Community Memo: Values and Focus

Hello, NEAR community,

It’s a tough time for everyone. Economic recession, massive drop in crypto and a somewhat pessimistic outlook, war, potential nuclear threat. People are stressed across the board, and all of this leads to more personal and family health issues.

So the first thing I want to say is that we all need to chill, take a deep breath.

The NEAR ecosystem is built around vision, values, and amazing people. If you were at NEARCON, you would have felt it.

We have to focus on that when things get difficult or uncertain, because all of this will happen again: this is Web3, we’re building something very new and it’s still early. It’s also very ambitious, which means it will not be easy.

Mistakes have been and are going to be made, that’s part of the growth mindset. Projects and efforts are going to fail. And even some companies building on NEAR are going to close. That is normal, we all together will find a place for people if that happens and learn our lessons. Some efforts will get funding from the ecosystem at large (not just NF, but eco funds, VCs, and community) and some won’t. And some people will decide NEAR is not the right place for them and they will leave, that will be their choice. These are not failures––they are part of growth.

It will hurt in the moment, but none of this should be a cause for panic. You can’t react to everything negatively and attack the people around you. Placing blame, attacking or undermining people pulls the entire community down.

Things take time. But it is time worth spending on your core efforts.

I understand the desire to try to capture every opportunity and expand as fast as possible when it always feels like NEAR is behind or doesn’t have enough users/apps/TVL/NFT volume. While everyone else in blockchain used unsustainable approaches to bootstrap growth, the NEAR ecosystem has tried to focus on the long term efforts.

Trying to do everything at once actually slows everything down. So far every time the team has focused on their core set of efforts, it has led to amazing results compared to when it was trying to deliver more value for the ecosystem and got spread thin. This includes me personally.

We grew out of a team sitting in one office in San Francisco. This went into COVID when everyone worked remotely and was isolated from each other, their friends and family. We then turned into the craziness of the bull market where it felt like everything was happening and NEAR was missing the boat. We had only just launched mainnet and not everything was ready, but we’ve made a lot of progress since then.

We have started spinning out efforts and starting hubs around the world to build presence, projects, and go to market teams. I still believe in this approach. I do think that decentralized organization is how we can compete with incumbents like Facebook and WeChat––reminder that this is who we are competing with for users, not other blockchains.

This speed of growth is often painful. We went from ±60 people at the start of 2021 to 200 in the beginning of 2022 to 1000+ across the ecosystem today, and in many different companies with loosely defined boundaries. With this kind of scaling, it can be hard to maintain a sense of community and closeness.

We are still early, most of the stuff on blockchain still doesn’t work. There are no blockchain apps that have PMF. Exchanges have PMF, but not much else. Stablecoins and yield generation have probably gotten the closest, though decentralized versions have gotten burned. And that is it right now. We all feel the pressure, but it is early days for the entire Web3 ecosystem.

So we can take our time to structure things right, align communications and coordination, set proper expectations that are clear and transparent, and figure out the strategy that is going to get us to 1B users.

We have really great fundamentals. We have an amazingly diverse ecosystem that is all aligned around the shared goal of mainstream adoption.

I appreciate everyone’s work and contributions to the NEAR ecosystem. Let’s try to never lose sight of what we hope to accomplish. Communication is the best way to ensure that we maintain a strong community that supports each other, and we need to keep figuring out new ways to communicate as we grow.

PS. If you are frustrated or think that somebody else did something wrong, turn that into specific feedback and deliver it to them directly. You may learn the reasons for why they did what they did, or figure out together a way to improve for next time (values: transparency, growth mindset).

The model to use is COIN: Context (what you are talking about), Observation (what has the other party done, from your perspective), Impact (how did that affect you), and Next steps (what you can do together to address this).

Join the AMA with NEAR Foundation leadership and me on 1 November to discuss some of the community’s current concerns directly (stay tuned on Twitter @NEARProtocol for details). Let’s focus on making NEAR the best community in Web3 and beyond.

Thanks for reading,

Illia

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Awesome words and perspective @illia , cant wait for tomorrows AMA with the NEAR Foundation, and what the future has in store for all of us in the weeks, months and years ahead.

:pray: :innocent:

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Can’t agree more on this: looking forward to AMA :handshake:

Looking forward to it @Paul and great job

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Looking forward to tomorrow’s ama…:cowboy_hat_face:

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Thanks for this @illia

Based on model of NDC, as shared in the first video presentation, Creatives DAO has created a governance model derived from the values we stand for and designed to ensure a more decentralised model of voting and funding distribution.

Your feedback and insight would be very valuable.

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Couldn’t have said it any better Illia! Thank you for this.

Best,
Chad Lamon

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After reading this, I am not sure I am a #NEAR maxi or #Blackdragon’s maxi. Wise words. Tough times create Strong Builders #NEAR #NEARisNOW

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Yes, We are creating without limits … :rocket:
These AMA will definitely ensure the project envision in the community mindset .

Let’s Join the Force - Near Foundation Leadership AMA :clap::clap:

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Thanks for writing this Illia. I appreciate your frankness here.

NEAR’s values include Ecosystem-First and Openness/Transparency. The foundation/affliated orgs as well as community product teams (including my own) have fallen short on these fronts.

We are still early, most of the stuff on blockchain still doesn’t work. There are no blockchain apps that have PMF. Exchanges have PMF, but not much else. Stablecoins and yield generation have probably gotten the closest, though decentralized versions have gotten burned. And that is it right now. We all feel the pressure, but it is early days for the entire Web3 ecosystem.

