cryptography and technologies that enhance privacy and self-sovereignty. Cypherpunks invented/created the EFF, PGP, SSL, SSH, BitTorrent, Tor, WikiLeaks, Bitcoin, smart contracts, Zcash, and Signal, among other notable achievements.”

As Frank Braun puts it: 

“We wish to disseminate cryptography as widely as possible, and make it impossible to stop it. That has certain societal consequences perhaps, but those are usually characterized as crypto-anarchy more than cypherpunk.” 

The age-old mantra, originally coined by Eric Hughes, is that “Cypherpunks Write Code”. Code that will protect average individuals from privacy infringements, and guarantee the freedom to speak openly, and without censorship on the internet.  

Cyberpunk = subgenre of SciFi in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of low-life and high tech"

Cypherpunk = an activist advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change

— Frank Braun (@thefrankbraun) December 31, 2019

What is the Goal of the Cypherpunk Guild? 

The Cypherpunk Guild is launching on NEAR Protocol, as a home for Web3 privacy advocates and the many different solutions awaiting development within the space. Unlike privacy coins like Monero or ZCash, NEAR is a smart-contract platform that operates as a foundation for other decentralized protocols and applications. Embedding the option to transact or build on NEAR using private transactions is the first goal of the Cypherpunk Guild. As Arto explains: 

Cypherpunk projects are projects that support the NEAR vision and mission of building a user-owned internet – the Open Web – where people have control of their own data and money. And the way to do that is to enable better privacy than has existed so far on NEAR.” 

In terms of the concrete goals of the Guild, Arto explains how it will ideally operate as a ‘privacy hub’ that not only delivers private transactions to NEAR, but also functions as a homebase for an active community of privacy advocates interested in safeguarding their money, identity and data: 

“Accordingly, we plan to solicit, evaluate, and fund projects that increase and promote individuals’ privacy, security, and self-sovereignty with regards to their data and their funds, warmly welcoming cypherpunks and privacy-first initiatives into the NEAR community and ecosystem.”

This importantly comes with board support from Chief Economist of Cypherpunk Holdings, Jon Matonis (Note: Cypherpunk Holdings is the 9th Largest BTC Wallet in the world). Arto leaves the topic with foreshadowing of what can be expected into the future: 

“For now we have a few concrete grant proposals from well known cypherpunks who are looking at NEAR for the first time given the privacy blitz around NEAR now. This is definitely bringing more eyes to NEAR. And we will deliberate on the initial grant proposals in the next weeks and announce some first grants.” 

Why Did The Cypherpunk Guild Launch On NEAR? 

In a recent Marketing Update, NEAR defined its vision as “A world where people have control of their money, data, and power of governance.” That vision and the values grounding the development of the NEAR Ecosystem, was a determining factor in attracting Arto and Frank to NEAR in the first place. Applying for funding from the NEAR Foundation for the Cypherpunk Guild was a way of putting NEAR’s commitment to privacy to the test: The Guild received 100,000 $NEAR for the next 18 months, with every member of the council voting yes. 

Beyond the ideological support from the NEAR Ecosystem, Arto and Frank both saw NEAR as an innovative 3rd generation blockchain that was defined by its scalability and usability. As Frank explains with reference to the NEAR Account model, the surface has only been scratched: 

“With the NEAR Account model, it is possible for accounts to contain smart contracts with multiple access keys, that can have different levels of privilege. This enables a lot of use-cases that are interesting. It is possible to create smart contracts that can essentially fund themselves because they get a portion of transaction fees.” 

Importantly, both Frank and Arto stressed that even though NEAR is technically sound, and rapidly developing, the space remains open and the future undetermined: Network effects, luck, and consistent community action are also important variables for NEAR’s long-term future development potential. 

Why is Privacy Important For the World We Live In Today?

On a more theoretical level, Arto and Frank took the time to delve into the importance of privacy in cultivating a healthy society of independent and free individuals. Frank’s main point on the topic of privacy centered upon prior discussions he has had on his podcast that revolve around the freedom to innovate and experiment with ideas, forget, and evolve: 

“The way I look at it is basically that the development of society is basically an evolutionary process. Like in evolution, in order to experiment with things we first of all need to generate all of these ideas, products and philosophies. And then select the best and let them run their course. If we restrict the ability of people to do that, or to innovate their ideas we limit the strict evolution of society. We are getting into a situation where we are severely restricting the ability of people to innovate. On the one hand you lose your future, but you also have your permanent past. The stupid things you say when you are 16 years old – the current 16 years old this will haunt them when they are 40 because it is on permanent record.”

