Soon… | NEAR Update: June 14, 2019
COMMUNITY
June 14, 2019
We’re extremely close to getting our new consensus, Nightshade, deployed to TestNet! Over the last two weeks we’ve been merging big blocks of it into master branches repos that will be affected. Bear with us during the transition, there will be breaking changes. You can now send money in the wallet, as well as see and manage authorized applications. In addition, you can deploy contracts in Rust to our TestNet. Co-founder Illia has been traveling through China for talks and demos with the Web3 Foundation.

COMMUNITY AND EVENTS

We want everybody to be able to take part in building the decentralized web with us. So we’re sponsoring a Twitter pitch competition for the next 6 days to give away a free ticket to DWeb Camp. Check out the tweet above for how to enter.
Illia is in China! He has been presenting alongside Polkadot, Chainsafe, Edgeware and others in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing about NEAR, usability and sharding.

Great time with Illia from Near Protocol. pic.twitter.com/UNv5mzDj1l

— Kaikai Yang (@KKYohlala) June 14, 2019

We’ve partnered with the Web3 Foundation to host regular Twitter chats on topics relevant to the crypto community. Our first chat was on usability; the second on blockchain gaming. Tweet at us (@NEARProtocol) if you’d like to suggest a topic!
Upcoming events:

Alex is giving a talk on usability and scalability at IBM’s Blockchain Developer Summit on June 21 at Galvanize, San Francisco. Tickets available here.
Max is giving a talk on using Rust to build smart contracts at RustLab in Florence, Italy on June 29. Tickets available here.
Jess, Peter and Vlad will be running a Crypto-Prototyping Series at DWeb Camp, south of San Francisco (July 18-21). It will be a multi-day immersive experience for the decentralized web community run by the Internet Archive. Tickets available here.
Alex will be talking at the Web3 Summit in Berlin (August 21-25). Tickets available here.
WRITING AND CONTENT
We’re happy to release the two videos from the blockchain gaming panel and the DeFi panel we recorded in New York. We’ve also got a new whiteboard session with Monica from Kadena, and a new series we’re launching called Fireside Chats. These are going to cover war stories from blockchain founders, starting with blockchain gaming. Lastly, we released another article on avalanche. Links below!

Videos

Future of DeFi — Panel | NY Blockchain Week
Blockchain Blockchain Gaming in 2019 — Panel | NY Blockchain Week
Fireside Chat with Devin Finzer | NY Blockchain Week
Whiteboard Series Ep 19 with Monica Quaintance from Kadena
Whiteboard Series Ep 20 with John Pacific from NuCypher
We Sponsored Nueva Hacks. Here’s the video.
Writing

Avalanche vs The new IOTA consensus algorithm, with a touch of Spacemesh
ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS
We’ve had 58 PRs across 9 repos and 10 authors in the last two weeks. Featured repos: nearcore, nearlib, near-shell, and near-wallet. Don’t forget, it’s all open source.

Overall, a lot of progress in the app layer and merged Nightshade into master.

Application Layer

Wallet
Authorized apps management
Various UI fixes
Display proper username in profile
Send money fixes
Account recovery fixes
Fix login redirect (when recovering account / setting up new)
Nearlib
Setup CI for Nightshade integration
Refactored to TypeScript with relevant updates for Nightshade and cleaner and extensible API.
Support adding keys to accounts
AssemblyScript/bindings
Merge with latest upstream
AssemblyScript JSON
Update to work with latest upstream
Use as-pect for tests
Studio
Wait properly for compiler loading
Basic end-to-end tests for studio workflow (running on CI)
Rust Smart Contracts
We now support smart contracts written in Rust
Near CLI
Command syntax improvements
Attach tokens to calls
Send tokens
View account
Blockchain

Added self-call for contract-based account.
Major progress on separating large logical blocks into chunks for the new Nightshade sharding design (commits 1 and 2). Still WIP.
Switched to u128 for balances / stakes across the board.
Implemented validator rotation and staking transaction
Restored all integration tests
HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED
Join us! 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.

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