Building The Next Genertion of Crypto Startups - Illia Polosukhin

hello hello everyone i hope everyone is uh fully awake by this time and doesn't have a huge hangover welcome everyone great to be here and i'm excited to have slides this time so let me kick it off so amelia i started near back in the day with alex but you know things are evolving so if you're not familiar with near near is a simple secure and scalable blockchain kind of the premises if we want to get to mass adoption which we do we need something that is truly scalable and for that we need charting the only way you know you can handle billions of users is by actually not processing everyone on one computer so near has launched sharding we're running with four shards and we're working on actually dynamic resharding where we can keep adding capacity to the network as the gro as the growth of the ecosystem happens and beyond that you know if you're thinking of users right most of people are afraid of blockchain most people don't understand it people definitely do not understand what 0x means and why they should be referred to by some random string of characters and numbers and so really going beyond that and hiding all those blockchain concepts like hashing private keys and delivering simple experience something that people are familiar with like login with you know existing platform is important similarly if you're a developer you probably don't want to learn new language when you're just starting to build new kind of new applications so delivering web 2 kind of style development right delivering the same tools that you're familiar with is kind of what we focus on and obviously at the end it needs to be something that doesn't destroy universe and our planet and so being energy efficient being certified carbon neutral pretty much delivering kind of security and performance at the low cost to the to the planet is really important for us so we've launched october 2020 so we're a little bit over a year and we already have you know over 350 projects in the ecosystem we have you know huge community and it continues expanding and it's very global four million accounts kind of transacting through the network and we have six largest developer base and crypto is like 2 000 active developers and i'm sure we can you know 10x that by end of the year so near started kind of this is like basic idea right with a protocol at the core because we saw that we are not able to achieve kind of the simple and scalable platform with any other existing system and so we actually had a kind of a lot of focus on that originally and as that evolved right um it's not just one company or project that work on it there's a ton of different teams and um companies that are contributing to the protocol and leveraging it at kind of very deep level so uh kind of just to name a few there's aurora which if you were in this stage can i think an hour ago alex from aurora was kind of explaining what that is it's evm compatibility that runs on top of near protocol it offers you exactly the same experience that you're getting from ethereum carbon copy of that but you know with the same benefits that near has you know like fast blocks one second blocks low transaction fees um and like you know fast finality octopus on the other side you know we just talked like uh we had just osmosis talking about app chains octopus is a way to launch app chains connected to near protocol as well you are able to again launch it really quickly you just stage your webassembly code of your app chain and their validators picking it up and start running it and you're just paying with the token that you created for your new chain right so again like super easy super quick bootstrap allows you to quickly iterate and launch your networks we have makina which is a data storage again it's using near protocol as a basis it's using the same data availability machinery but uh delivering you kind of uh large you know ideally like exabyte level storage we have calimero which is a private chart right so near is starting which means there's a lot of kind of parallel processing not all of this parallel processing needs to happen in public and every single data piece and transaction is visible to everyone we can actually run a lot of it in private inside specific data centers and then prove a lot of information about that computation that happened and pakoda i'll introduce in a second so nir focuses on three main verticals right we think of kind of and they're not just kind of independent verticals they actually work together so d5 obviously i mean a lot of kind of ethereum and blockchain general success is coming from finance and in a way this is a engine that attracts kind of capitals that allows to pretty much fund development for the whole ecosystem at the same time we need creators we need people who are kind of generating new content who are generating new value in the ecosystem and developers are creators themselves game developers are creators the people who are building new levels you know user generated content people who are publishing blog posts youtube videos etc dell creators and there's a creator economy that's been built you know nfgs is just a medium for doing this and it again it's getting powered by the financial ecosystem and kind of funding this but then beyond that you know we need communities right any creator out there has a whole community around them it's followers it's people who are talking with them it's people who contributing to the uh creation similarly if we have you know a project like near protocol it's huge community that's actually pocketed in a bunch of different sub communities around the world and so digital cooperatives or dows are a tool to organize these communities to launch tokens to kind of funnel this creativity of the community and and and organize them to come together right this is something that you cannot do with regular companies because company belongs to some place it has an owner it has some kind of shareholder structure here you have kind of more egalitarian way of giving people bringing people together and then creating this economy around it so beyond kind of technology and beyond verticals there is what we call kind of go to market right even though we have like all this it will not work itself and so the important pieces is always kind of what are the teams and people who are actually pushing this forward and so again kind of the ecosystem is decentralized there's a lot of different dimensions right so there is for example human guild which are here and they're pushing on play to earn gaming like how to enable gaming creators to really deliver the value but also learn about this ecosystem a lot of game like indie game developers and game developers in in the world still don't understand crypto they don't understand what the tools they have in toolbox they're still thinking of like how do we attract users through marketing versus you know how do we build the communities that will be using this stuff we have proximity that's focused on defy also uh somewhere around here and then beyond that you know we have geographic distribution with regional hubs we have folks in china which are kind of running at developer shops they're running uh product labs like writing community marketing similar in ukraine balkans kenya and we're starting more and more of these and at the same time we have uh ecosystem funds that are funding the startups right so all this ecosystem together kind of funneling different uh aspects of you know applications different aspects of community and building them up and so kind of original vision right of uh near like when we were starting was how do we give tools to developers and and i'm developer myself right the reason why we started it was like we wanted to build some applications on the blockchain we actually wanted to pay people around the world