NEAR - One Chain to Abstract Them All - ETHGlobal Bangkok 2024

hello ah there we go yeah we'll just wait like two more minutes see if anyone anyone turns up feel free to ask questions throughout because it's small you know I can hardly hear myself over this boom boom boom boom We we'll get started um now may as well so this is basically just an overview of near to familiarize yourself with it uh our big push here is AI and chain abstraction but I think it's really important to hold the know the whole context of near to implement an application to the best you can really um and a bit about myself I'm devell at near uh yeah I I I came into the ecosystem building my own product and then started working as a devil just cuz I I love the product so much and the company so yeah today's goals I talk a little bit about our bounties the first is near and ai ai is the big push for near at the moment we want to be the blockchain ecosystem to build AI in um and as a part of that we're offering a 6K bounty to integrate AI and near in whatever way you deem fit and we'll get into more applications of that later and then chain signatures we'll also talk about more this is signing transactions on other chains from near itself um in this multi-chain chain abstraction narrative uh but we'll we'll get into these in a bit and that's for 4K so we'll give a bit of an overview of the whole stack as a whole um and I really want you to go away from this talk knowing how we can proceed together during the hackathon like how you can get resources how you can get help CU we want to support you as much as we can so you could build some cool stuff so in general why should you build in near I think the main point the most obvious point is it's fast and scalable we're sharded by Design so the idea is that theoretically it's infinitely scalable and throughput will increase uh as it needs to and we're also cheap transactions fees are going to cost you less than a cent you don't have to really worry about gas costs and we have uh user and Dev friendly experience with named accounts access keys that no other blockchain system really implements uh and things like built-in account abstraction and chain signatures so starting off the account model really simply near offers named accounts we also have these long strings of hex like AB 256 whatever that you have to try and remember well you're not going to remember it but you have in your wallet and you have to copy the whole thing go uh over but the idea with near is that my account is py vortex. near you can send money to that easily because you can remember it or you can just see it and type it out um and yeah these are really nice to organize your applications uh as you can see I can have like my token listed under my apps bigger domain name I suppose um and it makes it easier to deploy new accounts from contracts because you can have like Factory contracts which deploy accounts for your users with either a contract uploaded uploaded to it or uh more specifics about the account so I could have all my users listed under uh Pi Vortex if I wanted to and we have I suppose native account abstraction as in all accounts have Smart contracts and all smart contracts our account and that were that was since like day one when the protocol went live and access keys this is uh something that's not really known much about near but it's one of the coolest things uh well to start off we have your classic access Keys which is uh a a key pair which can do anything with your account control it f the delete the account if you want uh on there you can actually rotate these keys so say I accidentally left my seed phrase in these slides then if I was quick enough I could change my key before you can access it and I don't have to send all my assets somewhere else uh but the most interesting thing about access Keys is we have limited access Keys uh or sometimes called function call Access keys where I can create a access key that is only able to sign specific methods on specific contracts and why you would do that is that we're actually go going to give these out to Applications so they can sign transactions on my behalf to um make ux Bas better basically so yeah here's I don't know if you've seen this meme before but it's the idea that this is the future of web 3 gaming where every bullet you shoot you have to sign the transaction in your wallet well with near the idea is that this popup isn't happening because the app just signs the transaction for you and yeah these These are limited access keys but because these can call a function the function can do more than the access key can do so it can create an account or it can send there um so they're not just limited to calling functions themselves they can do what a function can do OB ly um so with that you can like link drop people accounts with a function called access key so I can allow you to interact with my app without you needing an account essentially meta transactions I don't know if you've heard about this but we actually have meta transactions built in at the protocol level there's no fancy work around it's just supported basically how it works is if you want to pay for your user's gas then you sign the transaction um whatever it may be call some function on a contract and it's then wrapped in a larger meta transaction and pass to a relayer who attaches the gas and the deposit to The Meta transaction and then that's sent to the network and then when it's received by the network it's like unwrapped and the inner transaction is then processed as if it was sent by the original person so you don't have to modify your app or anything you just set up a relayer and that's about it chain signatures this is this is the thing I'm interested in the most about near and this is the idea that your near account now becomes a multi-chain account because you can see you can derive all these addresses from your account um and this allows you to be able to sign transaction on like nearly whatever chain it covers all ethereum uh all evm Bitcoin as well and there's some Partners here like polygon arbitrum and I'm sure a loot of more EVMS so you can hit their bounties by just signing your transaction from uh near onto that Target chain which I mean you could you could probably do like 200 bounties here with this um so yeah how does this work basically you as a user want to sign a transaction on ethereum so you uh create a transaction and then you send that to the NPC net uh NPC contract and then the NPC contract waits for an offchain response from the MPC Network which sort of holds a sharded private key and then forms it together to create a signature and then once you get that signature you get it back to your contract and then back to the user who then adds it to the transaction and can relay it as if you were just signing it with a ethereum wallet and these are the steps in more detail so you have to derive a foreign address and each n account has basically limited foreign accounts because they can just change what the path is like derivation path huh time what is the time we got 10 oh sorry I was a bit confused but yeah you derive an account you create the transaction you want to send you get a signature for that transaction you put it together and then you send it to the network it's really quite simple uh I don't know what that means some Spanish that I don't know but the video is not working apparently ah uh we'll just skip that it was it was some video I can show you a live demo if you want to see it it was just basically how