Arto, in a similar vein, spoke about the true danger of surveillance as represented in 1984: 

“The point of the surveillance in 1984, wasn’t that the state actually had sufficient resources to actually keep track of everybody all the time. Rather it was that you never knew when they were looking in on you or not. And given that you had to behave as though they were looking in on you all of the time. That manifested itself in certain compliance behaviors. We are heading into something like that when we don’t have privacy. If all of our communications are available to some third party, we are going to self-censor, and we are going to adjust our behavior. That doesn’t lead to any good place.”

Privacy in this context is an essential part of a free, open, healthy, and innovating society: To end privacy is to slouch towards soft tyranny, subtle control, and the constant unspoken fear of being surveilled, tracked, and prosecuted. This is the current reality in many places across the globe. 

What Kind of Solutions is Cypherpunk Guild Hoping to Build or Fund? 

The Cypherpunk Guild’s immediate goal is to bring private transactions to NEAR. As Arto explains: 

“Our priority is private transactions for NEAR. The Funding commitment is contingent on us taking ownership of this question. Now, effectively, the Cypherpunk Guild is the business owner for this.”

Beyond bringing private transactions to NEAR, the discussion also touched on censorship-resistant review apps like True Review, the possibility of creating a decentralized chat app on NEAR, as well as the important choice validators will have to make when allowing free speech on the platform. 

“On Chain identity and reputation systems are also in line with things the guild would want to fund. It should be feasible to do an onchain private messaging system. ARmail has actually become quite successful. This might actually take off in some way between NEAR users. Private prediction markets are also a big category.”

The Future of Privacy Is At Stake

In a final call to action, the panel reiterated the importance of bringing privacy to Web3 and the need to start building it today. Cypherpunks Write Code. It’s Time to Build. To learn more about Cypherpunk Guild, join the conversation here. To learn more about Arto and Frank, you can read up on their Humans of NEAR storylines (Frank Humans of NEAR) and (Arto Humans of NEAR). To learn more about Cypherpunks and the history of the movement, check out the 4NTS Guild Overview, here.

NEAR Without The Noise Episode 8 featured the CEO of Sino Global Capital, Matthew Graham. The discussion served as a perfect introduction to understanding the Crypto Industry in China from someone working on the front lines of crypto and financial investing for the past eight years. Over the course of the hour, 4NTS Guild Members joined by NEAR’s Head of Ecosystem Development NiMA Asghari, were able to dive into the nature of crypto regulation in China, how Matthew looks at the Web3 space, the future of NFT’s and Sino’s investment in Mintbase, as well as NEAR protocol and the future development of crypto in general. 

What Is The State Of Crypto In China? 

China is the single most important geographic region for the development of crypto. This fact however, is still not fully appreciated by most western crypto enthusiasts: 

 “Mainland China has some understanding of international crypto, international crypto has almost zero understanding of mainland China.”

From this perspective, Matthew views working in crypto in China as an opportunity to support international projects looking to break into the market. As Matthew goes onto explain there are huge cities in China with millions of people that few in the west have ever even heard about. And it is these developer and investor communities that hold serious promise in growing crypto ecosystems in the years to come. 

As Matthew puts it: 

“China is the business opportunity of the century. Same as blockchain. Super simple.”

What is the Regulatory Regime of Crypto in China Like?

China in general operates with much more legal grey area than other places like the United States or the European Union. Much of crypto falls into that category. However, in general Matthew explained that the Chinese Government has three primary rails when it comes to handling crypto: 

First (1), the Chinese are extremely sensitive to any kind of fiat on or offramp. This is because the Chinese Renminbi is not a free floating currency and there are very strict currency controls. As Matthew says, “That is why we do not do fiat anything on or offramp – Go nowhere near that.” 

Second (2), authorities in China have a huge sensitivity towards anything that might be related to tax evasion or money laundering. 

Third (3), there is a special sensitivity to speculative fervor in China. The fact that scams can snowball and expand exponentially make them hard to control if they mature to a certain point. So authorities in China are very cautious of ensuring that a project is not a scam.

