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Edge Of NFT At ETH Denver: Interviews With NEAR Protocol, Cronos Labs, And Offchain Labs
It may be a bearish market right now but that doesn’t seem to preclude innovative creators in the Web3 space from thinking of cool new projects. This episode features the Edge of NFT live from ETHDenver 2023. We interviewed three different companies about how they’re looking to shape the Web 3.0 industry and beyond. Stay tuned to learn how NEAR Protocol is a blockchain creating without limits, how Cronos is a blockchain combining both the Ethereum and Cosmos Ecosystems, and from our final guest whose interview got cut short due to technical issues. We’ll learn more about how the blockchain Arbitrum‘s suite of scaling solutions provides faster speeds than Ethereum but with the same level of security. Tune in for all of these and more!
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Edge Of NFT At ETH Denver: Interviews With NEAR Protocol, Cronos Labs, And Offchain Labs
This episode features the show live from ETHDenver 2023. We interviewed three different companies about how they’re looking to shape the Web 3.0 industry and beyond. Stay tuned to learn how NEAR Protocol is a blockchain creating without limits, how Cronos is a blockchain combining both the Ethereum and Cosmos Ecosystems, and from our final guest whose interview got cut short due to technical issues. We’ll learn more about how the blockchain Arbitrum‘s suite of scaling solutions provides faster speeds than Ethereum but with the same level of security. Stay tuned.
I’m so excited to be here with Illia, the Cofounder of NEAR Protocol. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for inviting me. It’s great to be here.
It’s been an exciting few days for us and I know you had a big announcement about NEAR and where you guys are going. Why don’t you tell our readers about what you talked about? It’s exciting stuff.
If you remember one thing from this show is that NEAR is the BOS. Let me unpack that. Overall, we have always been building mass adoption toward giving users the control they need, the assets control, the data control, and all of these things. The problem is you always start from building foundational infrastructure and it’s a very developer-focused and centric view. At the same time, we have a pretty big ecosystem.
There are thousands of projects building but they all are still very fragmented. They’re building different pieces of experience. There’s no single place where users can come and start experiencing navigating. There’s another part which is most of the blockchain is not very decentralized because you are still at the end at UniSwap.org website. You have Curve that got hacked. You have the front nds that are developed by the centralized team and are highly susceptible to issues.
What we have launched is a new layer that allows us to build composable front ends that are decentralized that are served from the blockchain. This is then built on an already existing data stack we have on top of any blockchain. With that, you can start building applications and user applications extremely fast that are fully decentralized. The front end and back end are decentralized. You can use any smart contract on any blockchain. You can have new apps that use Ethereum smart contract and NEAR smart contract at the same time in one application, one experience. Users will not know about it. They’ll log in and start using it.
They’ll launch a lot more things like search, notifications, and all of the experiences that users are used to in one package. That’s what we call in Blockchain Operating System. It’s a place where developers get all of the tools and services they need to build. The users can come in and use applications and not think about hardware or the blockchain behind the scene. All this we released at Alpha.Near.org. This is where the preview of this is happening. There are already over 2,000 users there and a lot of developer activity as well. It’s going to be rolling out over the next few months wider.
You guys have been busy. This is a massive announcement. Can we rewind in terms of who you are and how we got to this moment and how much preparation went into this?
I’m from Ukraine. My background is in machine learning. I’ve been doing machine learning for a few years. I was at Google Research working across natural language understanding. I contributed to a paper that right now all of the ChatGPT-3 stuff is based on. I left Google and partnered up with my cofounder Alex. We were starting to work on how to use some of these models to generate code. We wanted to automate software development.
As part of that, we ended up building a crowdsourcing system. We had people around the world, mostly students working on small tasks for us and we needed to pay them like micropayments. It’s hard to do with the traditional financial system, especially when you’re paying into China, Russia, and Ukraine back then. We started looking at blockchain as a solution to our problem while we were doing something else. The more we got into the rabbit hole, the more we realized there is a problem in the blockchain that is very not solved.
When was this?
This was in May 2018. This was after the hype of the ICOs, etc., but there is a technology that’s supposed to be a global payment network but when you start trying to use it, it’s super complicated. It’s super clunky and expensive. It doesn’t scale. We had a few thousand people a day, for example, and it was not scaling. It was more expensive to pay people on Ethereum than how much we were paying them. We were like, “That’s a problem.” We started digging on what are our alternatives, approaches, protocols, etc.
We did not find anything that was approaching from base principles of how we sell scalability but maintain usability. How do we keep the experience of using the blockchain as removed from the user as possible? That’s what NEAR started with. How do we make it simple to use and build for developers? It should be secure and it needs to be scalable. It’s simple, secure, and scalable.
Blockchain was piece number one as a foundation as a structure, but we always were building user tooling, developer tooling, and focusing on end-to-end experience. This announcement is tying it all together. It’s because we started as layer one but in reality, it’s not about layer one. Layer one is the component you need to build this enabling experience for the users. That’s why we’re calling it a Blockchain Operating System.
