NEAR Guilds Update: Month of June

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In June, the NEAR Ecosystem welcomed SEVEN new guilds into the community – joining close to a dozen existing guilds spread across the globe. The Guilded Age has officially begun on NEAR Protocol, at a time when Decentralized Governance, Ecosystem Development, and Community Building are poised to take center stage of crypto-protocol developments. 

Here is a quick look at what the different Guilds in the NEAR Ecosystem have been up to in the month of June:   

INC4 Guild and Minerall Guild: Free and Custom Development Support For The Creator Economy

The two newest development Guilds on NEAR Protocol offer free prototype, and custom product development for creators and entrepreneurs getting off the ground in the NEAR Ecosystem. In the month of June, these two guilds kicked off: INC4 has begun prototyping a mobile application for Arroz Studios to allow the purchases of food and beverages in $NEAR. 

“We have defined the flow for them and started on the mock-up for the app. The whole project will consist of 2 apps – for clients and for operators. So clients could pay and operators could check the payment right on the spot and serve food and drinks.”

With two more requests already being processed, INC4 Guild is still open for more requests! Minerall Guild has started work on two private projects, contracted under NDA. These projects are respectively situated in the areas of Wallet Development, and Marketplace development for different stakeholders of the NEAR Ecosystem.  

Merchants of NEAR: Weekly Insights Into NEAR Price Action

The Merchants of NEAR started to provide financials to the NEAR Ecosystem in terms of price action, macro analysis, and long-term price development (for and within the Ecosystem). Their telegram group remains active with weekly contests surrounding NEAR price action. In addition, multiple Merchant Analysts, provide routine updates on short term price action and technical analysis. Future developments including fundamental analysis surrounding NEAR, the next crypto bull market, Skyward Finance, Ref Finance and Octopus Network. 

The Silicon Craftsmen: Product Demos and Community Hub

The Silicon Craftsmen launched their Community Hub: the home for all things Product, Design and UX/UI in the Near ecosystem. The Hub is deliberately asynchronous to encourage more thoughtful, insightful conversations in dedicated channels which are easy to organise in searchable threads. The Hub is experiencing steady growth as more community members, projects building on Near, and Near Core team members continue to join. One of the first Demos of the Silicon Craftsmen has been for the Skyward Finance Token Sale! With Ref, Octopus, and Flux on the Horizon, the Silicon Craftsmen are preparing a suite of demos for the month of July.  

The Sandbox has Relaunched! 

Amidst a very ‘crypto’ Sandbox relaunch party involving technical challenges, trolls, and stand up pitches, the Sandbox relaunch party was a roaring success with more than 50 participants. As part of the relaunch, weekly AMA’s were launched within the Sandbox in order to expedite growth in the NEAR Ecosystem. 

In addition to the successful relaunch of the OWS, the Sandbox DAO is now fully operational, accompanied by a tutorial on how to use it! Beyond the DAO launch, the new Bi-weekly series ‘Humans of the Open Web Sandbox’ launched, with Samtoshi and Orvard taking the stage. Last but not least the Sandbox Guild has developed a proper database for contributors, with a new form for filling in their information now available on the contributor channel and Airtable

NEAR Hispano Continues to Grow

The NEAR Hispano Guild’s Website is now launched! As one of the most active geographical guilds in the NEAR Ecosystem, NEAR Hispano has had a busy month of June. Beyond launching a new Logo, NEAR Hispano is actively collaborating with the NEAR Education Team to  update and create videos for their project NEAR in Minutes. With the help of NEAR’s Head of Education, Sherif Abushadi, NEAR Hispano organized a NEAR Certified Developer Bootcamp for 23 members of the Guild. In collaboration with NEAR’s Ross Gates, NEAR Hispano also participated in a Growth experiment to airdrop NFTs to Twitter users.  

Beyond the new initiatives, LATAM has focused in on doing what it does best: Onboarding new users, developers, and community members to the NEAR Ecosystem. In June, LATAM  onboarded 25 students and teachers from the Universidad Autonoma de Nayarit. In addition, through a partnership with the Open Source Laboratory, LATAM onboarded 5 Universities from Mexico to the NEAR Ecosystem. Last but not least, the 2nd meetup for the NEAR Hispano Guild was held on June 30th. It’s still early to the LATAM party so don’t hesitate to join them for their next meetups and presentations! 

Swine Guild Stays Boarish on NEAR: 

NEAR’s Meme Guild – Swine Guild – has been making waves since its initial launch. The NEAR community welcomed their boarish energy with overwhelming enthusiasm, partially shown through their memes about Swine Guild itself:

As promised, Swine’s focus has been on crafting purposeful memes that play roles in enhancing NEAR’s culture online, informing the ecosystem about current updates and projects, and increasing general NEAR visibility, as their memes have become increasingly viewed and now reach about an average 2,000 views per tweet. Swine Guild is not the first group to work in the industry of NEAR meme creation, but it’s launch seems to have jump-started activity within the community.  

Their first monthly meme contest popped off, for lack of a better term, with 57 participants who submitted and voted on memes in the #swineguild channel of the Open Web Sandbox’s discord server, and 100 NEAR was given out in total for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners. The Guild also began disseminate a pack of memes every Monday with the tag #MemeDropMonday to keep the content flowing. After laying down some layers of the foundation, Swine is gearing up to reach out to facets of the NEAR Ecosystem directly to offer meme services and advertise that they are open for requests

NEAR Arabia Guild 

During June, our biggest focus was on educating people about Blockchain and NEAR, In context of that we launched two educational initiatives: The first, is known as the “Learn and Earn” competition, from which more than 350 people competed in the “Learn and Earn” competition through the NEAR Arabia Group on Telegram. In this competition, participants learned about NEAR and its most important features. Secondly, two educational webinars were held by the NEAR Arabia Guild – the first one was focused on Aurora, and while the other was a more general webinar focused on Blockchain basics and NEAR platform, with over 50 participants.

Open Shards Alliance (OSA) – Guild

The validators in the OSA continue to forge blocks on GuildNet (A sharded community governed TestNet), with the number of validators joining the network growing monthly.

Why another network?

– Community Governed and Managed TestNet

– Validator Bootcamp and Training

– MainNet Validator Funnel / Sourcing

– Dev ENV for dApps

– Sharding Enabled 8 Shards

Key Moments:

– Network Upgrade to 1.19.0

– Guild Vote Passed – Reimburse validators on a quarterly basis with at least 90% uptime.

– Added 9 new validators for total of 25

– GuildNet PR accepted into NEAR-CLI core (KaBoom!)

– NPM update pending.

Short-Term Goals:

– Decentralize RPC Services

– PR to NearUp for inclusion

– Validator Recruiting Campaign

Refer a validator and receive a 75 NEAR bounty after 3 months of uptime.

Network Upgrade to 1.20.0 (once released)

Interested in becoming a NEAR validator? Join the OSA and Begin the Journey: https://discord.gg/t9Kgbvf

Conclusion: The Guilded Age Is Off To A Roaring Start 

New Guilds are already in the works. And this next wave will continue to accelerate the fast growing development of communities and activities within the NEAR Ecosystem. In parallel to many of these digital communities, another trend also looms large on the horizon: The development of physical city nodes for the NEAR Ecosystem, set up in different geographical hubs around the world. In the coming month expect a suit of new guilds, as well as the announcement of two future hubs of NEAR Ecosystem Development!