TL;DR: Rainbow Bridge Soft Launch, kicked off NEAR’s Q2 Initiatives 
, some new partners and programs launched, and we’ve rolled out an updated events calendar for 2021.
Product Launch
We made a big step forward this week with the soft launch for the Rainbow Bridge Mainnet. 
This major advancement opens up NEAR’s economy and Ethereum’s economy to merge, and allow for all the things that can’t live on Ethereum to be done on NEAR while still benefiting Ethereum. We will be making more noise on this very soon but for now invite you to come join us and test it out!
- Get Started: Front-end
- Check Stats: Dashboard with NEAR-ETH transfers so far
- Ask Questions: Telegram support channel
- Check Repos: CLI guide
Supporting Major Q2 NEAR Initiatives
A lot of work is being done on the marketing side (and across NEAR) to support the Q2 initiatives outlined for the NEAR Collective. This includes:
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Supporting Creators and Communities Economy*: This is everything related to creation (NFTs, collectibles, gaming, virtual worlds, community tokens, etc) and the associated economic activity.
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Open Finance: The financial layer that powers the creator economy and brings financial tools to consumers.
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Open Web: powering web2-style platforms with blockchain in a hidden-blockchain way. Users interface with the login/identity but shielded from blockchain for the rest.
Sample ways marketing is supporting these 3 NEAR Collective initiatives:
- Aligning with various artists, influencers, communities, and partners to create use cases and experiences that demonstrate the power of creators / communities, Open Finance and Open Web.
- Helping to craft stories and visuals that extend across online and offline marketing channels and highlight our partners to help tell these stories.
- Growing our Discord channels to engage more around Creator Economies (NFTs, Community Tokens, DAOs).
- Sponsor various events around the globe to showcase partners, communities, and creators.
- Creating collateral and tools to help spread love for NEAR’s protocol and ecosystem.
- Working with Wachsman PR on wider amplification of these stories.
- Buying relevant targeted ads placements in various publications to help support awareness, trial, and advocacy.
- Partnering with influencers to help create excitement and awareness.
We’re looking forward to sharing more about these initiatives in upcoming updates. 
Branding Updates
The brand website and brand update remains on track and the brand agency, MilkInside, is working on an overview to share with everyone sometime next week.
We’ve also been working on the brand identity for Aurora (Bridge + EVM) coming out later this year. We’ll have comps to share with everyone soon. 
Ad Campaigns
We’ve been working to secure ad placements (for the next 3+ months) across various industry publications and podcasts to support various launches, initiatives, and campaigns. 
We’d love to hear in the comment section if there are particular placements/podcasts you think would be a good fit for NEAR.
SEO update
SEO refresh work / updates are progressing and we’re seeing a positive impact from this on traffic and conversions. This includes more site traffic, higher conversions on new users clicking on CTAs (ex. Follow us on Discord button) and an overall increase in followers. We are seeing less drop off on landing pages where we’ve updated messaging and CTAs.
It’s also helping with discoverability with NEAR’s Twitter. We’ve been growing steadily month over month and are up to almost 6K new followers in the month of March! 
Events & Experiences Updates
Event season is here! Here’s an overview of some of the action: 
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@Erik Trautman participated in a partner webinar with TessaB on 3/30. This is a great example of Brand Advocacy efforts with our partners. Audience was largely comprised of media. Want to watch it? Peep HERE.
- CV VC Panel Opportunity open to all featuring @Peter DePaulo on 4/6 2pm PDT: “Unicorns debate on DeFi and the relevance of Scalability & Interoperability”.
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OWC’s Batch II Demo Day - it’s a 3 day event, please share with your networks!
- The Ethereal Summit is being organized by Decrypt on 5/6-5/7 and NEAR has been asked to participate. We are exploring what our presence will look like.
- Collision Speaker Briefs for @Illia’s Roundtable and @Matt Lockyer’s Masterclass kickstarted.
Other pipeline items:
- Bridge Town Hall TBD but likely 4/12
- Consensus
- PorcFest
- Community and Creators Conference +Hackathon (5/14 new date)
- Federico Solmi Art Showcase (date TBD)
- Mintbase + Wilde Moehre
- Grace Hopper Speaker Submissions (due 4/14)
- NFT.NYC Speaker Submissions
Partnership and Program Launches
We’ve kicked off an exciting new campaign with South Pole, a leading project developer and global climate solutions provider. We shared that Octopus Network has concluded their seed funding round. Quite a few educational courses launched including: NEAR Academy, NEAR Certified Developer and finally we outlined next steps for the NEAR India Accelerator program with Lumos Labs.
-The NEAR Foundation Marketing Team