to sign a transaction in the front end and yeah when you put all these things I've talked about together you get chain abstraction which is you don't have to know about the intricacies of each chain you just interact with blockchain as a whole or even abstract an account and you're just interacting with this application and it can be signing transactions and serving users wherever they are and you don't really know about it and one of the most interesting thing about chain signatures is that if we remember a contract is an account itself so a contract can actually call the NPC Network and have derived addresses of its own which enables a lot more use cases and N can essentially become the smart contract layer for other chains and have like a common common interface and you can do things like swap accounts so I can swap your arbitrum account for my polygon account just with with uh just inside of a n contract and that's done with n's finality and n's gas price which is much lower than a lot of other chains so I can send like Bitcoin or ethereum without having to pay gas on that Target chain so what what what can you do with this well I already said the first one really but you can also create link drops on near with an access key um like a function called access key that allows you to drop an asset on whatever chain you want to claim it on you could do social login account recovery and things like very cheap multi is an interesting use case because you can basically have one near contract that controls like a thousand different multi um so you don't actually have to deploy a multisig on ethereum you just have it like baked into a near contract and that Cost Cuts costs by a lot a lot a lot well as well defi on bitcoin pretty cool but we we're here at ethereum uh Bangkok so it's better probably to do something related to ethereum uh integration L Services if you verify something on top of near then you can broadcast that to whatever CH chain you want like it might be cheaper to verify a a a proof or get an oracle feed on there and then you can just send that to whatever chain you want uh with kind of little cost so if you went to event before you'll realize that near is the blockchain for AI this is the big push um we want to become the ecosystem for AI and it's not NE necessarily that we have Integrations deep in the protocol level that's not really what AI is about we we are making some changes with intents and and stuff um but yeah we we we're trying to build out an ecosystem that is just full of AI and I think a lot of people have been saying that like data is the new oil as such and we're trying to bring as much data onto near and as much infrastructure and services so it makes it easier for you to build your AI application here oh I I I forgot I put this in but this is basically all the AI Partners inside of the ecosystem um that makes it easier to build your app here I think someone's taking a picture so I'll wait yeah take a picture quick if you want three two oh good and yeah how can you think about AI in a hackathon with n um well AI is the best place uh AI near is the best place to build with AI because you're not just building in agent on top of near you're also building an agent everywhere since we have chain signatures so why confine your agent just to one place why not have it be uh applied everywhere so if you build it on near then you can serve everyone with your agent everywhere essentially and yeah I spoke about the second point but the account model really goes nicely with agent creation since agents have given a bit more personality with their own named accounts and they can act by themselves and and live this live their own life as they want um and how could you use an like an llm to make decisions uh on blockchain so you can actually have a smart contract yield and resume and it resumes based upon uh an external external input and that input being like a a response from U an llm so you can actually have a smart contract controlled by AI essentially and blockchain is pretty difficult to interact with so how can we use blockchain uh how can we use AI to make it easier to interact with what can you build here's just some ideas the first one is really quite cool uh but quite simple basically there was an application that was made before a few months ago uh where there exists a treasury full of meme coins and what you have to do is you have to Shi this smart contract and this uh AI model your own meme coin or some other meme coin and the better you shell the meme coin the more the treasure work treasury will rebalance its token Holdings so if you shell it well enough then it will buy a load of Your Meme coins which is just a fun little use case but it really shows what you can do with a l um inside of a smart contract and next indexes they're kind of a pain to set up so why can't I just say to some model hey build me an indexer that gets me this and this information um that would really make life easier so if you can build some sort of infrastructure or service that is made so much easier by AI that would be a great application and like I said with a agents and named accounts you could have an agent that acts autonomously inside of a blockchain's games economy so it can go around buying skins or like weapons items whatever as nfts inside of this economy whilst no one is even online so it makes the world and the game a little more like real life and I just talk about some announcements that came recently uh that might be worth noting when you're thinking about building uh n just came out with well near AI uh came out with an assistant which it's like chat GPT but these models are very limited by they can't they can't perform actions for the user very well so inside of this interface you can let it control your near account and sign and form transactions for you um and also generate interactive front ends inside of the model so this might come in use when you're when you're building take a look at that there's also the research Hub so if you're interested in developing these models we have a competition for people to build a model with it's starting at like 0.5 trillion parameters for then going up to uh 1.4 trillion uh and there's like a competition to train these models in decentralized manner basically and we have a new transaction type com in called intent which basically says Hey I want to perform this action but I don't know how to perform it and then I can have some solver come in which can be an AI agent to uh complete that for me and finish the transaction we also just had ethereum wallet support so you can plug in metamask to your applic now on near so if you're coming from like a solidity ethereum background you could just use the wallets that you're familiar with and we also just had Omni Bridge announced which uh with chain signatures it's very diffic very easy to sign transactions on other chains but it's really quite difficult to get backwards uh well Omni bridge is allowing you to verify State on other chains through like light clients various message passing protocols um yeah cool stuff and QR code time if you're not in our group I think most of you are but scan this QR we have links to our docs on there and also like a telegram group so if you can't find us about um then just ping me in there I'm like the big orange musly cat in that telegram group so if you you want to talk privately just just ping me and that's everything I'm going to get some food now come talk to me in the queue if you have any questions and thank you [Applause]