NEAR BELT AND ROAD: Building Bridges on NEAR As A Strategic And Necessary Development Play

Ecosystem
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TLDR: NEAR has a rare opportunity to put themselves at the Universe of Chains, by leveraging Rainbow Protocol to connect its novel governance, financial and fundraising infrastructure to all of crypto.

I want to keep this short so that the impact is felt most clearly.=L NEAR has a huge opportunity to position itself in the early development of the crypto landscape by building fully decentralized and permissionless bridges between other major and emerging ecosystems.

This move, much like the historical transition from mercantilism to liberalism, will position NEAR to become the ‘Commercial Center’ of DAOs, DeFi, and Fundraising across the Crypto-verse. It means that bridged ecosystems can use Sputnik DAOs for their management needs, projects can use Skyward and fundraise in their own bridged token (beyond ERC20), and Bluechip DeFi on NEAR like Ref.finance will be able to list tokens from across the crypto verse. Appchains on Octopus will also stand to benefit from direct bridging to Cosmos and Polkadot, as will Flux Oracles.

This is a strategic play that we estimate will take 12 to 20 months at the earliest to fully build out. It is a window of opportunity that is ripe for the taking and that (surprisingly) no other protocol (from what we can see) has seriously taken advantage of most likely becuase no other protocol has infrastructure like Sputnik or Skyward on top of it.

Bridges We Should Build (in nor particular order):

  1. Bitcoin
  2. Solana
  3. Polkadot / Kusama
  4. Cosmos
  5. Celo
  6. Binance Smart Chain
  7. Polygon
  8. Optimism / Arbitrum ?

Benefits:

DAO Positioning of Sputnik V2 (Calling Data and Moving Value with Bridges)

Launch Fundraising (Listing any Token on Skyward)

DeFi Token Accessibility / LPing / and Value

Fundraising for Venture DAOs from Across Crypto

Next Steps:

— Prioritize which Bridges Should be built first
— Identify Teams Able to Start Production Of These Bridges.
— Identify NEAR Support For These Teams to Ensure All Questions or Blockers Can Be Eased
— Develop Results Based Funding Plan For Each Bridge based on the roadmap put forward by each team.
— Fund each bridge through a Venture DAO like MOVE.capital
— Narrative control of this entire initiative (its kind of like crypto’s Belt and Road lol)

Lets do it !

23 Likes
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good one. keep moving forward

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You had me at NEAR Belt and Road :white_check_mark::white_check_mark:

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The right idea, marketing and advertising of the project itself is good, but still the main thing is to make NEAR something that will be used by as many people as possible. And bridges will make it open to communities that already understand what cryptocurrency is and will be able to appreciate the benefits of NEAR.

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This is a good strategic to help Near ecosystem get mass adoption. I think you guys should build bridges on Binance Smart Chain and Polygon first since these chain are popular and has large money flow right now.

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I do think the Solana and BSC will be good for a start

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More Bridges sounds awesome :sunglasses:

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This is a really great idea, it will make Near become more accessible, bitcoin and BSC bridges would be a good place to start of from👍.

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Great idea! Bridges open up great opportunities for developers.

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This is a really great idea! :rocket:

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Bridges are such an amazing thing. Excited to see these projects flourish!!

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Just to surface ongoing work - BSC bridge is in progress here: Rainbow on Binance Smart Chain by 3alpha · Pull Request #604 · aurora-is-near/rainbow-bridge · GitHub

If anyone wants to work on Solana bridge - send me a DM.

8 Likes
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Awesome idea! Love to see the ecosystem expanding

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@illia thx for sharing! We have a team that is starting to build the bridges for Polygon followed by Solona and more within the next 1-2 weeks. They can prioritise and scale up as needed.

Great comments all around btw!

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It doesn’t end there. Think of an additional layer of infrastructure created by gateways which bridge web 3 to web 2. I’m talking about automatically listing NFT sales on existing web2 marketplaces or easily integrating fungible tokens with existing trading platforms via a series of gateways, each of which is much easier to create on NEAR than anywhere else. This creates a fully interconnected system which extends this idea to making NEAR not just the hub of web3 but the nexus of all the “bridges” out to web2 as well.

2 Likes
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I have a friend that works for Fireblocks, and apparently a16z keep asking them if they support NEAR yet.

I think a Bitcoin bridge has to be a priority, as whilst most Bitcoin holders probably wont hold NEAR, all NEAR holders will hold some Bitcoin.

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OK as an ecosystem, we should concentrate more on most valued projects first