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NEAR Town Hall April 2025
Recorded: April 3, 2025 Duration: 0:59:22Space Recording
Short Summary
Nier Protocol's recent Town Hall unveiled exciting developments, including the launch of NIA as a foundational AI infrastructure, the successful transition to eight shards for enhanced scalability, and the introduction of innovative projects like Omnibridge and Open Format's virtual chain. Additionally, Templar Protocol secured funding to expand its DeFi offerings, signaling strong investor confidence in the evolving crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
GM GM everyone and welcome to another Nier Protocol Town Hall. I'm Peter from Nier Week.
Your host is Nier.
And I'm here to tell you what's been going on in the Nier ecosystem for the past month.
To give you a brief update on what we're seeing in the world,
it's in a moment of deep transition.
The internet is changing.
First it was pages, then apps, now agents.
AI agents won't just write
essays or generate images. They'll act, trade, make decisions on our behalf on their own. To make that
work, we need more than just smarter models. We need infrastructure. We need railroads, something
to help millions, eventually trillions of agents coordinate. That's NIA. Nia gives them that full stack on chain AI native. So when we say Nia is
for AI, we're not guessing. We mean it and we're building it. Let's get into it. First off is a
regular, it's Nia's co-founder and the guy who's been thinking about this longer than most, Mr. Ilya Pulisukin, welcome to the stage.
It's all yours, Ilya.
Okay, thank you, Peter, and really excited to be here.
I hope everyone is doing well.
It is indeed an interesting transition time.
We, on one side, have, one after another amazing progress in the AI space on what's
possible.
I think the recent moment became very visual, what you can do with AI, if you haven't really
tried. haven't really tried you know uh uh do do do try but the interesting thing is because we're so
visual um like just things you can do now right with you know any image right from interior design
to you know changing outfits to redesigning to creating ads you know visuals etc like it's it's kind of amazing
explosion similar to what happened in text and code right over the past couple years
um so i think like the ai space is just accelerating and i think the recent tariffs
right that announced yesterday are just going to accelerate robotics even further.
I mean, US is trying to ensure the manufacturing, but the reality is there's no nobody who wants to work on those factories.
And so it's going to be all robots.
There's already really interesting companies in robotics space.
And I think there's an interesting opportunity there around telepresence around
deepin around also different crypto primitives to really engage with creating kind of what is the
next generation manufacturing that's fully automated looks like now all of that is in the future and let's go and review the past quarter
as we are just starting q2 to go to the next slide
so we had a pretty amazing quarter i think there's a lot of things to be excited about
to be excited about. I think the one that I'm really been kind of exciting to see
is the transition we had from six starts to eight. I think the important part here is not the number,
but actually the way it was done. So first of all, I mean, obviously, Nier has set out to build this blockchain that not just is easy to use and easy to build on, but really can handle billions of users and can scale as kind of people come in, applications come in, use cases come in without, you know, fights on the forums about, you know, our blocks are small or big, you know, without needing to fight to increase gas limits, etc.
It was designed to really scale as more applications
and more users are using it.
Same as you have it with traditional web services.
And historically, we had a very kind of recharting process that required a few ebooks,
And historically, we had a very kind of
and so it was pretty slow. And so this transition had been done within one block. So within one
second, we went from six shards to seven and then to eight and so the idea here is
that now we can actually increase number of shards at the moment when there's a ton of demand coming
in and really uh kind of expand capacity really dynamically for the blockchain this is also means
we need more values we need more kind of participants in the network, but it really kind of highlights
the technology that Niro One team has been building and kind of advancing the Stateless
Foundation and Nightshade V2, but really exciting to see this progress and I'm more even more excited
about trying smart contracts and other things they're working on for the rest of the year.
and smart contracts and other things they're working on
for the rest of the year.
Now we had a ton of hackathons, right?
So we've kind of introduced new primitives
around the agents, kind of AI agents,
obviously Intense integrated as AI agents
and then Shade agents as well, and we'll talk about it.
And so it was really important that we actually tested out
with a ton of developers, right?
So we've done a one trillion agent hackathon, which was online.
We had an in-person Coinbase hackathon as well as a useful agent hackathon we organized with Electric and then Agent Games Day in Denver.
So really just engaging developers across different new products we had put out.
A lot of things, you know, we're still in progress.
And so we needed that feedback.
We needed to know what to improve.
And so really excited.
Thank everyone who participated.
And I'm hoping we'll see some of the products as well
going into production from those hackathons.
Now, on the AI side, we've been kind of working really
across both research and really building product.
