The First NEAR Community Town Hall (Monday September 28th)

The NEAR Foundation would like to cordially invite you to our first community Town Hall on Monday, September 28th 2020 at 10am PT (1pm ET / 7pm CET / 1am (+1day) CST).

This is the first of our town halls, which will occur every 4 weeks on Mondays.  While we have numerous ways for the community to stay informed (eg subscribing to the newsletter, joining on Telegram, following on Twitter, participating in various open calls, etc), this is the first general opportunity for the core team and members from the community to interact in a more open forum.  You’ll hear what’s going on with the project, what’s new in the community and upcoming opportunities to participate.

This post will lay out the agenda and show you how to get involved.

Video Recording

The video recording of this event will go here once it is ready.

Format and Agenda

The town hall is 60 minutes long and occurs live on video using the Hopin platform (sign up here).  As a participant you can submit your questions directly in the platform or participate in Discord’s #general channel in an unstructured discussion.

0:00-0:10: Introduction from the NEAR Foundation

Erik Trautman, CEO of NEAR Foundation, will set the stage and introduce the NEAR project and its current status.

0:10-0:20: Project update

Illia Polosukhin, CEO of Near Inc, will describe the high level initiatives that are going on as the project finishes the transition to MainNet Phase II and beyond.

0:20-0:28: Live from the Developer’s Studio 

Peter DePaulo, Developer Relations lead, will describe the cool things that have been shipped recently and what devs in the community should keep an eye out for.  In the meantime, check out the new Blockheads series on YouTube and jump into the Hack the Rainbow Bridge hackathon, which ends on September 30th. 

0:28-0:36: App feature: Mintbase

Nate Geier and Carolin Wend, founders of Mintbase, will introduce the project, which recently switched to NEAR from Ethereum. As they describe it, Mintbase is the shopify of the new virtual economy. Users deploy their own stores (unique verified smart contracts) and tokenize and sell music, art, tickets, memberships, game items, services and products.

0:36-0:44: App feature: Flux

Peter Mitchell, CEO of Flux, will introduce the project, which is one of NEAR’s earliest. As they describe it, Flux Markets is a highly scalable open market protocol that enables prediction markets on any asset, commodity, or event. By building on NEAR Protocol, they enable cheap trading on-chain and super fast resolutions. Flux delivers on the original promise Augur made to the Ethereum community — fast, permission-less, efficient markets on anything.

0:44-0:50: NEAR Validator Advisory Board (NVAB) Update

Viktor Bunin, Protocol Specialist from Bison Trails, a NVAB member, will introduce their work around criteria that could help inform when the community could vote to move to Phase II. He is looking for feedback and a discussion of the criteria to be held on the github issue and subsequent community calls (9/30 at 9pm ET and 10/2 at 12pm ET). As a reminder, these criteria are a starting point: everyone is free to comment and vote as they please. Viktor is helping shepherd the process to collaborate with the community on a successful mainnet launch.

0:50-0:60: Signal boosts and Q&A

Pitching upcoming community events and addressing some of the Q&A from the participants in the event.

How to Participate

You can join the event on Hopin at: https://hopin.to/events/near-community-hall-1 

Your can ask questions in the Hopin chat or on Discord’s #general channel or on Twitter ahead of time.

The video will be posted above when available.

See you there!

Erik