What's happening in the NEAR Ecosystem?! - May 22 Update

:wave: Hey all, hope you had a great weekend! Wanted to kick off the week with an overview on what’s happening in the NEAR Ecosystem, what’s being built on NEAR, community events, and any other interesting things around the community/ecosystem!

:technologist: Project updates:

  • Namesky launched on NEAR Mainnet this week. Namesky is a marketplace for buying & selling NEAR accounts as NFTs with audited contracts. Think ENS on NEAR.
  • Following Namesky’s launch, Mintbase is spicing things up with a competition and rewards up for grabs. Already 800+ minted, but I don’t think anyone will be able to create a cooler name than mine tbh.
  • NOWPayments, a cryptocurrency payment gateway that enables businesses to accept payments in various cryptocurrencies, now allows businesses to accept NEAR payments!
  • Do you enjoy escape rooms? The Murder Mystery Collective are building a community based solve & earn murder mystery game on NEAR. They recently launched the Detectives NFT collection on Few and Far’s launchpad, which provides utility in game, and has now sold out! Huge congrats!
  • Enter The Sphere is a pretty interesting Collectible Cards & JRPG Fighting NFT Game built on NEAR. They’ve been building for a while, the game is in early access and it’s definitely worth checking out!
  • Zomland, a P2E NFT Card Game being built on NEAR, went live with their NFT mint for ZomPacks and sold out! Congrats to the team!
  • Marma J Gaming has been putting out some content that really embraces what Web3 is empowering and enabling for creators. Marma J has been creating digital products, such as a tutorial/guide on how to effectively play and get good at Crypto Heroes (another game built on NEAR), and the guide is for sale as an NFT on Mintbase. This is all strictly on chain allowing for verifiable ownership and all royalties being paid to the rightful creators.

:spiral_calendar: Events:

  • There was an exciting Twitter Spaces last Friday with some amazing founders & contributors in the NEAR ecosystem, including - NEAR Horizon’s GM Laura Cunningham, MetaPool, Everstake, Mintbase, Aurora, NDC, CreativesDAO, Loozr! Catch the recording for a deep dive into NDC, NEAR Horizon, NEAR Ecosystem & more!
  • The NEAR x Coingecko campaign kicked off last week! This is an awesome campaign that will see 20k+ wallets created on NEAR via NFT onboarding, and one lucky winner will get some amazing rewards! Make sure to share throughout your networks & communities!
  • NEARHacks has been running some great workshops for founders & builders in the NEAR ecosystem, with the recent one having Samvel Raja of Web3Client unpacking how to craft & execute NEAR Smart Contract ABIs directly within their application (see here)
  • For anyone in the UK next week - the LazyFi & SeatLab team, along with others, are putting on a 2 day event all about building games in Web3! I will be there representing NEAR, and NF’s Altan Tutar will be running a workshop around building on BOS, smart contracts/widgets on top of BOS, and near wallet/account access/creation at the Gameball Jam on the 24th! These events are both at the University of Greenwich in London. Be sure to pop by!
    • Gameball JAM, 24th May - Join some amazing game devs to build web3 games. At the NEAR GameBall Jam, you’ll have the chance to:
      • Network and discover new software, other developers or investors
      • Find job opportunities or internships in Games Development or Business
      • Participate in a workshop on how to create smart contracts on Near Blockchain
    • Gameball Rally, 25th may, public facing event where different gaming projects will showcase, giving each one a chance to present and then launch a demo for each player to test it!
  • On June 28th Mintbase will be hosting a DemoDay showcasing the great projects that have come out of the Mintbase Grants Program!

:brain: NEAR x ChatGPT:
With the hype around ChatGPT and the endless possibilities with it, we’re seeing more and more builders on NEAR working to connect ChatGPT & NEAR. Check out some of these interesting things being built:

  • Peter Salomonson, a long time builder on NEAR, built a ChatGPT widget allowing you to ask to generate a beat (drum beat with kick, etc), play it or download it.
  • Louis from the Mintbase team built a plugin for NEAR smart contracts & widgets that can write & compile contracts, deploy contracts, generate UI from contracts’ ABI, deploy UI as BOS widgets.

:eyes: Interesting threads:

  • Afrostar Guild put out an awesome ELI5 thread on Blockchain Operating System
  • Oddgems put out a very in depth thread around BOS and really breaking it down to his large audience
  • NEAR Foundation’s Altan Tutar recently put out a very insightful thread around how Web3 terminology acts as a barrier to mass adoption, and how NEAR is tackling this
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Massive amount of super helpful info and knowledge! Thanks a lot @MarcusNEAR :raised_hands:

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Woah, this is an awesome recap! Def need to get more people reading this, and with links to everything. A lot happened this week​:fire:

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