First off, Happy #NEARvember folks! October was probably our busiest month so far, we built a lot of new connections, kickstarted a bunch of new initiatives and found ourselves taking on a host of new experiments too. Time does fly! Here is a summary of activities:
NIA at NEARcon: nearcon.org
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Gave a joint talk on the importance of layer-0 (people) in the Web-3 economy with NEAR’s resident rock star @David_NEAR at the Kick-off event.
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Our relationship with Staking Rewards which began with a podcast with @illia and Kenneth Garofalo in August, solidifies further as Staking Rewards became an official NEARcon partner. This is a big morale booster for our outreach to potential external partners to continue building upon these relationships for more collaborative value.
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Video production for the Open Shard Alliance’s NEARcon presentation about NEAR Validators.
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Partnered with @orztirrstudio for video production for a teaser trailer of the DragoNEAR game at NEARcon: Selected Gaming Highlights (October 2021) - YouTube
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Partnered with ikhimaz to organize a DragoNEAR Egg Hunt during NEARcon - several people participated and found the dragon eggs by scanning the QR codes and many of them posted on Twitter. The dragon egg NFTs will be sent out this week, including the one of a kind NEARchan DragoNEAR NFT
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Our relationship with Aragon also progressed significantly as we got Ivan Fartunov, their Head of Partnerships to be a panelist at the DAO panel at NEARcon with great support from @Grace and team for making it happen.
Other Highlights:
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Recorded and published a DAO hangout with @Ozymandius from 4NTS Guild, @starpause from NEAR Foundation and Ivan Fartunov from Aragon as part of the Astro awareness push: Deep Dive into the World of DAOs - Fireside Chat with NEAR Protocol and Aragon - YouTube
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Ivan helped get NEAR as one of the sponsors/partners for the DAO Global Hackathon, which is the biggest web-3 hackathon in the world, focusing on DAOs: hackforfreedom.org
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Finalising the NEARWEEK State of the Art launch strategy (Introducing "NEARWEEK State of the Art" a NEARWEEK x NIA collab) and building a network of ecosystem partners with @JPALHUMAIDAN - launching mid-November (postponed due to NEARcon).
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NEAR Scout is tirelessly spreading the word about NEAR:
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Partnered with Paras and NEAR Swag for the Paras x NIA x NEAR Swag - Card4Card contest wherein the top 3 most traded NFTs will be listed as official NIA swag on NEAR’s official swag store. The idea behind this experiment was to drive creative engagement and increasing the wallet transactions and quality NFTs on-chain by leveraging a simple growth hack: https://paras.id/publication/card4card-is-back-this-october-616d7ceeee25ff5cc2b63053?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=card4cardoct
The results will be announced this week and then we will have a better assessment of the experiment but going by the rough estimates so far, the week long event saw some significant traction with more than 1,000 NFTs being minted and thousands (units) being traded under the Card4Card category. We will continue such experiments. -
Talked about Games on NEAR on the new Rise N Grind show by 4NTS Guild:
Rise and Grind, NEAR Ecosystem Ep. 1 - YouTube
Rise and Grind, NEAR Ecosystem! Episode 3 - YouTube -
At the Guilds Demo Day: NEAR Guilds Demo Day - YouTube
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Recorded a video with Aliaksei Papou, Operations Manager and Michael Birch, Senior Engineer (Engine) at Aurora as part of an awareness push, produced in collaboration with our partner Whiteboard Crypto for a NEARvember release. Michael and Aliaksei will also help by proof-reading the script for the video.
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Updated the NIA website https://www.nearintelligence.agency
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Received 4 applications on our member/ecosystem onboarding form and short-listed one applicant. We have been in touch with them and have already had a video call. The person is a computer programmer with Solidity and Clarity smart contract knowledge and is studying Rust at the moment. We will get them onboard.
