Missed the January report so this will cover two months of developments - and a change in direction for the guild.
General Thoughts
At it’s inception, I envisioned Vital Point Guild as the community/education/recruiting division of Vital Point AI. Over the last couple months, watching, participating, and pondering the developments and discussions occurring in the Guild/Community/DAO space, and with NEAR in general, I’ve taken an objective look and assessed whether Vital Point Guild is achieving what I intended it to and more importantly, what it is actually contributing to the NEAR ecosystem overall.
What was immediately clear is that my efforts have been far more focused on developing applications/building solutions, typically at the expense of recruiting and training new members and building any type of active/loyal community.
Considering all that, I’m dropping Vital Point Guild as a separate division from Vital Point AI. From henceforth, Vital Point AI is both the company and the guild and my/our efforts are laser focused on two things:
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Building applications and making AssemblyScript focused contributions to the NEAR ecosystem; and
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Building up Vital Point Academy to share tutorials and courses that enable others to build applications and make AssemblyScript contributions.
I believe this change (which isn’t really a change at all considering how things have been working to now) will make it easier for people interested in AssemblyScript development on NEAR to find a home at Vital Point AI where they can work on interesting projects, in the open, or propose new ones. And, we’re going to be embracing DAOs to make that happen - which is a good segway into what Vital Point AI has been working on.
Introducing Catalyst
At Hack the Rainbow, Vital Point AI ported Moloch v2 DAO from Ethereum to NEAR (AssemblyScript). Ever since, we’ve been adjusting/evolving it with a view to providing an Aragon(esque) type of DAO SaaS offering for NEAR. If you’ve been following Vital Point - you may remember a big focus has been on a decentralized community platform, personas, daos and so on - all of that has been rolled into Catalyst.
It’s very close to seeing the light of day. A bit further below is a rough video sneak peek of it’s current state - as you watch, note the following:
- It extends NEAR wallet - meant to be a seamless experience
- Has decentralized identity (DID) support via Ceramic IDX - NEAR accounts and DAOs built with the platform have DIDs
- DIDs enable each account or DAO to have rich profiles (Personas)
- Ceramic smart docs are taking care of the data needed for the application (DAO proposals, profile information, event logs, etc…)
- Images/storage reqs are handled via IPFS
- The DAO Factory provides five baseline governance types as starting points that communities can evolve through proposals that implement configuration changes as desired
- Incorporates several contracts: dids, factory, dao
- lots more…
Here’s a first look (apologies for production quality - just a rough video to give you an idea of what Catalyst is/does):
Pretty excited about how Catalyst is coming along and think it’s going to be a cool addition to the NEAR DAO space building on what Sputnik is already doing. Might be showcasing Catalyst at conclusion of the Gitcoin Kernel program (I think there’s a demo day).
That’s Not All Vital Point AI Has Been Doing
Bounties Accepted and (Maybe) Completed
- Ceramic Clay Testnet Integration -haven’t quite closed this one out - but as you can see from Catalyst, the profile capabilities promised in the bounty are working - just need to pull the out/package them into something that is more like boiler plate for people to use in their own applications. And helped an awesome developer - Trevor - put together the CAIP 2 proposal for NEAR (it needs some expert comment, if anyone has the time…)
Vital Point Academy
Couple new content additions as part of a new/ongoing series of NEAR contracts in AssemblyScript:
- Near Core WhiteList Contract in AssemblyScript Lesson
- Near Core MultiSig Contract in AssemblyScript Lesson
New Github Repos (AssemblyScript NEAR contracts)
Youtube Videos
Community (Connect with Us)
- website: https://vitalpoint.ai
- mailing list (can subscribe through website)
- Vital Point AI Discord server
- Vital Point AI Telegram: Vital Point Guild
Looking Ahead
Catalyst will be the focus - hopefully be the catalyst for a lot of things 
(pun intended). As development on that continues, key parts/components will be extracted and written up as a means to help others use its functionality in their projects.
Enjoy March. See you in another month(ish). As always, feel free to reach out to me if you want/need clarification or have any questions on what Vital Point AI is up to.
Until the next report.
Aaron