Matthew says the following about the rest: 

“With the exception of these 3 rails much of crypto falls into this grey area. So there will be periodic crackdowns and then they will ease up. This grey area becomes a matter of relationships and things like that. What people tend to do is just keep a low profile because they just don’t want to attract attention to themselves.”

Crypto is Still Not Very Well Understood, By Most People 

Sino Global Capital works at the intersection of finance and technology, in both the East and the West. As broad as that might sound, they have a very strong focus on the world of crypto, specifically as it pertains to Decentralized Finance and Non-Fungible Tokens. From this position, Matthew was insightful in his analysis of crypto and its current level of understanding among the population based upon its level of development: 

“This is still an industry that is very, very early in its life cycle. I still think we are late 90s, maybe like 1996 from the perspective of the United States and the Internet Industry this is still like 1996. We don’t even have Google Yet…The point is that we are super, super early. And this can cause a lot of misconceptions because when you have an industry that is still fairly early, you still have a lot of cowboy type people that are kind of sketchy and all kinds of people that are still involved.”

One crucial difference, in spite of the youth of crypto, is how it is viewed on a political level by different governments from the East to the West. 

“The promotion of enterprise blockchain and blockchain related innovation is happening in China now probably on a grander scale. We will likely see what we have seen with other technologies anointed by the central government — which is tremendous over investment — like they did with solar — a lot of games to get government subsidies, but ultimately we will get a lot of interesting successes that come out of this. That is the most likely scenario in that regard.” 

This comes in stark contrast to the more individualistic and business-first approach from the West, where many companies experimented with blockchain, but did not realize immediate value, and thus did not continue to experiment with it. 

NFT’s Are Also In Their Early Days 

A key part of the conversation took place when Matthew spoke about NFT’s and Sino’s investment in Mintbase. This is what he said: 

“Our thesis with NFTs is that we are very early. And that it is taught to prognosticate which aspects of NFTs are likely to take off first or most. It is easy to see how NFT use cases could be super cool for many different applications – like Digital Art… In game NFT’s are something that have a lot of potential as well.”

In terms of Mintbase, Matthew went into detail about why he was confident in Sino’s investment in the Mintbase Team: 

“One reason that we are super comfortable on them is that they were approaching it — not as NFT’s for gaming or a specific vertical – but more from the perspective of being ready to pivot – the industry could go in different directions. How we are going to get prepared to go with the trend in multiple ways. They are approaching this as seasoned technology and business experts in different directions…But at the same time they also have long term vision, saying look NFT’s on Ethereum – we think Gas fees will continue to be an issue. We were already one of the top Ethereum Dapps on the dApp store. For NFT’s to take off and for gaming NFT’s to really happen in a realistic way you have to have reasonable fees associated with doing these types of transactions.”

Overall Matthew held that Sino viewed NFT’s today, analogously to where DeFi was in 2018. As such the time for NFT’s is very much yet to come. 

NEAR is a Serious L1 Blockchain Protocol 

While Sino does not hold a position in NEAR, it does remain in their highest esteem. Matthew answered a couple of questions relating to NEAR and what he thought was especially valuable about the NEAR Ecosystem: 

“A lot of it is that the devil is in the details, but also you have a world class team that is able to execute and build developer relationships – that is number 1. Number 2 – the fact that you can have sharding but maintain composability is something that is super important. A third point is that there are a lot of things that are super sexy for developers such as the fact that you can program in Rust — Rust is a famously developer friendly language and if they were choosing a language to learn I think that very few people would want to choose Solidity over rust for example.”

Like Mintbase, Matthew reiterated that they also viewed NEAR as being in its very early days. And, yet in spite of that, it was positioned for ‘An extremely promising future’. 

Other areas of discussion dealt with the history of computer innovation, the need for more UI / UX development in blockchain, and different ways to bridge the gap between crypto natives and normies. To see soundbites of this discussion check out the 4NTS Youtube Channel Here. 

All images from Unsplash

 

NEAR Without the Noise Episode 7, went in depth on a new collectible platform building on NEAR known as Paras. The name – an Indonesian word – is used to describe the face or persona of a thing, and refers to one of crypto’s first Digital Collectable Platforms, built around Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT’s). For educational and product purposes, the episode was interesting on many fronts: What was Paras’ original vision? How do they see the digital collectable marketspace? Why did they choose to build on NEAR and what is the future of NFTs? These were only some of the questions touched upon. 