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Our partnership with Cheddar Farm has officially taken off as well, as we assisted the Cheddar Team and Cheddar DAO in organizing their first community contest: Cheeziest Meme Contest by Cheddar Farm
We are also assisting the Cheddar team with outreach strategizing, community engagement and building a $CHEDDAR utility platform.
NEAR Hub DAO:
We kickstarted the NEAR Hub project along with Orztirr Studio initially as an experiment but it evolved into something much bigger than we had initially expected. It is now a full fledged community project and we found it very hard to keep up with all the developments within a closed group. Hence we decided to launch the NEAR Hub DAO, which will oversee the development of this initiative and help us manage it much more efficiently: Introducing the NEAR Hub DAO
- VR experience for Astro DAO under construction with website interaction and function calls from within NEAR Hub.
- Experimenting with Community Choice Awards via the Astro space station, to make voting more fun for the community: https://twitter.com/NEARdevs/status/1453116735998025733?s=20
- NEAR Testnet Wallet has been integrated and is running smoothly.
- Full NEAR Wallet integration underway and should be complete this month.
- Paras Metaverse Museum being built (fingers crossed for an NFT NYC showcase which is being coordinated by @jlwaugh and he is also guiding us to make the metaverse experience more user-friendly and valuable for NEAR natives, once NEAR Hub launches).
- Scaling up the servers for the landing website and starting the journey from testnet to mainnet wallet, which would enable features like interactions with NEAR Projects, NFT minting, tipping fellow players, gated content, on-chain functions etc.
Business on NEAR DAO:
Learning from @Rejinderi’s success in talking to Shannon Code, Lead Developer at Emblem Vault (emblem.finance) and convincing Circuits of Value (circuitsofvalue.com) to move to Aurora/NEAR led us to the conclusion that instead of working in a silo, we need to synchronise our onboarding efforts with the larger ecosystem’s success in order to do justice to the efforts and have a more structured approach to project onboarding. Hence we have decided to channel all such efforts by NIA’s Mercantile Caucus to the Business on NEAR DAO which has been set up as an Ecosystem DAO for this very purpose: Introducing the Business on NEAR DAO
Emblem Vault should be deployed on Aurora fairly soon and a host of other projects are also on our radar and we are constantly educating them to migrate/expand to NEAR.
Road to NEAR Intelligence Collective:
We are well on the track of evolution, growing from NIA to NIC as we DAO’ify our initiatives and start setting up a family of on-chain niche units under one umbrella.
We started NEAR Intelligence Agency as a Warpspeed Guild to supercharge our launch and facilitate faster scaling of NIA activities and to allow us to move aggressively towards our goals. While we will continue to experiment, engage, explore and evolve - our goal is to have NIA positioned as a key, indispensable component in the NEAR Ecosystem, with a product-suite, service-range and governance of its own. The long-term plan is to replace the NIA as the main organization, effectively making it one of the many sub-units contributing to the broader NEAR Intelligence Collective (NIC) group of sub-DAOs.
The NEAR Intelligence Collective (NIC) will eventually replace the NIA as the parent guild to a host of contributing sub-units (Mercantile Caucus, NEAR Hub, etc) that will all work along side NIA - under the NIC Guild. This will be a completely new experiment where a guild reorganizes itself to spin up more individual sub-groups, each focusing on different set of activities but all working together, under the new umbrella. We will keep working under the NIA banner till we have the NIC ready to be instituted.
Some necessary steps would be:
- Setting up an NIC DAO and transitioning towards the NIC is going to be our main focus moving towards next quarter.
- Assessing, prioritising and categorizing all NIA activities to facilitate the transition.
- Rebranding and communicating the change effectively.
- Never stop experimenting and learning!
Grateful to everyone from the NEAR Foundation/Core who has been guiding us and for the constant support. Looking forward to an even more productive November and months to come. We love brainstorming on all things NEAR. Please feel free to reach out to me at t.me/chronear and let’s chat about NEAR!