And on the research side, there's two papers
that we've pushed out.
One is a paper called Proof of Response.
And it's really a fundamental new way
of ensuring liveness in decentralized network.
It's actually akin to creating a Tor network as well, where you have different nodes in
the network that actually hide the entrance and exits in there.
But it provides a crypto-canonic incentive to ensure that every node is indeed actually sending messages
and you are getting response from the server
that you requested.
This is useful for machine learning.
This is useful for APIs.
This is useful for storage.
This is useful for kind of generally any service on internet
that you want to get access to. So really excited.
We have a kind of prototype of this, there's a team working on this tirelessly and we're
going to be pushing more of actual implementations to actually have it prototyped in near core.
So really integrating in this protocol. And then we have decentralized confidential machine
learning, right? It's really kind of
bringing all these pieces together and introducing a solution to a ton of problems that AI space has,
right? Confidentiality and data privacy, data locality for countries, right? I'm in South
Korea right now. There's no like access to, for example, chat GPT because you're not allowed to export customer data
from Korea.
So you need to have data centers in Korea to use it.
And then in case of OpenAI,
they don't have data centers here.
And normally, you know, a company wouldn't trust
to just upload their rates
to somebody else's data center.
So we're addressing that problem, addressing monetization where,
instead of open source, open sourcing, you can put it on this cloud.
And now everybody has access to it, but they still need to pay.
And they still preserve their confidentiality.
And there's a number of safety and other concerns.
So check it out, the paper. And there is a talk I did at NVIDIA GTC outlining really
how that system works.
Now, we also had product launches.
The Omnibridge launched really, and I
think the migration of Rainbow Bridge to Omnibridge
is happening.
But Omnibridge leverages
the chain signatures technology and really unites
kind of the bridging across different chains
into a single interface, kind of single protocol.
And so now, you know, tokens coming from different places
can be unified.
We also have agent interaction and transaction protocol,
right? The AITP, which is, you know, think of the bridge between all the agents,
but really it's a way for agents to interact and pay each other and transact.
And finally, the shade agents is an ability to not just run an agent and verifiable kind of
trust execution environment,
actually execute actions through the blockchain,
use chain signatures to deploy these actions
across the board, right?
Proximity, I'm sure we'll share more,
but you know, have a few examples of this.
Now, we had a merge of ref and borrow into rare finance
and they're kind of, you know,
have the points program uh running
there's a sweat that introduced mia their personal assistant that can help you with fitness that can
help you with crypto they can do actions um we have templar uh that is a fundraise and you know
testnet showing the multi-chain lending we have satoshi port with
their beta for uh brand brokerage there's a ton of other bitcoin projects that are
in progress uh obviously really excited about abound about is probably one of the reasons
like this kind of use case is one of the reasons why we got into blockchain in the first place.
The original, you know, we're trying to pay people around the world.
Like how do you pay people into China, into Southeast Asia, into Eastern Europe with MIR AI back in 2018.
And so Abound is really an example of that where they're allowing people from America to send money back to
their families in India and they went to from effectively you know days and weeks that it
was taking them to you know one second time for transactions and from you know multiple
percents of fees to down to you know know, fraction of a cent,
tens of a cent for the transfer.
So really excited to see like actual, like, you know,
use case of remittances of money transfer globally
in production, there's a ton of users already using it
with, you know, over a million in daily volume there.
Really excited to see new chain signatures as well.
Kind of the new version with way higher performance, low latency,
and our team continues working on improving that. We have a ton of stuff happening on the
intent side, right? There was a few product updates, including one on April 1st, which wasn't a joke, but you can now do OTC trades, you can do gifts and link drops, those who remember those.
There's obviously more chains that got added, Kyber's integrating, Infinex is integrating,
the Nafl got renamed to more markets and using Fnzestech as well to really move around
different assets between different chains.
So I think there's a lot of projects
and kind of next generation projects
that leveraging all the unique offerings we have built
and really bringing them to market,
not just kind of in the ecosystem,
but beyond that across all of the web3 ecosystems and even beyond
traditional ones so really exciting uh i've been uh obviously with the team at the events across
east denver as well as ecsf and vj gdc and so really kind of exciting to see on one side, San Francisco was, you know, a ton of
activity.
There's a ton of crypto people, but as well as there's just a lot of AI people, right?
The useful hackathon was very much focused on AI developers coming in, you know, they
didn't need to know anything about crypto.