I could have used BOS back in college. Had we met back then maybe ten years earlier, you would’ve gotten started earlier because I was working remotely with a company doing optical character recognition processing with a team of college students at my own college and other colleges all over the world. I was trying to figure out how to do these micropayments to get them compensated for taking these characters and processing them. It was difficult back then too. I totally get it. I think there are a lot of micro-economies that can benefit from this technology.
In the end, what blockchain is good at is opening up markets and everything in our life is a market. We don’t usually perceive it that way. Right now, it’s so hard to even when you do have it on the chain to access it. We are making it easy, cross-chain available, and the liquidity to flow. At the same time, the user experience is you don’t need to think about any of the blockchain details.
With the big announcement that you did, which I think is quite remarkable. You were starting to get into Alpha.Near.org which is the BOS which you all are bringing out. It’s very timely as Josh was alluding to how back into college he was starting to build. He was trying to create these things. People call it a bear market. We’re in a builder’s market. It’s time for people to build and you all are creating a process for people to be able to do that. Why would more and more people enter your ecosystem to participate in this latest drop?
A quick note on the bear market. We started in pretty much August 2018. If you remember, this was on a full-on steep dropdown. We built through 2019 and launched in 2020. 2019 was great. There were so little distractions. You could focus and build a reputation. It was amazing. For us right now, it’s an amazing time. We are building and shipping. Our team started shipping faster.
Your team isn’t trading crypto as much. They’re just working.
It’s really exciting and we see similar things happening to our developers in our ecosystem but what this BOS platform allows you to do is develop faster. It’s not only developing faster in Web 3.0. This is a faster development environment for frontends already in Web 2.0. We see some people building Web 2.0 applications on this as well. You don’t need to do hosting, identity, have payments embedded, need a stripe or anything. You can compose from existing pieces quickly new experiences. What we already see is this is going to be a better developer experience and that’s always what we were trying to do.
Web 3.0 should be better than Web 2.0. It should not be like, “We should be matching the Web 2.0 experience.” No, it should be 10X better. It should be building faster. You should be attracting users faster. There should be better network effects because users have control. They don’t have issues and the onboarding should be easier, not harder. You should be coming with your social graphs. If you’re using a new app and you already have your social graph, you don’t need to re-onboard and refollow everyone. It should be really quick. That’s what we’re getting right now. We have a social graph already on chain. We have all these pieces coming together now and we see people like building new experiences that are possible to do with Web 2.0 but it’s going to take you so much longer.
Here, you can ship things in 1 or 2 days. That’s why I’m citing here for the Hackathon because we have a bunch of bounties. We have a bunch of things for people to build. After this, we’re going to continue rolling this in. We already see a bunch of people coming and I’m sure there’ll be more and more. Even from Web 2.0, we’ll see the power of this.
Your ecosystem is off also quite robust. I’m in LA and there are a lot of NEAR builders and projects that are spawning from the NEAR ecosystem. We have Chris Gale coming on our show. He is the founder of the new NFT marketplace on NEAR. What is some of the existing projects that everyone should know about that are being built on the NEAR ecosystem that you’re excited about?
I will name a few but then I’ll get a lot of shit for not naming somebody else. I’ll apologize. The ones that I think are exciting. There’s a whole host of NFT marketplaces that are amazing so far. There’s Mintbase and Paras. There are a few others that are de-aggregators. All of that is powerful because NEAR is always been designed for utility first. A lot of these folks are working on cool experiences like utility enablement and working with existing companies to create some experience around NFT and not only drop and not have anything from this.
I think that’s exciting. There’s a lot of gaming that’s built around these communities. It’s a cool game set. They take time to build. They are way more way longer usually than one expects. We have cool financial applications. I’ll name Orderly because it’s solving the problems that we’ve seen with centralized exchanges by having a decentralized order book where the order book itself is off-chain.
You still have the performance of centralized exchange but all the custody and settlement happens on the chain right away. You cannot do things that we have seen centralized changes do with this model while you still have exactly the same experience as centralized exchange. They’ve been growing and they’re launching more products. Keep track of that. There’s a lot of exciting stuff in DAOs. People keep experimenting and the social IP ownership spaces are interesting.
The social niché as well in LA. Check it out. Its mini-communities and NFT-enabled but also creates niché communities. I think it’s where the social interactions are going anyway and IP ownership spans from SailGP owning a team with a DAO through, for example, Kino where the community fund the movie and interacts with it. You have a very big range of what IP ownership means but that use case is extremely powerful. There’s a ton of other stuff. There’s infrastructure and tooling but the end-user experience is where it’s getting exciting.
As you’re looking at this, more and more builders are coming to your ecosystem. You have a lot of different pieces of your ecosystem that are making it more possible for users to onboard and become part of that mass adoption. The mass adoption word is something that people like to toss around or talk about all the time. Right now, during this builder time and as you launched BOS, you’re trying to help bring that out by allowing your developers to come and be able to build easier and bring on those devs over into Web 3.0. Also, for your end-user experience to be more fluid. What is it going to take to keep moving mass adoption forward?
BOS is not only the developer platform. It’s similar to Windows back in the day and right now the iOS and iPhone. It’s important that the platform itself gets enough audience so that it becomes the distribution channel and then developers want to come to it because it’s a distribution channel. People started wanting to build for iOS early on because they knew there were enough iPhones out there.
