Tools missing in the ecosystem

[illia]

This topic is to crowdsource list of the tools and integrations that are missing in the NEAR ecosystem.

This can serve for RFG (Request-For-Grant) to NEAR Foundation if someone is willing to implement or integrate with such project, service or a tool.

Ideally respond with a list of tools that are missing and reasoning why they are needed.

Or if you want to support one of the already left responses, just tweet mentioning @NEARProtocol and link to the response (can add your comment of cause)

For example:

Name or Desription of the tool

Website: (if such tool already exists)
Describing more. If tool doesn’t exist yet, more detailed information should be provided.

Provide some examples of usage and what pain it would solve (e.g. what can not be done without)

See couple examples in the first responses.

What are your suggestions for tools?

[illia]

Dune Analytics

Website: https://duneanalytics.com/

Popular analytics tool in Ethereum ecosystem. Allows to create custom dashboards for application data.

Without Dune Analytics, developers need to write their own SQL queries in a scratch pads (and may be even have their own indexers).

[illia]

DeFi Pulse

Website: https://defipulse.com/

Great tool to keep track of DeFi projects. Serves as a way to monitor high level health of the DeFi ecosystem and see details around specific projects.

Without DeFi Pulse, there is no visibility how much DeFi is going on the platform, limiting people’s ability to onboard onto it as they don’t know how much liquidity and trust is already there.

[chefsale]

Monolith

Website: https://monolith.xyz/

Monolith provides you with a Visa debit card non-custodial wallet, so you can spend your Ethereum in real world.

[chefsale]

Aleth.io

Website: https://aleth.io/products/monitoring

Ethereum Blockchain Monitoring

Set and receive alerts for specific activity on the Ethereum network.
Make informed, immediate decisions based on meaningful, real-time, on-chain activity.

[chefsale]

Truffle CI and management tool for smart contracts

website: https://www.trufflesuite.com/teams

Manage and monitor the health of your blockchain-enabled application. Truffle integrated. Built for open source and enterprise.

• Shared Ganache Sandboxes
• Zero Config Continuous Integration
• Visual Deployments
• Smart Contract Monitoring

[chefsale]

Superhero (Blockchain patreon)

website: https://superhero.com/
more about the project: https://blog.aeternity.com/superhero-how-to-send-receive-superhero-tips-34971b18c919

In general I feel that projects like this which reward independent content creators would be a great way to onboard more people from general public to start using blockchain if executed properly.

Personally I was a big fan of this project, but execution just wasn’t there.

[jusdao]

** Info of NEAR chain**

Website: https://polkadot.subscan.io/tools/charts

more info about:

Daily Transaction Amount
Daily Extrinsic Number
NEAR Price (USD)
Daily Active Address & Newly Created Address
Daily Fees Burned
Found Available Income
Found Expenses
Daily Unlock Schedule (NEAR)
Daily Unstake Schedule (NEAR)
Daily staked Value (NEAR)
Year reward Rate (STAKEd NEAR)

[miohtama]

Web3.py

website: https://web3py.readthedocs.io/

Python integration for NEAR blockchain, similar to web3.js or near-api-js.

Python is most used by data analyst (scan on-chain data flow), exchange integrations (a lot of centralised exchange are partially written in Python) and DeFi trading bots.

[miohtama]

OpenZeppelin

Gold standard open-source smart contracts for everything, with docs, tools and guiding and paid maintainers.

OpenZeppelin/openzeppelin-contracts

[miohtama]

WalletConnect

WalletConnect

A standard SDK for mobile wallets and dApps to communicate.

Note: WalletConnect Foundation is open for grants. WalletConnect protocol is already used by more than 30 wallet apps. The protocol itself is chain agnostics, used e.g. by BinanceChain (the Cosmos one), so if NEAR is looking to gain support in mobile wallets, it is best to be done through existing WalletConnect SDKs.

[illia]

@miohtama

The protocol itself is chain agnostics

My understanding is that it is not the case right now.
Trust Wallet has a custom implementation for BinanceChain that is not spec compliant based on their feedback.
There is v2 spec, but I’m not sure what the state is.

[miohtama]

Gnosis Safe

A gold standard multisignature wallet with friendly user interface.

Overview - Gnosis Safe

Note that user interface and indexers are like 99% of the code, the actual smart contract is only under 1%.

[miohtama]

Yes, there is still some work to do for v2. But however, the foundation is there:

• dApps and wallets have ready SDKs

• RPC payloads go to both directions encrypted

• Adding custom requests is easy

It would be a no brainer for NEAR to start expanding the wallet support using WalletConnect. NEAR specific bits need to go into v2 spec any case, so better try to do a PoC and give feedback for the spec, making it very easy for the wallets to adopt NEAR.

[luciotato]

Metamask-like extension Wallet for NEAR

I believe an extension-based wallet adds another option to HW, phone wallets and the Near Wallet. A lot of ETH users are used to Metamask, having something similar for NEAR would be of great help to make them feel at home in NEAR
I’m working on that actually. It already imports accounts in read-only mode and can auto-locate your lockup contract. I’m about half the way to a beta release

[luciotato]

An intermediate SDK option between Rust and AssemblyScript

This is a long haul proposal, but I think we can bring dotnet/C# into the mix with Rust and AssemblyScript, so contract developers have another option for NEAR development.

Microsoft is investing heavily in WASM and its dotnet open source initiative, so the basis are there and it’s the right time to do this. Blazor is their hot-new framework, and it allows you to write C# code that runs in the browser. So if we can provide C# support to develop NEAR smart-contracts (all compiles to WASM), developers would be able to create amazing web3 SPA Apps and the smart contract all using the same language.

It’s not easy and it’s a ton of work, we need a medium-sized team to even start this project, but I think it’s doable. I have in my company several C# experts which I can use if we can secure a grant.

The idea is to eventually build a near-sdk-dotnet, documentation, examples, etc, so C# developers can use all the dotnet tools, IDEs, and tooling to develop for NEAR

[illia]

Cron transactions service

It’s common that some transactions need to be executed at some specific point of time or based on some on chain condition.

Chain itself doesn’t have such function, hence external actor must be used. For example bite in Maker if CDP is under collateralized or finish contract deployment at specific time if delay has completed.

Such service can be a decentralized with smart contract that can register which transaction must be sent and when. Tx payment and some reward also gets attached for the sender.

Any other participant in the network than can send a tx to this contract. Contract verifies if condition is met and then would dispatch the scheduled transaction.

This can be expanded into full IFTTT service.
A core benefit, is that smart contracts themself can “schedule” call to themself for later.
This creates some form of agency in the contracts.

[zavodil]

NEAR Login button

The Login button is a simple way to trigger the NEAR Login process on any website or web app.

Example: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/web/login-button/

[sashahudzilin]

General chain stats: https://ethstats.net/
Current gas prices: https://www.gasnow.org/
Dedicated node hosting: https://www.quiknode.io/
Data caching/querying layer: https://thegraph.com/

[nima]

DAOs on NEAR. DAOs had a strong comeback in 2019 and in 2020 played a huge role in the DeFi mania … powered by governance coins.

The first use case for DAOs on NEAR is managing our Guilds. Another low hanging fruit is community/social tokens.

We’ve been coordinating some early efforts with @adridadou from TheLAO and James Young from Abridged. Here’s their proposal:

https://hackmd.io/@ateam/ryYr5PFdw

We will be dogfooding DAOs with our own Guilds but will also proactively reach out to existing and future DAOs in the wider web3 space.