It was all kind of, you know know transparent for them to use and then nvidia ggc really seeing kind of
the the impact the guy is making right nvidia has been really pushing across the board on
what is possible now to do with those advanced models uh we have a bit ofdle Asia coming here in Korea and then token 2049 in Dubai.
So really excited for folks around these areas if you're around.
And then around Biddle Asia, there's AI hackathon as well, engaging Korean and Asian community.
And there's a bunch of side events at token around ai blockchain so looking forward to those
excellent yeah so just to give you a quick you know visual if you if you missed it
uh this is kind of example of a visualization you can get the thing data lake dot xyz
I think data lake dot xyz.
I'm gonna butcher the URL,
but effectively you can see every shard
and then you can see transactions
happening on different smart contracts
and also sending cross shard messages to each other.
So there was a stream on near protocol Twitter
really kind of showcasing this so
really exciting to see this again for for me when you know we envisions this in 2018
you know we've been we actually built i think three or four versions that we threw away
before we concluded uh kind of got to nightshade design and obviously you know improvements that bowen and the team
made with nightshade v2 it's really exciting to see this next slide i know i'm pretty over time so
um yeah we hit uh kind of six months high in daily transactions i think a lot of it came from also
just battle testing the mainnet and the a new record on transactions per second.
I think it hit more than what was written on ChainSpec as theoretical maximum.
So yeah, it's really exciting to see blockchain to continue
really running with all the upgrades and transitions
and supporting the use cases people use it for.
Next slide.
Similarly, on the AI side, we have pretty good growth
of the agent of people building agents.
There is, in between February and March, we had over like 600 agents built kind
of across different areas.
You know, obviously people are forking and upgrading agents.
So if you haven't checked out app.mira.ai, there's a bunch of agents and people building next slide
so lots of exciting stuff the even more things are kind of coming in the pipeline
we have migration of Omni bridgeridge, as I mentioned, with Rainbow.
We have more intent liquidity coming as well.
And the team is working on permissions listings.
The really exciting part is a chain signature EDDSA support.
So for those who are not familiar right now chain
signatures support easy dsa which is ethereum bitcoin those chains and solana cosmos ton
require EDDSA which would enable kind of a lot simpler approach there and chain signatures are
going to get packaged into trust execution alignments to
actually enable higher level of security of the of the whole system and then kind of using
omnibridged and chain signatures launching omni tokens as well to to bring them across across all
the chains on the ai side i think mc server actually already launched and you can use it from cloud
code for example or any other solution actually working on a bunch of stuff on MCP on the AI side
as well and so you'll be able to use it from the agents in the AI they also upgrade near AI so
you can log in without your account that's been one of the big feedback around,
as used, especially consumers coming,
but also developers that really wanna try and use it
before figuring out the blockchain part.
We have kind of the MVP of all the confidentiality
confidentiality and variability. And so we're going to be launching that as well. And, you
and verifertability,
and so we're gonna be launching that as well.
know, continue evolving the AITP payments to support more and more options and integrating
with Intense. Next slide. Yeah, on the protocol side, I'm really excited actually about the speed up on the blockchain side.
So the team has been working on improving the block time.
We've kind of went from 1 to 1.2 seconds since mainnet.
And the plan is to release with the next version the 600 millisecond lock time and which will make one
second bft finality which as far as i know is probably the fastest it's 12 times faster than
solana's finality and so i'm really excited to kind of see that the intents are integrating
the somnia bridge to really kind of expand and increase security and really exciting this hustle stake.
So we have the testnet version live,
we have the delegates and so really rolling it out
and getting the state, getting the people proposals.
I know the community been really kind of really behind
and like, where's our NDC days? And I think this, you know, we're very close to having a version and really want to see
and kind of get people to participate in that, in that new system.
And then, you know, we test it and reiterate, but now it is really enabled by the smart contracts
and kind of their fairbile logic.
So obviously there's a ton of stuff
on the community side that's happening,
like finally, Infinex launch, Satoshi port,
the Skyrim mining, Covenant, which is other DeFi projects,
Atlas and Vita, if you haven't seen Atlas as well,
already on Testnet. So kind of real kind of multi- the DeFi projects, Atlas and Vita, if you haven't seen Atlas as well already on Testnet.
So kind of real kind of multi-chain DeFi
that leverages intense chain signatures,
plugging all of this together
and enabling kind of new experiences
for users across Lab3.
And so just to make one comment here,
I think a lot of folks being,
hey, we've had some projects failing, like, you know, today, mid-day announced that they're closing, which is, you know, obviously very unfortunate and sad to see.
