Hello NEAR fam, it’s time for our monthly NEAR Forum rendezvous and we couldn’t be happy enough to share the September Progress Report. With gratitude and greetings to everyone as we enter the next quarter, here is a quick summary of the past month:
- ikhimaz has turned out to be a stellar contributor to the NEAR ecosystem. His artistic creations for the NEARchan Guild’s DTIYS contest were featured twice on blenderartists.org and Blender Nation:
- スケーター - Finished Projects - Blender Artists Community
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夢 (Dream) - Finished Projects - Blender Artists Community
To raise awareness about the Paras IDO, he gave away his featured NEARchan artwork to the NEAR community (100 NFTs to be sent out soon by him):
https://twitter.com/NearScout/status/1440270888436330502?s=20
- NIA was able to identify Whiteboard Crypto as one of the finest content creators in the cryptocurrency space at a fairly early stage. We were quick to form an alliance with them to create high-quality educational content about NEAR Protocol. This resulted in an introductory video about NEAR, with lucid and comprehensive explanations, with bite-sized information and engaging infographics.
The idea behind this alliance was to have a quick learning explainer about NEAR and to tap into the Practical Psychology and Whiteboard Crypto communities by spreading the word about NEAR. Why Practical Psychology? Because Theodore, the owner of Whiteboard Crypto (almost 100K subscribers) is also the owner of Practical Psychology, a channel with around 2 million subscribers. He is now a good friend and apart from YouTube videos about NEAR, we will be exploring other areas of collaborations, like blockchain workshops, open courses and podcasts etc in the future.
We are already seeking guidance of Alexei Papou from the Aurora Team to write the script for an Aurora video in the coming weeks. He has been kind enough to provide us with all the learning resources we need.
The aforementioned video is now the second most viewed stand-alone video on NEAR and will keep serving as a handy guide about the project sustainably:
- What is NEAR Protocol? NEAR Explained with Animations - YouTube
- https://twitter.com/NEARProtocol/status/1441829244594634756?s=20
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NIA members are actively involved in assisting existing and up and coming projects in the NEAR ecosystem by way of providing them various services, from outreach strategizing to community moderation and social media optimization.
NIA members participated in the beta-testing and genesis minting of the Cheddar tokens by voting for it on the Cheddar DAO and have been actively moderating and walking the Cheddar community through the project. Having already talked to Blaze and agreeing upon it, we will be entering into a full-fledged agreement with Cheddar this month, to build a strong, loyal and informed community around the project organically. This will involve everything from social media management, community engagement, building playbooks for moderator FAQs, market research, additional dev support and user growth assessments. -
We are successful in sustaining the growth in NEAR Scout’s metrics and the next step would be taking cue from our learnings so far and trying out some new experiments to further grow these numbers:
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NIA has also entered into a partnership with NEARWEEK to expand their digital footprint, help bring more value to the community, increase readership and sustain community participation. This is a broad, expansive partnership and one of the many solutions we came up with for instance is the upcoming NEARWEEK State of the Art product, the first edition of which will be published in October. We will also sync with NEAR Games Guild to help us. Right on time to capitalize on the advent of web-3 gaming and NFT innovations on NEAR:
Introducing "NEARWEEK State of the Art" a NEARWEEK x NIA collab
We ran an extensive competitor analysis with @JPALHUMAIDAN who has been kind enough to give us creative freedom and together we have come up with a plan to make NEARWEEK the best-in-class news platform for a blockchain community. All we can say now is this will involve overhauling the entire service and restructuring some of the existing approaches in the coming months. -
NIA has also partnered with NEAR SWAG @frederikhansson to drive community engagement on the Swag Store. From the many ideas we have come up with, we will be launching the first ever NEAR Community SWAG Design Contest in collaboration with Paras and Mintbase in the coming weeks, possibly after NEARCon considering the packed schedule of all participants. The idea is to get the entire community mobilized and engaged in voting on NFTs, submitting designs, wild promotional campaigns on social media and supercharging wallet transactions and DApp interactions organically by getting various ecosystem participants involved. Like an NFT League of sorts wherein the highest voted NFTs get listed as posters, swag etc on the NEAR Swag Store. We have already discussed the plan with @Grace @frederikhansson @JMaenen and the Paras and Mintbase teams. Right now these platforms are setting up the technical infrastructure and creative framework for the contest. After a green signal, NIA will activate the marketing support button and post the complete details on the forum with announcements by NEAR, Paras, Mintbase and officially kickstart the competition in the coming weeks.
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We got in touch with Daniel Ospina, the Head of Governance at Aragon and set up a NEAR x Aragon fireside chat, all about DAOs between @starpause from NEAR and Ivan Fartunov from Aragon as part of a PR push for the Astro DAO launch. Aragon is one of the earliest movers in the DAO space and they have a very loyal, DAO-focused community. The fireside chat will be streamed in the second half of October and NIA will work with not just the NEAR Marketing but the Aragon Marketing team to promote it on both ends.
Note: There could not have been a better time than now with them implementing the Vocdoni update, NEAR launching Astro and the DAO Global Hackathon happening around the same time as NEARCon to build up this collab. DAO Global Hackathon hackforfreedom.org is supported by Gitcoin, Aragon, Agora Space, Mintgate, Radicle, UMA, SuperFluid and various other leading projects. Getting Astro/NEAR involved as a supporter can be a great way to boost the marketing/hype around Astro launch. -
DJ Jeff Gold joins the NIA as the newest member and he brings with him great firepower to the NEAR ecosystem. Jeff is an acclaimed DJ who has played shows and concerts around the world and is a smart contract developer (Solidity, Rust). His vast and rich experience and network will be a big boost for us. Can’t wait to build great things for the NEAR Community with him.
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NIA’s Rejinderi is giving final touches to his efforts to bring Emblem Vault (emblem.finance) Circuits of Value (circuitsofvalue.com) to Aurora and we hope to get it deployed in the coming few weeks. It’s a $24 million project with a unique use case. Emblem Vault is a tokenized multi-asset wallet that wraps crypto portfolios into a single NFT token for various chains. Link to a recent Decrypt coverage: Emblem Vault NFT Sales Rise 225% in Week - Decrypt
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NIA got Human Guild connected with Will Robinson from DeFi Alliance’s Web-3 Gaming Accelerator to discuss potential partnerships or collabs with NEAR games. They recently launched a multi-million dollar gaming incubation fund. Will Robinson will be a guest in an episode of the NEXT CREATORS podcast by the Human Guild.
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NIA has been working closely with @JMaenen, one of our advisors to leverage social media to drive more engagement and community growth. Joep has also introduced us to his new team members, to streamline information and guidance sharing and to bring more coordination in our collective efforts.
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Staying consistent with our roadmap and expansion plans we will continue to build up on ongoing initiatives and keep looking for new ways to drive community engagement and foster our outreach efforts (shout-out to @David_NEAR who helped us set up an NIA email for our website when we needed it urgently; @ross for guiding us on our outreach approach and @shreyas for guiding us on how to build an effective strategy to delegate responsibilities within the team).
September was fun and this is by no means an exhaustive summary of what we have been up to. Looking forward to an even more exciting and productive October. Let’s have a brainstorm session about anything and everything NEAR! Please feel free to connect with us at nearintelligence.agency or say hello to me on t.me/chronear
Already excited for next month’s!
