Hello Dear NEARians! How is your weekend going? Hopefully well
I’m writing this monthly report on the 20th to show the growth of our guild throughout March! What a month that it has been, we have quite a lot of news to share with you.
First let me refer you to the updates that took place last month:
After that, lets begin with the updates for the time being!
Current community and projects development
Telegram and Twitter - @Turco
Regarding our socials, we have an approximate 50% growth on both areas, Twitter and Telegram. From the last 161 members on our Twitter, we have an actual 250 follower base and we are still to get more users to be interested in it since we are about to launch spaces and get contact with academic influencers. Same as for Twitter, Telegram grew from 103 members to 148 for the time being.
We are working on categorizing most (or all if possible) of the traffic of our socials into the different areas (socials, academic and devs) in order to get them into projects or to certify themselves as Near Analysts or Developers if that is their particular case.
We are getting a lot of capable hands (and minds) into, which will be defined in this post in detail later on.
Academics and The 300 - @nacho.near
The 300 was presented as first as an EiR project, but we decided it would be more beneficial to bring our ideas together with Near Hispano and develop the area with them. We will work hard to get a lot of students to certify with Near, as Analysts, Developers, Professors and Instructors if possible. More on that can be found below.
Development Team - @leamanza
The Development team growth came to a halt at this moment since we are focusing our energy into getting more people to be certified as Analysts, we are at 17 as of this moment which is an increase by 2 from February but we are also helping them to certify as Near Developers as well, and we are also launching new projects with them in the near future. We will describe the new projects below.
Ongoing and Future Projects
We had to divide in two sections this Monthly update since we are having a lot of new projects on the way thanks to the last budget granted by Near Foundation and we are currently launching new initiatives to change the direction of the Argentina Region, for the better as always.
Self-sustaining
First and foremost we want to take our development a step further, and for that we are taking 100% in consideration the last topic related to the new structure that Near Foundation want to take regarding guilds, here we will attach it for reference:
We agree with most (if not all) of the points treated in the post above. We have a different opinion in some (will not go one by one because it will make this post really long but will give a general idea).
We agree regarding that there are a lot of guilds that do not scale, that their objectives or goals long term are not clear enough, also that some fundings may bring unnecessary drama to the scene, and that there may be favoritisms when we talk about guilds who are more proactive and efficient, and every idea related to the mentioned.
But we do believe it happens and by some means it may be necessary for other guilds to bring more to the table, for every guild to step up their game.
We do not believe its a problem but a virtue that brings this thriving ecosystem.
We do believe also that grants and fundings have to be earned and proved, and if guilds do not comply when showing what they can offer, then there will not be trust regarding funding or thinking that x guild would provide in delivering work of quality.
And we stand by it, even if it is our guild. Because that is what we promise or at least try everyday. A work of quality for Near Foundation and for our community as well.
With that in mind, one of our first and future initiatives is Self-sustaining and we wanted to make a separate section for it. The final details of it will be developed it in the next months to come since it surely will be a delicate topic to treat, but one that we hope helps the mission of guilds being autonomous and that it serves as an example for other guilds if they want to be autonomous as well!
There are plenty of ideas on the works, such as getting a percentage of the grants directly to every region that came up with a grant worthy project or that came up with a huge initiative to be funded. This will ALWAYS go back to the Guild’s development regarding getting new jobs to newcomers in the development, design, marketing, community areas and more! The idea is to someday have our own funds to dictate our growth, without intermediates.
More to come in a big post later detailing the final decision with the Argentina Community as well.
Moving on! Here we present the other projects that will take place in the future.
Build Guild Launch - @leamanza
New guild led by Lean Manzanal with the objective to target Developers into a guild in which they will be guided for future projects and to take part of the Dev Community into a DAO.
Will add future post for reference
Contact with Investors - @chicharra.near
With Ernesto we are working together in bringing a Housing Business Company into Near and a group of professionals in Computer Law. There will be two meetings and presentations with said groups about the Near Ecosystem and will aim to bring them as future investors.
More details regarding that will be presented in another post afterwards, since they manage a capital around the millions and we will seek to make a more professional approach with them.
TiR and Teaching in Mendoza - @matigo
Matias will be representing us in Mendoza, Argentina in the future, giving classes in his university “UCA Mendoza”. This week he took the NCP and is expecting results to become our first Near Certified Professor in the region.