Context is Key: 

Paras is a platform for Artists to publish collections of artwork or trading cards, and investors or collectors to accrue these collections for their diverse purposes. While this may sound initially unfamiliar, trading cards and collectables currently take up a marketspace of over $300 billion US dollars. Fan favorites like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Baseball Cards have increased in both popularity and value in the past twenty years. In parallel, novelists of some of the most popular fan fiction create cards of different characters for use either inside or outside of novels – as expanded versions of gameplay.

What Paras is effectively building is an open digital frontier for this space to inhabit: Where a kid from Uganda can trade a collectable with a teenager from Argentina: Where artists from any culture or background can share what they find beautiful, creative and valuable with collectors from all over the world. The value proposition for this vision is large, and that is why Paras is so exciting. Below are some of the most important takeaways from the Interview with their team. 

Paras Found Digital Collectables Accidentally: 

Originally, Paras was created as a form of decentralized social media and memory preservation for different users. They started building on Blockstack and were brainstorming different ways to involve users. The discovery of digital collectables and artists interested in selling their work via NFT tokenization was through a product-market fit event: 

So in a conventional digital market artists usually share their portfolios, and expect that there are people who will use their commission. But what if they can also post their content – that they already have – as a way to fund their next big project? But at the same time they can also sell their own content in order to get more money to create newer content. That is the background of how Paras is today. 

As a collectable platform, Paras allows Artists and Collectors to transact works embedded as digital trading cards. According to Founders Riqi and Afiq this is much different from other NFT platforms on either Ethereum or NEAR: 

Paras is really unique because there are a lot of NFT marketplaces out there. Especially on the Ethereum. We wanted to have some differentiation – after a while we were doing a lot more research. One of the biggest collectables out there are the card collectibles. Everything else is really big – from small children until maybe 20 people in their 20s or 30s. So I think the card collectable market – the physical one is really big. It is already there. And we just need to digitize it. This is where we will be focusing on – NFT Card collectibles, because the market is already there and it is pretty easy to just digitize it. 

And the focus of collectables is on the series of items rather than a single item: 

We wanted the collectors to collect the collection – not only just stand alone art like any item in an NFT marketplace. Because of that we wanted the collector to focus on the narrative, on the lore, on the story of the collection, on the universe of the collection that is being built by the artists themselves. Not just because of the visual or who the artists are. 

Why Build A Premier Collectable Platform on NEAR? 

The marketplace on paras.id

Originally, Paras was built on Blockstack. Shortly after, they migrated to NEAR and started building at breakneck speed. Why did the Paras founders decide to build on NEAR? For starters, because of its speed and cost: 

NEAR is one of the best blockchain protocols out there. They are really focused on production, their mainnet is really fast. Took like 3 seconds at most for every transaction. The gas fee is very cheap – like 1,000 Transactions will cost you 1 dollar. It is very cheap for developers wanting to build on top of the blockchain. Just build on NEAR it is fast, cheap, and the developer experience like I mentioned earlier: Most developers are really familiar with JavaScript. Well AssemblyScript is pretty much JavaScript, and fundamentally it is the same so JavaScript developers can use NEAR and AssemblyScript as an easy way to build your first decentralized app. 

Beyond the speed of the protocol, the cheapness of transactions, and the ease in building, Riqi and Afiq also emphasized how quickly it was to build their solution on top of NEAR:

Building on top of NEAR is making our life easier and that is why we can build this marketplace within a month: Since our first launch, the social media one, we have already built our indexer up and running; we already have our notification system; most of the things needed in our platform now is already being built. 

As a whole, what the founders of Paras are emphasizing about NEAR has been told time and time again by other founders and builders in the Ecosystem: NEAR is a scalable blockchain platform that puts usability first – not only for developers, but also for users. 

What Kind of Artists is Paras Looking For? 

First set of Arcanes from the Immortal Flame Series now available @ParasHQ pic.twitter.com/GkPpc1a9wy

— Fetus Squid (@FetusSquid) January 10, 2021

As a digital art collectables platform, Paras has the important task of recruiting not only crypto-artists, but also artists who are not familiar with cryptocurrency and the digitization of art via NFT’s. While this can be challenging, Paras is still bullish on bringing new and unfamiliar artists into the crypto space: 

For now we are having a lot of crypto artists that really help the community, and help onboarding other artists. For now we are just like 70% crypto artists and 30% non crypto artists…When we are trying to onboard people that are not coming to the crypto space. The concept is very foreign to them. It is hard for them to imagine buying a digital art card online – who is buying that? 

