Update on NEAR UA

Ecosystem
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We would like to bring to the community’s attention some changes with Palyanitsa Ltd, the leading company within NEAR UA, a prominent hub within the NEAR ecosystem.

NEAR UA have made many positive contributions to the NEAR ecosystem, notably their team’s incredible efforts in raising awareness and taking action with the current situation in Ukraine. To date, NEAR UA has received a significant amount of grant funding and support from NEAR Foundation, conditional upon those funds being used to achieve certain milestones and in a way that is consistent with the values of the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, NEAR Foundation has decided to halt funding and terminate the grant agreement with Palyanista Ltd. This was not a decision that was taken lightly, but ultimately the NEAR Foundation believes this to be in the best interests of the NEAR ecosystem as a whole.

NEAR Foundation has been working hard directly with principals behind Palyanitsa Ltd to try and find a workable path forward. However, despite everyone’s best efforts — and we thank the principals behind Palyanitsa for their hard work during this period — NEAR Foundation believes the only realistic way forward is the following:

  • NEAR UA gradually winds down
  • NEAR Foundation offers to cover hub payroll for 3 months
  • NEAR Foundation works one-on-one with certain hub projects to see how to best support

This difficult decision to halt funding to NEAR UA was driven by various factors, including some that are specific to the NEAR UA hub itself and its historic management and operation, and others that are part of the more general funding review the Foundation has been going through (as announced in “Evolving NEAR Foundation’s Funding Strategy”).

What does this mean for NEAR UA projects and personnel?

NEAR Foundation has committed to:

  • make grant funds available to pay NEAR UA’s payroll (excluding the hub principals) for the next 3 months;
  • work directly with hub projects to assess their funding needs and how NEAR Foundation can support; and
  • support hub personnel in finding new roles within the ecosystem should their initiatives within the hub be wound down.

We will provide more information shortly about how eligible hub personnel can claim their monthly compensation (and whether this will be made available via Palyanitsa Ltd or directly from NEAR Foundation). We are also setting up an Airtable for hub personnel and encourage all projects that are recruiting to review and reach out to suitable candidates.

NEAR Foundation has already begun to get in touch with the NEAR UA projects to assess their progress and other needs. A member of the NEAR Foundation team will be in touch with relevant project leads shortly (if they haven’t gotten in touch already).

We want to emphasize that this is not a reflection of our commitment to hubs in either Ukraine or Lisbon, where NEAR UA has been based since early 2022. We will be exploring a relaunch of local efforts early in the new year, and we will work closely with the community as those efforts progress. NEAR Foundation also remains committed to supporting efforts in providing assistance to those who need it in Ukraine. We are working with the community to explore various ways this could be done, including providing additional financial assistance to NEAR community members based in the region.

NEAR is home to many incredible people building awesome projects across a wide variety of verticals. The NEAR Protocol and ecosystem are well-positioned as the Web3 market moves into 2023 and beyond. The Foundation is truly inspired and excited by NEAR’s thriving community and all of its potential as we collectively move forward to create without limits.

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Eventually, NF made right decision :100:.

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Really ! I was already thinking about doing a Near UA related forum entry myself one of these days. I am a person who knows the ecosystem well enough and for a long time. I am from Ukraine, I have a project “Aurora with Ukraine” in which we broadcast news and activities related to Aurora. I wrote 2 times to Near UA, filled out a form and got no response … I know of at least 2 other projects that were either ignored or refused to cooperate! It is very good that Near still sees its mistakes and tries to somehow fix it. I don’t think this is the only hub that needs to be reviewed. We as a community fully support such “revisions”. That’s really good news before bedtime.

UPD:

both of these projects are supported by marketing instead of how they should have been supported by the corresponding hub

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It’s unfortunate that you didn’t get the support/response you were looking for. I wouldn’t categorize this as a mistake. There surely have been a number positive contributions by supporting Near UA but as you said, funding has and will be reviewed periodically to ensure these initiatives align with the goals of the Foundation :100:

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Great solution, I agree with him

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Good news. Because I haven’t seen any work with the UA community

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I fully agree with this decision. NearExplorer is a project whose participants are all Ukrainians who are now in Ukraine. When there were delays in Marketing DAO, I turned to NEAR UA for help, as we were eligible, but after 2 months I did not even receive a single message from them. As a fan of Near and a resident of Ukraine, I did not see any work with the UA community from them, so I consider the decision to close it to be the right one.

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Really surprising for me. Is this going to happen to other hubs too?

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The idea is that the regional hubs continue to work constantly, but if hypothetically we find a situation like NEAR UA, the Foundation will let the community know the decision taken, as it was done in this case.