Contact with Influencers - @Turco
We are currently looking for a new influx into our guild and getting collabs with influencers is a big help in it. With the efforts of Turco we are working hard to get as many talks with communities as possible.
We had a talk with “Inversionistas”, a discord of 2300 users and had a talk with 30 active users of them, here I’ll add a snapshot showing the talk and we have it recorded if its needed for any presentation or future references.
This call took place on March 10th
We have another scheduled with Sheinix on the 29th of March, he is an influencer with a reach of 23k of followers on twitter and 67k on Youtube.
We have also two meetings with two more influencers to see if we can make collabs, spaces or some contact of the sorts.
Blockjobs - @DarioFS
Another project to come is Blockjobs, which is a Marketplace of Professional Services with intermediation through a DAO in the event of a dispute between professional and employer.
This project will be leaded by Dario and @sebasgr
We also want to congratulate Dario on becoming an NCI ! The first Instructor in our region. He will be the host of several bootcamps to come, in order to certify our community.
We are very glad to have you here! 
More detail about this project to come will be made in another post and linked here.
ONG to web3 - @josefina
We want to give a warm welcome as well to Josefina Van Thienen. A member which will give a huge added value to our community bringing a lot of traffic and projects from web2 into web3 and into Near!
She will work with us on bringing a decentralized ONG into the Near Ecosystem. The objective is creating “non profit organizations” that may shift after a while into “for profit organizations” with the objective to help more people around the world and create real scalability when it comes to growing humanitarian aid throughout the world.
Will upload a future post when we have a clear idea on how to bring all of her contacts from web2 to web3. We are looking into creating a NFT ecosystem or tokenized system for it.
Identicon Network - @mariozito
A simple, secure and transparent way of providing “proof of life” and “proof of identity” for “real people” in the NEAR Protocol.
Mario aims to the human validation of one or multiple accounts through human nodes, with the objective of bringing more security and blinding us against malicious attempts of identity theft or giving credibility to users if they have to take part of an important project or show they are who they claim to be, among other case scenarios that will arise with the continuous blockchain adoption.
The briefing:
Identicon is a trustless protocol for identity verification in the OpenWeb, focused on providing multiple signed verifications of a real world entity and binding it to one (or more) digital identities, and independent of the form these digital identities may take (NFT, DID, etc). It is not an identity vault or a repo for unique identity.
Is based on a set of decentralized and random selection of human nodes (citizens) which will produce the “on-site” verification of the solicited identity, proof of life or proof of existence.
More on the development of the project or litepaper later on. Will report on it in the following months.
I wish you - @leamanza
IWishYouNFT (IWY) is a Decentralized Application that provides the service for creating digital art as NFTs. We will make it possible for users without any technical knowledge to create their own NFTs.
Here you have the detailed post for more information:
This was a post presented in February and the project has already been developed thoroughly, we will be on the lookout to present a request for a grant and see the possibility to fund it in order to launch it into mainnet.
Open wallet initiative and Argentina Guild DAO - @nacho.near
Thanks to the budget provided by the Near Foundation we are opening the wallets of every new member into the community that wants to take part in the Argentina Guild.
We also created our own DAO in order to handle in a more clear and transparent way the direction of every fund to be transferred between our community members and projects.
I’ll add here the link into our DAO
https://app.astrodao.com/dao/argentinaguild.sputnik-dao.near
Certified Members in Argentina and 300 Project - @nacho.near
We continue our efforts in gathering new students and members of the guild that want to be certified and start helping Near in different projects or between communities.
We will attach a snap of the list of members that took the certificate and ones that are already certified, by march 8.
The tally was 15 but it should surpass 20 by this time since there were more that are about to take certifications throughout the month.
The final certified members of our community will be later added in the next month’s report.
We will keep our efforts month by month in delivering new students into the Near Certified Community.
Meetups to come - @leamanza
Lean will take point when it comes to the meetups that the Argentina Guild will create in order to bring future people into the Near Ecosystem and into our community.
I will be assisting as many meetups as I can and help him throughout the way leading this initiative.
Final words
To conclude I would like to say that its incredible everything is happening so fast, I want to say thanks to all the Argentinian community regarding all the hard work of everyone here.
Stay tuned for more updates on our montly grow!
Thanks and be seeing you Nearly