for some of the crowdsourcing we were doing and we couldn't right we didn't have a platform that was low like low fees enough to justify you know using it it wasn't simple enough for people who we wanted to send money to to be able to use it but beyond that like as a developer building on many of these platforms was complicated and not just kind of the basic building but also beyond that how do you grow your application how do you monitor it etc and so the real story is that as we think of web 3 compared to web 2 where there's a lot of kind of stack of instruments that have been built in the past uh you know 10 20 years you know we have amazon we have hubspot we have intercom we have you know house zero we have all those tools that you can actually piece together a pretty quickly a kind of startup stack right to build your startup to monitor to understand what's going on to you know login users to kind of understand their journeys we don't have that in web 3. we still don't have that and so we have uh kind of transitioned the um our original company that we're building protocol to be the first web 3 startup platform this is a place where as a developer and an entrepreneur you can come and you can start launching your startup really quickly it gives you all the tools you need to launch and operate your startup right this means you have the data blockchain data accessible you have analytics of your application you have upgradability for your contracts it means you have you know way to launch it out that you can start managing your contracts and ideally your community over time it also means you can start you know launching tokens doing the lockups all those nitty-gritty stuff that operations teams you know spending ton of time figuring out like all of this is just in one place and so beyond that the new ecosystem has tons of stuff right so it's not that the pagoda is building all this it's a place where you get kind of access to all those tools but they are coming from different places an ecosystem and if you're building something that kind of fits into this framework we can surface it as well and kind of give the usage of this to you and obviously it continues contributing to the near kind of open source project right because there's still a lot of development to be done on sdks and apis and there's more cool things coming there so just kind of to cover like there really is a stack that is is being built right like at the bottom we have the blockchain protocols uh the kind of the you know the bread and butter of this whole ecosystem but then beyond that there's a ton of services and and kind of tools that you need right like all of us are using rpcs we all need to in kind of fetch some data from the blockchain understand what's going on we need some kind of you know streams of data to be able to uh you know react on them on the front end beyond that you know we need analytics we need to understand if something happens you know probably you should get an alarm and kind of trigger some actions right for example if your contracts maybe have been attacked maybe you want to pause the contract automatically and then figure out with the dao what to do next right like all those things that actually improve security of the platform we're talking about vault services right at the end you as a as an application actually have a responsibility to protect your users right you need to make sure that they are secure and when you they use your application and not losing funds and so giving them tools like second factor that is authentication getting them notifications for example and something happens with their system right for example again we had as much as talking about pools and you know you have impermanent laws for example just pushing notifications when the sudden price changes are happening would be instrumental to improving the kind of user experience and um like usability of the systems and beyond that i mentioned kind of startup creation right like yes you you were here at hackathon you built some cool app now what you need to launch it you need to make sure you have a kind of governance structure that is able to upgrade this contract you need to you know launch your own token you want to maybe fundraise you want to distribute it to your team all of this tooling that you need kind of is coming in here into developer console and obviously beyond that like apis sdk all of the stuff that you need to actually kind of access and visualize and i do want to mention specifically marketing because so i'm coming like i'm a developer myself i hate marketing that's just the normal uh normal state of the world for developers but same time marketing is a tool to actually communicate with your user right we're not talking about you know huge ads on billboards we're talking about people who are actually excited about your product who people who are interested in what you're building you want to give them information about what's happening you want to give them information of what's going to happen right and so for to to build that right nfgs is actually probably one of the best tools out there to connect you kind of you with a user or creator as a user right and so now that we have this tool we now we need tooling to actually do this right like there's things like campaigns there's things like you know uh for example talking like nfc gated communities that you can build to actually start enabling this communication and actually get people who are most interested in your products have a bigger voice share voice in giving your feedback for example right so you can have think of intercom like a thing on your in your websites right now this intercom doesn't not know how invested the user that asks a question is but for example if they have an nft in their wallet that they logged in now you're able to kind of have a direct conversation with them so all those things right like integrating an existing applications and existing platforms on near into a single experience and so like this is kind of covering a lot what you can do with this platform and this platform is still evolving to be clear we're just launching it uh actually at this event and you know there's been some talks about this but kind of beyond that you know the ecosystem is evolving and there's a ton of ways to get engaged right i just want to mention few because there is specifically things like grants right here at at the event i think we have 25 pound like 15 bounties 25k but beyond that you can apply for grants at near.org you can pretty much get funded to start building your company beyond that we actually have a meta build hackathon finishing on monday as well so you can double tip between these hackathons if you're doing d5 right d5 is actually a little bit more involved than just grand so there is a separate kind of proximity the d5 go to market team that can help launching your g5 startup i mentioned we have regional hubs right so we have each of these regions and right now it's mostly kind of around the world in in places where we don't have as big events and as big presence kind of by the global community they're starting to launch their own funding and beyond that like i want to mention opennet collective which is an accelerator that helps you and kind of connects you to a bunch of you know already existing entrepreneurs and startups to learn from them and kind of go through a curriculum and connect you to the uh to the investors which is the plenty of as well so all in all kind of the the ecosystem is evolving there's a ton of stuff going on uh and check out pagoda because if you're trying to build a startup if you if you're trying to build a project that may become a startup this is what we're trying to achieve we're trying to give you tools to really quickly adopt this and get this kind of to market get users feedback and connect with them directly thank you