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Interesting. When was the date when you applied?

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Hey direct4d. Welcome to the forum :raised_hands:

It’s hard to generalize this to all the other hubs. I assume these decisions are evaluated on case by case basis. I don’t see any reason why active hubs should have to worry about their existing arrangements with the Foundation.

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A NEAR UA team message to the ecosystem

The first time we announced ourselves as a NEAR UA team happened in the autumn of 2021 when we organized events for the community and a Hackathon in Kyiv.
Since March 2022, our team has been working in Lisbon, doing our best to solidify the name of NEAR Protocol, develop the ecosystem and create new projects.

Our team achieved major success and did a lot in less than a year, even considering partial relocation of the hub because of the war. We want to share more details on what NEAR UA team has been working on during 2022 - here.

As of now, NEAR Foundation has decided to halt the hub’s funding.
We do confirm that our goals and ecosystem development vision are not always aligned with NF’s, which entails a number of challenging issues.

However, we are eternally grateful to NEAR Foundation for the cooperation, support, and opportunities to have a reliable partner in such a difficult time for Ukrainians, especially at the beginning of the war.
We created a significant number of projects over this period. We will continue to develop these projects as an independent organization.

NEAR ecosystem is decentralized (as a very core of NEAR values), allowing us to work on what excites us and what brings the most value to the NEAR ecosystem from our point of view.
We will keep our promises given to the team members and our partners. This is what we are working on thoroughly at the moment.

NEAR UA’s main and ambitious goals were:

  • Product lab: to create more unicorns by launching new projects valuable to the ecosystem and users and testing various hypotheses - according to our vision.
  • we were focused on raising NEAR brand awareness by bringing A players and institutions to the ecosystem and conducting various events, hackathons, and marketing activities.
  • being far away from Ukraine, we have always prioritized Ukrainian projects and helping Ukraine in general, e.g., one of the projects is a validator that sends part of its profit to “ukraine” wallet.

After a neat wind-down of NEAR UA hub, we will remain an independent organization and keep on building. We believe in NEAR ecosystem, and we are doing our best to contribute to 1 billion users.

We want to express our gratitude to the whole NEAR UA team, NF, to our partners and founders, and to everyone we had an opportunity to work within this time.

We do believe in NEAR, web3 generally, and we are sure that there are new and fascinating achievements ahead.

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@NEAR-UA @shreyas Could you please let us know total amount of funding that was allocated to NEAR UA? How much of the allocated funds were spent and on what initiatives? How many projects & initiatives received grants from NEAR UA? What were grant or investment sizes per project. Apart from CBDC, Datrics (which existed before the team started NEAR UA initiative), Wombi, and 3 other projects, what were other initiatives? I haven’t seen NEAR UA providing any reports.

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@David_NEAR @Alpar_NEAR could you please include the aforementioned points in your next transparency report?

  • Allocated amount of funds to NEAR UA
  • How much of the dedicated amount was spent by NEAR UA?
  • What initiatives have they conducted, what were metrics, and success stories?
  • What was the average budget per each initiative and what was the reasoning?
  • You mentioned that the decision was driven by various factors. Could you please elaborate on that in a full capacity?
  • NEAR UA is not providing a report looks like - why do the possess such a privilege?

Thanks

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In addition I would be thankful if you could provide certain clarification on the activities of parties that are involved with @NEAR-UA. Hence it appears to me that there are countless instances of conflicts of interest.
Anton Vaisburd - Managing partner at NEAR UA, CEO and co-founder of Datrics (project mentioned within the report and backed by NEAR NEAR JOINS DATRICS AS A STRATEGIC PARTNER, general partner at SID Ventures)
Kirill Kirikov - part of the NEAR UA team, CTO of Datrics, involved in Wombi, and general partner at SID Ventures
Veronica Korzh - partner at SID Ventures and co-founder and CEO of Geekpay
Igor Kaufman - VP of Product at Datrics and founder at Wombi
Out of six projects listed within the presentation, three of them are run by individuals with close ties to each other. How normal is that and why is it tolerated? There are innumerable examples of gifted developers in Ukraine who create and run various initiatives. Why was this allowed by the foundation and what were control frameworks to avoid such instances? Please list the reasons why red flags were not raised by internal teams monitoring activities of regional hubs @David_NEAR

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Hey @KatyPerry,

Thank you for asking these questions. I’m just jumping in to ask for a bit of patience - points raised have been escalated.
We are also connecting with NEAR UA to find out if they intend to publish a report to address these.

We will get back to this with an update as soon as there is anything meaningful to share.

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