NEAR is going to ETHDenver!
COMMUNITY
February 13, 2020
NEAR will be at ETHDenver and we can’t wait to see everyone there. It’s always exciting to see what ideas gain a foothold year after year. ETHDenver is an annual hackathon and conference that brings together diverse minds who are passionate about decentralization, Web3 & the blockchain ecosystem.

With the recent launch of NEAR’s EVM Compatibility, and incentivized testnet competition, we are excited to get more developers and entrepreneurs building on NEAR Protocol. 

We have three bounties for you worth $1,500 each.

🌈 Use the NEAR <> ETH Bridge

⛓️ Deploy an EVM-based smart contract to NEAR

👉 Use cross-contract calls in Rust

Read on to learn more about NEAR Protocol, what you can build, and how to participate in this year’s hackathon.

What’s NEAR Protocol?
With NEAR you can build, deploy and scale in minutes. NEAR Protocol is a scalable, Proof-of-Stake blockchain. It’s designed to provide the performance and user experience necessary to bridge the gap to mainstream adoption of decentralized applications. 

Whether you’re still looking for inspiration on which tech to build on, or are interested in building a truly decentralized application with world class support (our team can always be reached here), we’re excited to meet and hear from you in-person and online.

What can I build with NEAR, and what can I win?
We’re proud to continue our support of ETHDenver with both our participation and bounty sponsorship. 

Things NEAR is excited to see this ETHDenver :

what’s new in the DAO scene
oracle advancements
DeFi 
the future of scalable smart contracts 
the latest updates to contract-based wallets and accounts
NEAR is building for the builders. We invite you to come tinker, then build the open web with us.

NEAR is on the WebAssembly train! WebAssembly is the solid choice for modern smart contract development. It extends the possible set of smart contract programming languages to include choices like C#, Kotlin, Rust, and more. The smart contract examples in the NEAR Documentation are currently written in Rust and AssemblyScript. AssemblyScript is similar to TypeScript (which taps into 10M JS developer market), and actually compiles a subset of TypeScript to WebAssembly with ease.

Don’t have experience in Rust or AssemblyScript? No worries. Depending on your preference for backend or frontend, you can write and call smart contracts on NEAR intuitively. We’ve got some great examples to explore online (https://studio.nearprotocol.com/) and/or run locally (https://github.com/nearprotocol/create-near-app). Make sure to also look for our in-person workshop at 11:30am on Friday at ETHDenver for hands-on experience.

For the frontend folks, our ReactJS project generator will get a NEAR app running within moments. This may be particularly appealing to those familiar with the JavaScript build processes who enjoy quickly iterating. Once you’ve written your smart contract and compiled it to WebAssembly, you can choose how to interact with it. In addition to our ReactJS app, folks can interact with the blockchain with our slick shell tool. For example, after setting up a simple configuration you can deploy and call a contract from the command line. Since all of the code that runs the NEAR chain, tools or libraries is open source, you can jump into the libraries to see what’s going on.

Another cool feature is the concept of a human-readable account name with multiple keys for various purposes. Want to allow another account to execute a function call on your smart contract? Dole out a key! To visualize this aspect of NEAR, you may visit our Wallet to see this behavior in action.

The elements cited above are fun pieces of tech to tinker with at ETHDenver, but there’s a bigger picture. NEAR’s vision is to enable the builders to build the open web together. It starts with a strong foundation: a solid VM, an extensible and future-proof plan for smart contracts, fun languages to write in, access keys with variable permissions, libraries that speak to JSON-RPC, and most importantly a team mindset inclusive to all. We invite you into the fold for all of it.

What are NEAR’s bounties? 
Use the NEAR <> ETH Bridge
Build an application that uses the NEAR <> ETH Bridge to make calls to Ethereum contracts from a NEAR smart contract
Prize: $1500
Resources:https://near.ai/bridge
Deploy an EVM-based smart contract to NEAR
Deploy a Solidity or Vyper contract to NEAR, and use the NEAR Wallet in your frontend to call the contract’s functions.
Prize: $1500
Resources:https://near.ai/near-evm
Use cross-contract calls in Rust
Write a smart contract in Rust that makes a cross-contract call. This can be from one NEAR contract to another (in Rust or AssemblyScript), or to an Ethereum contract using the ETH Bridge!
Prize: $1500
Resources:https://near.ai/cross-contract
How can I meet the team at ETHDenver?
NEAR has four team members on the ground at ETHDenver. We’re excited to bring our engineers, product, and accelerator team together with developers. On Thursday, February 13th, Sasha is hosting a discussion, “Into the Open Web” at #ETHDenver, and Kendall will be chatting about the future of the Web at Distributed Networks Summit. Or come chat with us Friday, February 14th at 11:30am at NEAR’s Protocols & Interoperability ETHDenver Workshop. Kendall and Illia will be talking about how to write, deploy and interact with Rust, TypeScript, and Solidity smart contracts on NEAR: a sharded, Proof-of-Stake public blockchain with a WebAssembly-based runtime. 

NEAR also supports EVM smart contracts (Solidity, Vyper), and the use of Ethereum assets via a trustless, bidirectional NEAR <> Ethereum bridge.

If you miss our workshops, you can look for Kendall (@kendallc), Mike (@mikedotexe), or lllia from our epic engineering team, or grab Sasha (@AliaksandrH) if you want to talk product-market fit. NEAR will also have ongoing online support; the team will be active on the ETHDenver Discord as well as NEAR’s own channels. NEAR’s primary developer support channels are Discord and the NEAR Forum. We encourage you to say hello to the team and ask questions!

Register for the ETHDenver Hackathon here!

Links:

http://near.ai/economics

Follow @NEARprotocol on Twitter to get notified about new content we post, and get the latest updates on the development of the protocol.