Beyond focusing on creating a collection – i.e. some sort of long term value engagement with their audiences, Paras currently has a form available for prospective artists to apply to get whitelisted onto the platform. This is to ensure that content remains safe-for-work and within the parameters of the early days of the project. 

What’s Next In The Development Plan? 

We have published our 2020 journey!
Starting from our 1st iteration which is a personal website generator up until December where we launch our 3rd iteration as NFT Marketplace.https://t.co/zxUYJkzO6F

— Paras (@ParasHQ) January 12, 2021

The market for collectibles themselves is around 370 billion dollars. And virtual goods are around 50 billion dollars. From the Pokemon cards, from their first Pokemon cards until now they sold around 30 million cards. The Card Collectibles market and the collectibles market is really big for us to disrupt. This is where the NFT – the crypto space – will be growing much bigger from this year because we have a lot of newer blockchains like NEAR Protocol. We can onboard some non-tech users to the platform really easy.

Paras has big plans for its platform on NEAR, and in many ways can be seen to be on the frontier of the digital collectable marketplace. Future planning and development on Paras is focused on two primary things: (1) Catching up to other NFT marketplaces in terms of features and user experience, and (2) making it easier for artists to showcase their work and fund future work via an original creative launchpad. This is what they had to say about both respectively: 

One thing we are trying to catch up to is to have similar features to other NFT marketplaces like auctions, on-bidding, but some different aspects that we are really focused on is the card features: The booster pack. We wanted our artists to create our collection and put it into the booster pack and just like your physical trading cards you buy a booster pack and get 5 random cards. Aside from the booster pack we are also trying to build these trading mechanisms. In real life people trade cards and that is where we are hoping to build this year for Paras. And for the narrative for the series for the collections we wanted to build the publication place for the artists to share their lore, their narrative, their story and hopefully in the future create a novel, omics and other creative stuff for Paras. 

On the topic of the all new Paras Launchpad in the works: 

We want to create a creative launch pad – if you new in 2017 that we had ICO’s and that is it. With Paras we believe that we can create more like a creative launch pad where some artists can create a project and fund it through these initial criterias. We can onboard a lot more impressed people like gameday developers, comic artists, developers, and many more. Also other creatives as well. It’s going to be very exciting and offer many things that artists and creatives have never had access too before. 

What Does Paras Hope To Be In The Future? 

All things considered, this is what Paras left us with, as their vision for the platform in the long term future: 

We are not just looking for 1 hit wonder artists that can sell cards that cost thousands of dollars. We want to be a one hit wonder platform in which we sell the highest bid cards that exist in NFT marketplaces: But we want to grow a sustainable community in which their creative process and their creative ideas can be stored and expanded for the long run. We want our artists to collaborate with one another. We are very much open to a lot of artworks that we have.

4NTS Guild recently featured Travis and Rob from Zed.run on NEAR Without the Noise Episode 5. As an episode that featured an inside look at Zed.run, one of the most impressive crypto-based horse racing platforms in existence, NEAR community members and general crypto enthusiasts will gain much from listening to Travis and Rob as they discuss their solution, the future of gaming and crypto, NFT’s and why they chose to build on NEAR Protocol. 

A full link to the episode can be found here. 

Zed.Run Is THE Place to Race User Owned and Bred Digital Race Horses 

The episode started with Rob walking through the actual product that Zed.run has built: An online ecosystem of user owned and bred race horses, designed to reflect horse racing 200 years into the future, and largely inspired by the movie tron. Users have the opportunity to purchase thoroughbred racehorses, and then breed additional horses that can then be traded, raced, and (in the future) customized according to the user’s interests. 

“Horse racing is one of the oldest sports to exist, and one of the few remaining unchanging if you think about it. We did want to change that, and we wanted to bring a community driven ecosystem to a younger audience and introduce them to the world of horse racing and what it actually meant as well. That was a big motivator to us as well.”  — Rob Salha

Beyond simply purchasing any horse, horses are tokenized as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT’s) that also contain complex features: Bloodlines, Genotypes, and Breed Types. Zed.run is thus an ecosystem for users to strategically breed, manage, and race horses for REAL MONEY staked as ZEST tokens or other currencies. In simple terms: Welcome to the Digital Era of Horseracing. 

