Ich Bin Ein Berliner | August 23rd, 2019

Ich Bin Ein Berliner! | August 23rd

We’ve been talking to a lot of you all in Berlin during the Berlin Blockchain week! What a blast, and what a fun/strange city. In other news, we’ve launched our ambassador program. We’re looking for folks who want to bootstrap their community and there is early access to pre-mainnet tokens! We’re not interested in Hodler or token speculation meetups, so don’t bother if that’s your thing. We’re very interested in technical, design, business and creative meetups that add to the Blockchain and NEAR ecosystem. Let your freak flag fly and we’ll support you.

In engineering, we’re excited to announce a new serializer for Rust. It’s called Binary Object Representation Serializer for Hashing (BORSH). Links with explanation and details below.

Finally, keep your eyes peeled for some content that came out of Berlin! We’re not quite ready to share, but we’ll tweet about it when we are. We talked a little bit about the difference between an app chain and a dapp platform, you can see the early video below and soon we’ll post something on it on the website.

In Berlin and don’t know who to talk to? Have no fear! ‘cuz the @NEARProtocol team is.. uhh.. near! https://t.co/FXAvTa09tt

— Ken (@puntium) August 17, 2019

COMMUNITY AND EVENTS

Berlin was action packed, with tons of epic talks. It feels like this year is the real year of growth for the ecosystem. Here is a retweet about Alex on the mainstage:

Challenges on sharding, one of the most interesting talks I heard so far at #web3summit by @AlexSkidanov @NEARProtocol pic.twitter.com/pxC9eJAYmt

— Mario Cao (@cao_mario) August 21, 2019

• We presented at multiple events for Berlin Blockchain week from web3 summit mainstage, to panels at the legendary Soho House, to the crowded and hot co-working spaces of Kreuzberg. Thanks everyone who showed up! And an even bigger thanks to the hosts. 
• Don’t forget! The IDEO hackathon is still in progress. It’s not too late to jump in, most of the work happens in the last few weeks. Don’t miss out.
• We’ve kicked off the ambassador program. Set something up in your community!
• We’re hiring aggressively. If you don’t see anything that fits you, email us!
• Illia was on several panels and presented. (Videos below and more to come.)
• Alex presented at the Web3 Summit on sharding. Should also be uploaded to the web3 summit YouTube. 

ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS

• 66 PRs across 12 repos by 19 authors. Featured repos: nearcore, nearlib, near-shell, and near-wallet
• BORSH (Binary Object Representation Serializer for Hashing) is a new library we’ve released serializing. 
  • Check it out: https://nearprotocol.github.io/borsh_web/
• Updated transactions model to support batched actions, e.g. create an account, deploy a code on it and make a function call in a single transaction
• Nearlib now automatically unwraps RPC results
• Added fees for transactions, receipts, actions to core
• Removed protos for byte serialization in core
• Fixed u64 parsing in assemblyscript
• Major refactor of the typescript runtime in progress
• Wallet
  • Allow scanning QR code for money transfer
  • Fixes to routing (now should change wallet pages without flicker)
  • Fixes to token amount display

WRITING AND CONTENT

• We’re on the ZK podcast! We’re biased, but it’s a pretty awesome ep: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/91
• Illia gave a presentation on the difference between App Chains and Dapps: https://youtu.be/Ufe-dvqNBHE
  • (Low quality, but it’s the best we could do in a pinch)
• Alex gave a new talk on the challenges of sharding! That should be available form the web3 youtube very soon

BONUS

there is someone masquerading as Alex Skidanov asking for Bitcoin on Telegram. It turns out that pretty much the entire team trolled them. If they ask you for BTC, make sure to tell them that you’re happy to send the funds, but you need help with your non-smart phone.

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED

Join us: there are new jobs we’re hiring across the board!
If you want to work with one of the most talented teams in the world right now to solve incredibly hard problems, check out our careers page for openings. And tell your friends!

Learn more about NEAR in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol. 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.

Reminder: you can help out significantly by adding your thoughts in our 2-minute Developer Survey.

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