At the same time, that is pretty normal, right? You have a lot of startups that try to build, you know, a successful product and it doesn't work out, that is pretty normal.
And so the kind of exciting part here is we have a new batch of these projects,
which are really exciting. They have validation from the market around their use cases.
And I think they're going to be making a really meaningful contribution to the ecosystem
as well next slide
yeah so uh we also started tracking more on inflows and house loads in the ecosystem
to really understand kind of how their people are kind of onboarding the, you know, everything from
users to whales to also projects.
Because one of the important pieces that we've been really trying to align is, you know,
how do we drive goals across, you know, foundation and the whole ecosystem to make sure that
everybody understands how as well their
contribution is fits into this protocol and so net inflows is a really kind of the framework
that we're using because you know for d5 projects for example it drives inflow of money into the
ecosystem you know for if you're launching a, it drives inflow because you're creating
a pool with a mirror for house of stake, it drives inflow because people are staking
into the participating governance for, you know, for some of the other solutions that
drives inflows from people kind of wanting to come in and transact or by participating
in different applications.
So it's really kind of serves as like a unifying platform.
Next slide.
Then the other piece we've been tracking a lot is how does Nier stack up in the AI kind
of crypto markets market space and so obviously the whole market went down but
in the AI space, AI crypto space as well but NIR has been kind of on a relative basis gained
some of the positioning there and this is something that we're going to continue
and this is something that we're going to continue kind of set as a goal for the NIR foundation
to really showcase that NIR is a blockchain for AI and kind of really drive continue driving
dominance in this in this category. Next slide I think that's yeah that's it.
Next slide, I think. Yeah, that's it.
Thank you so much for coming on, Ilya.
I'm gonna have to rewatch what you just presented.
Like that was really jam packed.
So much stuff going on, so much active shipping, so much being built,
so much infrastructure. Can't wait to see it all comes live all right next
up we got Kendall from proximity Kendall the word is yours all right and yeah I'm gonna
actually share my screen quickly
Let's go.
All right.
I'm going to have to quit and rejoin,
so I'll be back in one second.
All right. you
okay and we're back just one second here Okay, there we go. All right, so exciting week.
There we go.
Exciting week over here at proximity. Uh, we have the first shade agent live, uh, live in production. Everyone here can actually try it out right now. Um, to recap on, on what
Ilya said, like why shade agents are interesting. Um, they are fully non-custodial, uh, both the
agent code and the smart contract that is coupled with
the agent code are fully verified. So obviously smart contracts are running on chain.
And what's really interesting about shade agents is that the agent code actually runs within a
trusted execution environment that has to prove it is running a particular code hash to a smart
contract. And then all keys and interactions that are basically
used by the agent are managed through the smart contract, meaning that only verified instances
of this agent code are actually able to execute transactions. So why is that cool? Well, it enables
developers to build things like this agent we call base names. So base names on the surface sounds simple. It's
like a way for you to register names on base entirely through X or just through X and any
wallet you have, they can send funds to a given address. It works by basically tagging base names
on Twitter, telling it you want to grab a base name, and then it'll actually respond to you and say, hey, send this amount of ETH on base to this address, and we'll buy this name for you.
So to unpack what's happening here, basically the agent is running in this T. It's actually
monitoring Twitter for any interactions with this handle. And then when it sees an interaction with this handle, it is actually
going to create a special address for this user that is basically a near smart contract control
address. So this address right here, this 0x9 address, this is an address that is controlled
by that smart contract on near that is basically managing this entire agent workflow. And so the
the worker agent that's running this T can then monitor this address for an ETH deposit.
And if we see here, we'll see basically I made this ETH deposit from my address,
sending it this amount of ETH. And then the agent's actually able to do something
as a result of seeing that deposit.
So what it does is it basically constructs this transaction to actually register this base name.
And so what then happens is it basically constructs this transaction. It's basically a
raw base transaction. It sends it to this near smart contract. So you can see we have this,
this is a v1.shadeagent.near. And there's
basically this sign method that's called on this contract with the payload, which is that
raw payload, which is then returned back, I think right here, returned back to, and you see this is
actually my payload with like the different components of basically this signature. And so now we have this agent has the signed payload
that it can actually send to the base L2 to be processed.
So that's what's happening here.
And then again, you can see after we registered this base name,
then this agent actually refunds any of the leftover amount
that the user had sent.
