Community Update: April 10th, 2020

Welcome NEAR Community,

We hope that everyone is doing well. You spoke, we listened. We’ve put together a series of interactive online events on topics you’ve let us know you want to learn more about, including Privacy and Blockchain, Decentralized Exchanges, Building on NEAR, and more. We’ve outlined a few of the upcoming events below, and thank the 65 participants who joined us virtually this week! Have a topic you’d like to explore with us? Let us know here.

Ready Layer One 

We’re excited to announce Ready Layer One, a collaboration between Cosmos, NEAR, Polkadot, Protocol Labs, Tezos and more! Ready Layer One is an interactive, immersive virtual event that contains talks, workshops, and rants by everyone from well-known speakers to community-sourced contributors. 

Think of it as the intersection between a hackathon, a conference, a masterclass seminar and a vaguely anarchist festival for developers and builders of the decentralized web. The content will help you learn how to build decentralized applications using the next generation of layer 1 protocols.

Tickets are free but limited, and are reserved for the developers and builders who are contributing to the decentralized web! We need to get together to figure out how crypto & blockchain tech can help prepare the foundation for our future.

You can access NEAR Community Tickets through participating in our community events; more details below. OR, sign up to host a talk, workshop or another digital event of your choice! Visit readylayer.one for details.

Community Events

We have started hosting several community events, below are the details to each. Active community members have a chance of winning a Community Ticket for Ready Layer One. 

AMA: Privacy and Blockchain

This AMA is on the intersection between Privacy and Blockchain. COVID-19 will give governments and companies reason to deploy further surveillance tools. 

Questions arise, such as: How can users protect themselves from privacy-infringing technology? How can Blockchain help to protect user privacy? How are dApps different to Web 2 applications? 

When? — The AMA will take place in the main channel of our Discord Group on the 16th of April at 8 PM CEST, which is 2 PM EST, and 11 AM PST.

You can submit your questions to the following survey and we will get back to you with a response.

Thursday Jam

Weekly interactive Zoom call in which NEAR introduces different aspects of building dApps. From mental models and use cases, over getting our hands dirty with specific examples and real code.

When? — Every Thursday at 4 PM Pacific Time, which is 7 PM Eastern Standard Time

How to join? — Please message us on Discord and you will receive an invite, or access events over our community calendar.

Community Talk

In this call, we invite projects and researchers from the open web ecosystem to introduce and discuss different concepts and projects. This series started off last Wednesday with an introduction to decentralised exchanges. If you would like to get involved, please let us know.

When? — This call takes place on a bi-weekly basis; the next one will be on the 22nd of April at 5 PM CEST, which is 11 AM EST, on Stablecoins.

How to join? — Please message us on Discord and you will receive an invite or access events over our community calendar.

Windows Ready

We’re excited to announce that our primary introductory app now works seamlessly on Windows. Before, Create NEAR App worked best on Windows Subsystem for Linux, but it now can be run natively without all the downloads and preparation. The only requirement is to install NodeJS. Our goal is to onboard folks as quickly as possible, and this update will speed up workshop and hackathon progress for PC users. 

We’ve also included Window compatibility in our new examples page. We have a selection of examples tagged with Windows-friendly that include custom instructions for Windows users. 

We want to thank our community members who reached out about Windows support. We’ve heard you and appreciate the feedback! ❤️

How You Can Get Involved

Join the NEAR Contributor Program. If you would like to host events, create content or provide developer feedback, we would love to hear from you! To learn more about the program and ways to participate, please head over to the website.

If you’re just getting started, learn more in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol or read the official White Paper. Stay up to date with what we’re building by following us on Twitter for updates, joining the conversation on Discord and subscribing to our newsletter to receive updates right to your inbox.