Our team is working on a public dashboard with every key metric, including ones that don’t look so good like DAUs. We haven’t provided aggregate data in an easy to analyze format, which has made it more difficult for the ecosystem to measure product traction. It’s on teams like ours to set a good example for the growing ecosystem going forward.

PS. If you are frustrated or think that somebody else did something wrong, turn that into specific feedback and deliver it to them directly. You may learn the reasons for why they did what they did, or figure out together a way to improve for next time (values: transparency, growth mindset).

Here are specific areas that I believe NF can improve on:

One area that has raised a lot of questions in the community is the opaque funding process. For instance, the “NEAR Digital Collective” was formed recently. With a large starting grant, this organization immediately becomes one of the most important players in the NEAR ecosystem. None of the major outside product teams had any input during the formation - the signatories only include NEAR-backed orgs and closely connected insiders. I’ve asked other product teams in the ecosystem and most had no idea about the existence of the NDC. We have submitted the interest forms (after the organization was formed) and have heard nothing.

Another area where the community is behind is open source. The trend of projects remaining closed source seems to have emerged in the last bull run as more alt-L1s with heavy VC backing emerged. Many top NEAR projects, including those that have received millions in financial support, are closed source. This is unacceptable in any decentralized ecosystem - can you name a major Ethereum project that’s closed source? Would you have ever touched Bitcoin if it was closed source?

Most users don’t read the source code of projects they interact with, but knowing other people can is key to promoting decentralization. I don’t check that every dollar bill I touch isn’t counterfeit, but it’s reassuring knowing I can easily find someone who can. How can we honestly tell users that they are using a decentralized ecosystem when they are interacting with a 127 validator chain with most projects closed source? I understand that true decentralization doesn’t happen overnight, but if we don’t create appropriate conditions now it will never happen.

The foundation has a powerful tool to promote improvement on the OS front: the grants program. One simple way to ensure grants benefit the ecosystem as a whole is to only fund open source. While it may make sense in certain one-off cases to fund major closed source commercial projects porting over, in most cases financing closed source projects just furthers the perception that grants are a form of picking winners and losers.

I applaud you for being willing to start difficult discussions like this publicly and tackling issues head-on. Looking forward to your AMA.

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Thanks alot @illia for those soothing and encouraging words…

We will get to the top of our goals and achieve Community values; with hard work, focus and sincerity.

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We translated this letter for our community.
Thanks @illia

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For anyone looking for the specific time for the AMA, here’s the Twitter announcement. Looking forward to it!

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Hi Marko, just a quick update. The NDC represents the government (governing bodies) of the “NEAR Digital State,” which encompasses the entire ecosystem.

The Governance Working Group (GWG) is a community-driven initiative to define evolving governance models that ease the Ecosystem into decentralization, and it is the formation/discovery phase. We’ve been working to define the scope, deliverables, and budget. After the initial discovery, it was identified that it made sense to take a pragmatic approach to decentralization instead of a “big bang,” so the transition will take place over time.

The community has been working on a volunteer basis thus far, so no funds have been received or bounties issued. Now that we have the scope, deliverables, tentative timeline, and 1 YR budget we will move to onboard both the community through bounties and a few resources to work in a more dedicated capacity. You can learn a bit more here:

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Thank you for this encouraging words Illia. Looking forward to tomorrow’s AMA.
Rough seas make stronger sailor, so cheer up near fam!

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Thanks for the response @blaze. Quoting the original formation post:

Signed: Pagoda, NEAR UA, NEAR Foundation, Proximity Labs, MOVE Capital, NEAR Balkans, MetaWeb, Orderly, NEAR Vietnam, Satori, Open Shard Alliance, Open Forest Protocol, Human Guild, Aurora, HAPI Labs, Calimero, OnMachina, Kikimora, AstroDAO, and NEAR Office of the Co-Founders

These are all spin offs of NEAR organizations or directly backed by NEAR. This is not a “community” driven initiative when no outside projects were involved in the formation.

The community has been working on a volunteer basis thus far, so no funds have been received or bounties issued.

No funds have been received. Have any funds been allocated by NF or any affiliated organizations? How will future funds be governed?

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Thanks for everything @illia .
AMA will be amazing!

We at fraDAO will be strong and keep our DAO projects and governance firm and strong.
Everything passes!

we wish you positive vibes and peaceful energy

Thanks

fraDAO

@frado @PatriciaB and @Narau

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i genuinely believe in near. we’ll be fine and better than ever :purple_heart: thank you for this.

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Thanks for writing this @illia . For the things I want to build with WebAssembly Music there are really no other platforms than NEAR to make it real.

I started using NEAR long before most others because of the unique approach of being able to use it as an application platform accessible even to non-crypto users, and I still believe most people out there have not understood what separates NEAR from other blockchains here.

And that it’s actually a evolutionary milestone when it comes to delivering Web applications, that actually deserves to be regarded as the next generation of the Web.

For sure worth building on beyond the hype.

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Ecohing Marko on the transparency related to the funding process. It is also raised in this thread about the lack of transparency for marketing related payments via Flying Rhino and favoritism being played to organizations close to the Near Foundation. Funds should aim to be distributed transparent via forums like OWS mentioned below Bring back ows[how to improve near & its ecosystem through rolling opportunities]

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