So what ends up happening here is basically,
and you can see it responds like done registered this. You can see this is like that registration transaction and
all is complete. So yeah, what's really, really cool here is this is enabling developers to
basically condense pretty complicated workflows. I mean, this one is somewhat simple, but you can
actually have as long lived or complex of a workflow as
possible into just single simple transfers. So the user's interaction with this, basically this
universal API was just sending this specific amount of assets or even more. That's the cool
thing about the refund step. They can send as much or as little to this as they want. And as long as
they send this exact amount at some point,
then this agent can complete the workflow
and refund the extra.
And you can see here what I use
this Twitter-based application called BankerBots,
which is like basically managing a wallet
on my behalf through my Twitter account
to actually send this.
So I didn't even have to leave X.
I could do all of this through Twitter slash X
and this whole workflow just completed. So yeah, we have a lot more of these coming. Uh,
I definitely recommend trying it out again while this interaction happened on base,
the power of chain signatures is like all of this, this entire application is, is a near application.
So there's actually several near transactions that originated in order to send this on base
and the same kind of workflow will work on any ECVSA chain for now. And then very, very soon, we'll work on any chain
because obviously the launch of EDVSA is happening soon. So yeah, this is the first agent of
production. I think there were several hundred names that were registered through this, which
is a nice starting point. Obviously, going to get to millions before too long.
And we actually have the next shade agent coming out on Monday.
So stay tuned for that.
Keep your eyes peeled to both the proximity and I believe near accounts
will likely be talking about that.
And if you're interested in building something like this,
this kind of fully verified autonomous agent workflow,
definitely reach out to us at proximity and we can help you build it
thank you so much for coming on Cameron sorry Kendall and sharing about shade agents I highly
encourage everyone who hasn't read about it to go to proximity.fi and read more about what shade agents are they are a truly
innovative feature only possible on the near protocol next up we got the Barry
intern to tell us more about what strawberry AI has been up to welcome
Barry intern stage is yours hello so let me share my screen. Can you guys hear me?
Just a quick check.
Yes, we hear you perfectly.
oh okay it's working uh so let's talk about strawberry eye uh strawberry is basically
i would say it's a product that lets you research and do on-chain action
do on-chain action directly via a unique front end you don't need to go through any website and
check if they are rags or not in order to do on-chain actions but we spent quite a few months
trying to building all the infrastructure for research and then we eventually move to the defy part of it and it's i'm talking about
on-chain action like swapping depositing transferring and bridging and yeah we basically
right now we move the completely the front end to like classic chat gpt style where you can just ask question and get some text in return
but the new version will actually leverage a lot of defy lego pieces i will say
starting from near intense for every for every token that is supported for the near intents, it will actually use it on the background.
And as fallback, it will also use any other protocol, such as, for example, DBank, 1inch, whatever it is, without you having to even care about it.
And so right now, we're actually trying to ship it super fast because we have all the infrastructure.
We changed everything to like MCP servers
in order to make it scalable.
And we're doing our best.
It's starting to work.
I'm gonna show you like a quick look at it.
Like it, I would say, let's try with the token it's supported
sorry now it's doing its own research in our rag pipeline
and i can just go on and ask you okay you
know what let me try buying so yes is it
as you can see it's very like if you ever used the first version of strawberry chat it was just
texting text back now it's actually seamless between the front end you know it's doing its
own research trying to find the correct token addresses and double checking if
everything is correct like for example i can check if i have any chain link in my wallet already for
example
say 1000 usc for example
and so so far it's going pretty good we're uh like the underlying backend already supports
on chain actions and we're as we're speaking like i was working
until now on it in order to bring uh transactionality to it and we're pretty excited i think
well we're gonna ship it like very soon especially the near near intense part it's like all
near intense part it's like all already settled and yeah really like I didn't
heard the news that you will allow for permissionless listings or near intense
I think I might switch entirely on near intense because this is quite awesome
because I don't need to wrote like check-in for the correct routes.
If we have, I think, the permissionless side,
we will just need near-intensive in order to do any complex route.
So I'm pretty excited.
I hope to stay on track and follow all the developments.
I'm going to check out the also check out the shade agents.
Sounds pretty cool.
And yeah, of course, if you have any questions
and if you want to check out already
the first version of Strawberry Chat,
be free to go on our website.
Thank you so much, Barry Intern.
Keep shipping, keep building,
and looking forward to see you again
with another awesome update on what you're building.
Thank you so much.
And next up, we got...
Let me just show my screen. Templar protocol.
I'm just going to bring you on the stage.
There you are.
Hello, gentlemen.
Hey.
Could you do the next slide, please?
Yes, of course.
I'm going to remove myself and then change this.
