Our Last Update | December 13th, 2019
COMMUNITY
December 13, 2019
Friday the 13th, our last community update… Until next year! This is going to be our last community update in 2019. Our next update, on Friday the 27th, is going to be an end of the year special. Mark the date in your calendar! 

Now that we got that out, here is what we have been up to over the past weeks. 

We are heavily working on NEAR-specific content. Episode four and five of our ‘Lunch & Learn’ Series are out. For those of you, who are new to the episodes, it is basically a whiteboard series by Near on NEAR, explaining all aspects of the protocol. The fourth episode covers block finality in Nightshade, and in the fifth Evgeny takes a deep dive into runtime. If you have any comments, questions, or would like to request a topic, please get in touch on Discord.

Becoming stable — Stake Wars has been up and running for almost a month now. Let’s give a huge shout out to everyone, who has been sticking around and filed issues on GitHub. Since our testnet being more stable, we are changing the structure of the program. We will be rewarding running nodes and test scenarios. Follow the validator and stake-wars-announcement channel on Discord as well as the GitHub repository for further updates.

31st episode of NEARProtocol’s Whiteboardseries is out! Watch it here.
COMMUNITY UPDATE
Similar to our engineering approach, we like to iterate on existing community programs, once we feel the need to change the scope, to make those more effective. We are currently working on two community programs that build on our learning and feedback from previous community efforts. More information is going to be announced soon!

UPCOMING EVENTS
2020 is right around the corner and we are getting ready for the new year. I can only tell you this much, we are going to be back in Asia at the beginning of 2020.
If you are in the Bay Area, come and say hi at our office, we love to chat about user experience. In the meantime, our “Blockchain Hack Night”, a bi-weekly meetup for developers and blockchain enthusiasts in the Bay Area, is taking a little winter break. We will be back on the 15th of January.
Jan, one of our beta program participants, has been hosting several meetups in Prague. Check-out this photo from yesterday’s meetup.
Jan’s meetup
WRITING AND CONTENT
Check-out the latest Chorus One Podcast episode that Felix recorded with Illia on NEAR staking economics.
The 31st episode of our whiteboard series is out! Join Kevin Davis from Kava Labs and Illia for a deep dive on cross-chain DeFi, stablecoins, and Kava’s tech.
Do you want to learn more about NEAR? Then head over to our “Lunch and Learn” Series on YouTube. We have just published the fifth episode, in which Evgeny explains runtime.
Let’s celebrate the last days of 2019! Photo by NordWood Themes
ENGINEERING UPDATES
132 PRs across 24 repos by 26 authors. Featured repos: nearcore, nearlib, near-fiddle-api, near-shell, near-explorer, near-bridge and near-wallet;

Implementation of the fork choice rule in nearcore
Network graph cache in nearcore
Progressive slashing for double signs (as opposed to 100% slashing) in nearcore
Adding staking for fishermen (to prevent challenges spam) in nearcore
Light clients support in nearcore
Computing light client blocks
RPC endpoint that serves light clients
Published v0.4.8 of nearcore
Fix memory leaks in both ShardsManager and network routing table.
Use stake as weight in finality gadget
Store hash instead of actual values in trie nodes.
V0.16.0 release of near-shell, including
Allow easier formatting input for attonear
Use NEAR as default unit
Min node version requirement
Search by block height in near-explorer
Implement API for signing individual transaction in near-wallet
Published v0.17.3 of nearlib
Added documentation explaining receipt matching in nomicon
Lastly, check out the ongoing discussions for the design of cross-shard composability in NEP (here and here)
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.

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