NEAR Community Update: February 28th, 2020

Welcome to the NEAR community update!

In this community update, we want to introduce Stardust, which is one of the projects that is building on NEAR. The Stardust API just went live, and within a few weeks of its launch, they are already supporting over 2,000 players daily. If you are creating a game, collectible art house, or any other business with NFTs (non-fungible tokens), you can use their API to help you leverage blockchain technology in under 10 lines of code. How cool is that? Reach out to Canaan to learn more and check out their website at https://stardust.gg/.

We are really excited to see what projects are building on NEAR. If you would like to contribute to NEAR or start your own project, we would love to hear from you. 

Content Highlight

We released a blog post in which Alex explains “How Randomness Beacons based on Threshold Signatures work”. Modern Proof-of-Stake protocols need a source of unbiased randomness. Dfinity pioneered the idea of using threshold signatures as such a beacon. This post explains in simple terms how such randomness beacons work. 

Engineering

The engineering work on the unbiased randomness beacon is in full swing. We pushed the cryptographic primitives and are almost done with the integration.

It will take time to stabilize the beacon, and the initial launch of NEAR will use a simpler beacon, in which block producers have one bit of influence. The simple beacon is done and pushed.

The team is largely in the stabilization mode, preparing to restart Stake Wars. In the past two weeks we have fixed a variety of issues:

• Distribution of reward based on the stake, not seats:
  https://github.com/nearprotocol/nearcore/commit/3e6b14a5ba7112223e6aea69a4eda1991c873cf4
• Fixing the pricing of storage:
  https://github.com/nearprotocol/nearcore/commit/4d9b1a45a2804ffed31f560807e2ce2757f0e352
• Using the correct epoch for approvals on epoch switch:
  https://github.com/nearprotocol/nearcore/commit/fcb0746d9b629716e58b575638b14d0f4d36086d
• Fixing an inconsistency in the epoch manager:
  https://github.com/nearprotocol/nearcore/commit/fc4e26852fbe40734fe6e2c3edfecfbbe3d49ce4
• Fixing a bug with empty method names:
  https://github.com/nearprotocol/nearcore/commit/29cb2522870d4a33824a25f9e2fe8d897251a5b5

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.