Zed Run Started in 2018, and is Heavily Crypto Inspired: 

In early 2018 the Zed team decided to go all in on NFT’s and gaming, largely inspired by the fascinating inroads that crypto kitties were able to achieve (at great cost to the Ethereum network). Rob and Travis both found the crypto community to be interested and welcoming to the idea of Digital Horse Racing. On the unique nature of building a crypto project, Travis had the following to say: 

“It’s the most intelligent community space in the world. In a lot of other industries everyone is kind of normal, and then you get into crypto and blockchain and it seems like everyone has a PhD and you kind of just walk through nodding your head saying ‘yeah’, ‘yeah’ that’s cool, that’s awesome. But it is probably the most accepting community as well. Everyone just loves learning with you as well.  

Travis Winn

This attitude corresponds to the strong focus that the Zed team placed on their community: Where an active discord, and over 150 daily races, has led to widespread ecosystem engagement across demographics and global locations. 

“Most definitely the crypto community always has someone there willing to lend you their knowledge and walk you through something, explain something to you. It is one of the most welcome communities out there, and not just from a user level, like we see a lot of new users coming into our discord and our community, and we’ve got a whole bunch of users helping that user buy their first horse or install metamask.” — Rob Salha

Zed Has Big Plans for the Future Relating to Customization, Tokenization, and Governance! 

To date Zed Run offers users the capacity to purchase, breed, and race digital horses. The stats are impressive: Over 150 races a day, and between 3 to 4 thousand races per month with hundreds of thousands of dollars bet on race outcomes. In the future, Zed plans to incorporate its own unique token DEZ into the ecosystem. Players will also be able to design and host their own races, while users can customize the saddles and other features of their horses. The full scope of ZED’s ambitious and community-focused planning can be found in the Zed Vision Paper. 

For us the most important thing was to build an awesome product first and foremost – to make sure that racing was fun, and that racing was accessible, and to make sure that breeding worked as well. For us, we went more to the entertainment side of things. We felt like that if we did focus more on wagering and gambling its a very big black hole of jurisdictions, legal and all of these sorts of stuff. As a passionate startup focused on building games and building communities, we wanted to make sure that we were focused first and foremost on the product and at the same time on the community as well. – Rob Salha

NFT’s Are In Their Early Days:

As a project focused on building an ecosystem surrounding unique, non-fungible digital racehorses, Zed.Run is at the forefront of the impending wave of NFT solutions entering the crypto space. Rob had a number of important insights on the future of NFT’s in crypto, most aptly summarized in the following manner: 

 NFT’s are only a couple of years old. We see NFT’s as a way to game in the future as well. There is nothing cooler than pouring time and energy and love into a game you are playing and then being able to take things that you earn from an ecosystem or from a game and go on and monetize it through secondary markets or interoperability as well. I don’t think the mainstream has grasped that quite yet. — Rob Salha 

And just like other technologies, the team at Zed.run strongly believe that the future is on their side in terms of adoption: As more people become familiar with Web3 and more people start to understand the underlying values of ownership and distributed value embedded into NFT’s, access and engagement will undoubtedly follow: 

We haven’t even scratched the surface of what NFT’s is. Over time, the barriers will be brought down the onramps will be a lot easier and the bottlenecks will start to be removed. 

ZED and NEAR Have A Very Close Relationship:

The Zed staking and betting platform Zest is built on NEAR Protocol. Zed originally got into touch with NEAR just over a year ago, and has a fantastic relationship with them to date. According to Rob, common visions of the future, a strong focus on communities, and a win-win mentality in crypto truly ground the two projects. 

“When we met the guys at NEAR we just hit it off. It was a match made in heaven, love at first sight, whatever you want to call it. But they were absolutely so passionate about helping creators create without the shackles so to speak. We love the way that NEAR Approached us. They just wanted to get to know us, and to get to know why we were building what we were building. And to us that was really important.” – Rob Salha

As Zed continues to build out its ecosystem as defined in its vision paper, NEAR Protocol will undoubtedly play an important role in supporting the DEZ and ZEST infrastructure among other things. 

“NEAR is willing to work with other businesses, other companies, and other blockchains, to make sure that we get adoption as an entire industry, as an entire community as well. We do see NEAR playing a really massively important role into the ZED Run Ecosystem as well.”

– Rob Salha

To get started with Zed check out Zed.run!