Insights on AI, blockchain, Web3, governance, and emerging technology. Building the autonomous, decentralized future.
NEAR AI recently launched “private inference” and a “private chat” experience that promises a new level of data protection: your messages are processed inside cryptographically isolated environments called trusted execution environments (TEEs), meaning even cloud operators or NEAR AI technologists and operators shouldn’t be able to see your data. It’s a major step forward for […]
What Stablecoins, CBDCs, and De-Dollarization Mean for the Future of Money For nearly eight decades, the U.S. dollar has sat at the center of the global financial universe. It’s the asset everyone trusted, traded, and measured against. But as technology reshapes how value moves and nations seek more control over their own financial destinies, the […]
BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) However this proposal reached us, I’m adequately convinced that NEAR’s inflation reduction is necessary for the protocol’s long-term health. vitalpoint.pool.near will support the inflation reduction and I, aaron.near, will vote to support HSP-002. As has been expressed, the current 5 % issuance rate was designed for NEAR’s early years, when […]
Let’s be honest – most people avoid crypto for good reasons. Scams, pump-and-dump coins, and endless stories of people losing everything make it feel like the whole space is nothing more than a ponzi scheme. And in some corners, that’s true. But that’s only part of the story. Behind the noise and the bad actors, […]
What is NEAR? Good question – it’s increasingly difficult to figure out, but I’m going to try and answer. As someone who has been building on NEAR and watching it go through identity crisis after identity crisis (or rebranding after rebranding) since 2020, it’s been kind of hard to keep up. There used to […]
Breaking down Proposal ID 11 – New Voting Mechanism in plain language… Purpose To define proposed functional and non-functional requirements for a new voting mechanism as part of the NDC Voting Framework (NDC VF). Assumptions active community members should have more influence than passive members voting should be private during the election I am Human […]
No matter the reason you want to set up and run a NEAR validator node, whether it’s to participate in NEAR Stake Wars III, to experiment, to contribute to NEAR’s decentralization, or any other reason – this step-by-step guide has you covered. In about 30-45 min, you’ll learn: which Hetzner server to use (and […]
No matter the reason you want to set up and run a NEAR validator node, whether it’s to participate in NEAR Stake Wars III, to experiment, to contribute to NEAR’s decentralization, or any other reason – this step-by-step guide has you covered. In about 30-45 min, you’ll learn: which Microsoft Azure virtual machine (VM) […]
Here we go with the Vital Point Pulse for April – where you find out what the guild has been up to in support of the NEAR ecosystem and what it’s planning to do in the coming month. Let’s get to it. Current Members: 12 (no change) Coming up below: NEARly die doing taxes this […]
Aim To consider the similarities and differences between guilds and communities in proposing a future-facing framework for community and guild development in the NEAR ecosystem. Background NEAR Protocol started a guild’s program around summer of 2019. Since then there has been a considerable number of discussions and evolutions centered around clarifying its reason for being […]
Here we go with the Vital Point Pulse for March – where you find out what the guild has been up to in support of the NEAR ecosystem and what it’s planning to do in the coming month. Let’s get to it. Current Members: 12 (no change) Coming up below: Did the Pistol Shrimps win? […]
Here we go with the Vital Point Pulse – where you find out what the guild has been up to in support of the NEAR ecosystem and what it’s planning to do in the coming month. Let’s get to it. Aaron’s Random Thoughts It’s unbelievable that another month has passed and we’re staring March 2022 […]
Onboarding is a Catalyst in the Journey to a Billion Users The founders of NEAR Protocol designed it from the bottom-up with a focus on usability both from an end-user and developer perspective. That focus, combined with super low gas fees, ~1s block finality, and infinite scalability via sharding make it feasible to develop applications […]
Welcome to another Catalyst situational report! Some time has passed, and with it, many new features, and goals. These last months have been a whirlwind of discussion, rapid development, and excitement for us, and we are consistently grateful to be creating this project within and for the NEAR ecosystem. Here, I’ll outline what we’ve been […]
This is a long overdue Catalyst SITREP (Situational Report). It’s the second SITREP Vital Point AI has published, but the first in what is intended to be a series of weekly reports outlining the progress that Catalyst is making along with short-term goals for the following weeks. I’m Emmitt and in the time since the […]
To ready Catalyst for deployment on both the NEAR and Ceramic MainNets, we needed to setup and host our own node on the Ceramic network. The current documentation to do that is a little sparse. So, in an effort to share what we’ve learned over many days of trial and error, we’ve documented and streamlined the […]
Today, I’m kicking off the beginning of a series of regular SITREPs (updates) concerning progress made on Catalyst development. In the military we use SITREPs to provide commanders with an update/analysis of the current situation. They can be sent at regular intervals or whenever something significant happens. The aim being to keep all who receive […]
Introducing NEAR Personas NEAR’s account system – with human readable names and innovative access keys – is a thing of beauty. NEAR’s focus on usability enables us to build applications that behave like people expect them to and abstract away some of the more blockchainy and cryptography parts of it. This focus not only […]
This is part 2 of our deep dive into NEAR accounts, contracts, and keys. To recap – the end-state for writing this multi-part tutorial (and hopefully yours for reading it), is to completely understand how accounts, contracts and keys work together opening up cool possibilities for projects. Reminder There are other excellent resources that also […]
NEAR accounts and Key Registration: Webinar During Hack the Rainbow, two of the NEAR Collective’s team members – Matt Lockyer and Sherif Abushadi – gave a webinar on NEAR accounts and Key Registration. They took the time to explain how NEAR accounts, contracts, and keys work. Shortly after, another awesome developer and member of the […]
In mid-June 2020, I joined the NEAR Guild Program. NEAR Guilds take many forms but in essence, they are communities supporting the NEAR ecosystem in some way. My guild is Vital Point Guild and it’s objective is to help people learn to develop using NEAR protocol by focusing on building and releasing projects for real […]
A huge foundational component of a couple of the DApps I’m currently building on NEAR are centered on user interactions and contributions in a community setting. One of them is a project I started this week that will even be a submission for HackFS. In attempting to architect them in a decentralized fashion, I need […]
