Guild Program Launch
COMMUNITY
June 4, 2020
At the beginning of the year, we started our Contributor Program to directly work with community members on NEAR initiatives. Since we began, people around the world have been looking for ways to get more involved. Communities have spontaneously popped up, both online and in-person, to support the project. For instance, the Russian NEAR community has reached several hundred active members. 

The main goal of the next stages of our MainNet launch is to further decentralise the protocol. This does not only include technical power distribution but also community involvement. Building on the experience of our contributors, we would like to make it easier for organizers and leaders to get support for their communities and receive rewards for the work they do to drive the mission forward for all of us.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of the NEAR Guild Program. 

Guilds date back to the Roman times, where they were connected groups of builders, makers or merchants. More recently, the term has transitioned into the gaming world to describe teams of players who unite to support each other on missions and quests. In our case, Guilds refer to community hubs with a common interest in supporting the open web ecosystem. 

Guilds are represented by a Guild Leader. The Guild Program gives Guild leaders and their communities rewards when their work is aligned with a healthy ecosystem. These rewards might include things like the number of active developers or apps associated with the Guild, referrals provided to other NEAR programs, running validating nodes or simply claiming bug bounties.

Who Should Lead a Guild?
Are you excited about the open-web space? Maybe you are currently building and nurturing a community or you are tired of standing on the sidelines and want to get involved yourself. Maybe you already have a vibrant community as part of your business or just a circle of friends who like to read white papers. Guilds are for the blockchain enthusiasts, the futurists wanting to create a better tomorrow, the early adopters and technical gurus.

If this speaks to you, you can either start a new community or register your existing community as a Guild. This program is designed to empower those who want to take ownership of their community, to get developers engaged in the open-web space and set up community members for success. 

This is the second NEAR community program. The existing Contributor Program is focused on individual contributions to NEAR’s engineering efforts and it will continue. The Guild Program is focused on community contributions. In essence, the Contributor program is “Single-Player mode” and the Guild Program is “Multi-Player mode.”

The Difference between Contributors and Guilds
If you identify more with the contributor program, we would like to invite you to sign-up here. 

Cross-Guild Cooperation
As a Guild Leader, you will be able to share resources with other Guilds so you can advance the skills of your community. This will allow us to advance as a global community. 

The exchange of resources, initiatives and idea generation will take place within the online portal. Think about it as a knowledge base.

You can use the portal to:

Connect with other Guilds and NEAR contributors
Highlight your successes
Receive rewards based on the initiatives you share
Receive community support and participate in global initiatives
Take the Community Into Your Own Hands
What do we mean by this? In short: As a Guild Leader, you decide how you want to shape your Guild. 

Do you want to run online meetups? Have in person-events? Host workshops or invite external speakers? 
Where is your community going to interact? In-person, on Discord or Telegram? 
Do you want to shape your community around a project? Will it be focused on developer or validator education?
The only thing we ask you is to share your local knowledge, initiatives and resources with the global team of Guild leaders. 

Rewards
A fundamental belief of the Guild Program is that NEAR communities should be rewarded for contributing to the progress of the ecosystem. There are three ways this will occur in the Guild Program: one-time “Boosts”, ongoing “Rolling Rewards” and “League” rankings. 

Boosts apply to one-off activities, such as bounties, that a Guild can claim within a fixed time period. These are centred around engaging community members to participate in the NEAR ecosystem. Additional examples of Boosts include referring people to other NEAR programs or to use apps on the network.

Rolling rewards will be offered based on the Health, Power and Contribution of the Guild’s members. In other words, these reflect how engaged Guild members are, how active they are in core ecosystem activities like developing apps or running nodes, and how many one-time rewards they have collected along the way.

Finally, the League system provides a ranking of top Guilds based on their growth and effectiveness. An active and growing Guild community will advance to higher leagues and receive rewards. Here is the initial league structure and associated rewards:


Note that the number of tokens listed here is subject to change over time. Additionally, citizens in some geographies (for example non-accredited US and Canadian citizens) may receive alternative rewards that are not in token form. 

Additional perks will work their way into the Guild Program over time. The goal of the program is to identify and reward communities who provide value to the ecosystem. Thus, incentives will be adjusted to make sure that’s the case. 

For Example: The Berry Club of Ukraine
The Berry Club of Ukraine (“BCoU”) is a fictional Guild which engages its members by hosting educational workshops and occasional hackathons. They have an active Telegram community where they keep in touch with each other and many of their members are developers who build with NEAR. 

One team of developers won a Hackathon this month and their app has been a surprise success. They run a validating node as part of the Stake Wars program to play with the network and learn.

The BCoU might receive the following rewards one month (which are purely for demonstration purposes and may not reflect actual reward structures):

Boosts: 1,720 NEAR
Boost this month: New referrals to the Developer Program: 34 @ 10 NEAR each = 340 N
Boost this month: member participants in the NEARHacks online hackathon: 15 @ 20 NEAR each = 300 N
Guild Bonus: Additional 5% of prize for NEARHacks first place rewarded to team from BCoU: 20,000 N @ 5% = 1,000 N
Multi-month ongoing Boost: Members who fund their NEAR wallet for the first time: 8 @ 10 NEAR each = 80 N
Rolling: 981 NEAR
Currently active members of the Developer Program linked to BCoU: 55 @ 10 NEAR each = 550 N
Bonus for successful apps deployed by BCoU members: 331 NEAR
Running a node with 99% uptime on BetaNet as part of the Stake Wars program: 100 N
League Ranking: 1,200 NEAR
Silver: Based on last month’s Boost rewards of 1680 NEAR and Rolling rewards of 445 NEAR, BCoU was the #9 ranked Guild and thus earned a 1,200 N bonus this month.
TOTAL: 3,901 NEAR

Getting started
Submit an application to become a Guild Leader. If selected, we will follow up with you about next steps, including

Invitation to the NEAR contributor portal
Resources to help you get started
Do you want to start your own Guild and be part of our global network? Apply now.

Undecided? Have questions? Feel free to reach out in our community channel.