What we are doing with BOS and with Alpha.Near.org is starting to build distribution and audience. There are few core primitive social interactions and engagement that start a lot of this. We’re still starting with our community. Right now, it’s Superfans are still Web 3.0 users but we are dropping, boarding, and making sure that we’re going to be using biometrics for creating private keys behind the scene so that users don’t even see that.
ETH Denver: What we are doing with BOS and with Alpha.Near.org is starting to build distribution and audience. There are few core primitive social interactions and engagement that start a lot of this. We’re still starting with our community.
You look at your phone and you’re in. You have your private key. It’s self-custody. It’s synced. It’s in iCloud or in Google password but you don’t even need to know about that. As soon as you have the engagement, you have followed and we’ll have gross engines on top of this. This is a two-sided market. Developers are building new experiences and then we bring in more and more users into these experiences and match them.
What we’ll need to figure out is how to build better and better matching with the discovery part. I think that’s where the network effect is going to start because everything is on the same platform. Users have control over their data and can interact with any of these apps and experiences. They’ll see that, “I’m going from here to here. I still see my friends but now they’re interacting with music.”
We have music applications as well, the Tamago endless. You can go, “I see this new person that I saw listening to this music. They’re organizing a DAO to go to a concert together.” You can join that. You can have these interesting flows and interactions between different experiences. We don’t have this in Web 2.0 and on Web 3.0. This is what we’re trying to put together and a lot of growth behind it. We onboard a lot of users from Sweatcoin and from other already existing audiences. Right now, it’s still logged on to one application to give them a lot of engagement.
It’s exciting to hear how all this is coming together for NEAR and where you guys are going. When we talk about mass adoption, there’s the hockey stick analogy and it feels that you guys are trying to push this whole industry forward, not only what’s happening in NEAR itself. What’s the timing in terms of where we are in the hockey stick and not having rose-colored glasses on? When do we hit that inflection point based on how you see the acceleration growth within the NEAR ecosystem?
There’s still a lot to build. As I said, we’re launching for example easier onboarding. We’re launching a lot of better recovery methods and all of those pieces. Understanding every drop-off point for users is extremely important. Similarly, Sweatcoin, for example, has 120 million installs. They have the user base but that user base is not activated yet. They’re not fully engaged with all of the experiences on the blockchain. We need to do both. We need to drop the onboarding lower and lower but then test and try the engagement. This is normal product work. We’re talking about stuff that everybody does but we’ll need a lot of experiments and see. Our goal is to have it coming together for NeoCon.
When’s that this year? We’re not trying to trick you but that will be coming up in what quarter of 2023?
In the first quarter. I think we’ll see pretty nice growth from that and more cohesion between all these applications. Again, not just the NEAR Protocol blockchain but another blockchain as well. We already support MetaMask log-in. You can use the Sender as well. We can see how the whole Web 3.0 ecosystem is going to be coming together on a bus.
That’s pretty incredible and a lot of people reading this right now are excited. They’re like, “Now is the time. I’ve been waiting for that moment to try to get with NEAR.” How can people start to engage and learn more about BOS and everything that’s going on?
You can start with NEAR.org. If you are interested in diving in, that’s where to go. We are working on onboarding. There are still some kinks. That’s why it’s awful but that’s been an engaging experience already. As I said, 2,000 people are interacting there. There’s a whole real live feed that people are following. There are applications and games that are already built there. Some other experiences, financial experiences, and NFT experiences. The NFT marketplace is built inside the BOS already. There is a lot of stuff to play around with and give feedback on. If you’re a developer, build some more stuff and see it grow as more and more stuff gets launched.
We appreciate your time with us, Illia. I know there’s a lot going on at ETHDenver. I hope it’s a meaningful process from here in terms of getting those builders to get pumped about what’s going on. We’ve got Outer Edge LA and we are working with some of your companies on that. We look forward to maybe seeing you in NeoCon and being part of that and getting some updates. Thanks for your time.
It sounds good. Thank you.
We are here with Ella Qiang, the VP of Ecosystem and Partnerships at Cronos Labs who’s creating an open source of internet value. It’s so great to have you with us Ella. Thanks for taking some time out to hang out.
Thanks for inviting me.
It’s been fun here. How’s your ETHDenver been so far?
It’s been very interesting. There are a lot of valuable conversations are happening but also a bit overwhelming.
I also want to tap into your background a little bit more because I think it’s cool. Cronos is a public layer one blockchain that inter-operates with both Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems backed by Crypto.com and more than 400 dApp developers and ecosystem partners. A veteran in the Web 3.0 industry since 2016. You are the Director of Partnerships at Stellar Development Foundation followed by various roles in investment advisory DeFi.
It’s cool to see you come and be a part of ETHDenver. As you said, you came out here and you’re seeing all of these people and it feels a little bit overwhelming as this is one of the first big events that you’ve been to. That’s a pretty bullish sign to see how many builders are here right now. What’s your take on seeing this many people here?
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Jake is speaking at our event.
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