All right, cool.
So it's been a big month for us.
We came out of stealth mode.
We both announced our first round of fundraising.
Thank you to all the both VCs and angel investors.
We have some great advisors as well.
In addition to a raise,
we also launched the front end
and also the contract
for the testnet app, which we have been making several updates
Fortunately, there's nothing critical,
but we have made some good gas optimizations,
storage management, added some edge case coverage to the front end.
So thank you to the 3500 plus accounts that have participated in our testnet in
the first couple of weeks.
As of this week, the contract is starting the first round of audits.
This is the near only contracts.
We are going to be adding support for Bitcoin as collateral.
And we'll after that be adding support for Ethereum stablecoins as well.
We also did some work to make a couple of different technical upgrades for the future.
One, we designed the system such that there is no on-chain or smart contract
compatible wallet that's necessary in order to interact with the protocol
using a combination of trial accounts meta transactions with chain signatures
like clients we don't require that the user have a MetaMask account, for example, in order to interact with our app.
recovery of funds in the event that the MPC network has some downtime, which is a edge
case possibility.
So we're excited about that as well.
We want to make sure that the DAP is secure as possible and covers all the edge cases.
We also made updates to our websites, updated branding, have a nice about page,
links to all the different socials, as well as our Testnet app.
We'll be doing a reset of
the Testnet state tomorrow with updates to
the gas usage and storage management.
We've also planned to put together to the gas usage and storage management.
We've also planned to put together points and incentives programs.
We have a document on the different use cases
and security assumptions,
and we've put together a lot of good FAQs
that will be put on the website soon.
We also announced a partnership with REF,
formerly REF and Burrow. We'll be providing lending services against native Bitcoin.
They will do some looping as well as liquidations as well.
We'll do some looping as well as liquidations as well.
So for our timeline, we are going to have a invite only mainnet launched by the end of May in time for Bitcoin 2025 conference in Vegas, where we will have support for Bitcoin as collateral and near stable coins.
where we will have support for Bitcoin as collateral and near stablecoins.
And around that time, we'll also be raising our next round
to help us with expansion to more chains,
more partnerships to increase distribution.
And then we're targeting by the end of June, we will have a public mainnet launch
with support for ETH stablecoins,
Bitcoin as collateral,
and near stablecoins and collateral options as well.
So that's all from my end for now.
I'll hand it back to whoever's next. So that's all from my end for now.
I'll hand it back to whoever's next.
Thank you so much for coming and taking us through everything Templar Protocol.
I highly suggest everyone to check it out.
It's at Templar Protocol on Twitter.
And they're seriously pushing the boundaries when it comes to cipher lending
i actually think they invented that term all right lastly we have open format and we got
sarah here with us i'm gonna bring you to the stage sarah and feel free to present your screen can you hear me great I can can we bring Andy in
can we bring Andy in as well please Peter thank you so much I'll let you guys do it
amazing thank you so much and so my name's Sarah from Open Format and I'm here with my co-founder
Andy thank you for inviting us to be part of this today. We're so excited to be here and tell you a bit about what we're doing.
So we actually have our own virtual chain on NIR Protocol,
and we want to share with you a bit about how we see our products,
intelligent communities, contributing to the wider ecosystem.
And so to start with, we just wanted to share a bit about some of the problems
that we see that might resonate with a few of you.
And so why we wanted to build intelligent communities and then we'll get into sharing kind of how we're going about that.
But really, this is about us trying to solve for the problems associated with the coordination of communities, with reward and recognition and with general kind of incentives and retention across communities.
So we're looking at how valuable contributions often go unnoticed, how difficult it is to understand your communities,
especially across different channels and where those pockets of value are.
There's a lot of kind of quest platforms right now, but they're quite generic and static, and they don't really
reflect the community's goals, and also the evolution of a community, and the different
tasks and the different rewards that can come up. There's a lot of noise. We call them noise machines.
These kind of rewards for GMGM and rewards for kind of, you know, a comment here or there,
as opposed to really rewarding,
valuable contribution and what that means. So there's a whole bunch of stuff here that relates
to significant problems around communities that we're here to solve for. And really, we think that
this can be really valuable and contributing to the wider ecosystem. So Andy, do you want to share
a bit more about intelligent communities? Yeah, sure. So I can kind of just give everyone a bit of a high level view on what we're building.
And we are trying to take very much a community first approach to all of this in terms of solving
the coordination issues and kind of the reward and rewarding issues that communities find.
So what we've done so far is we've already built kind of a significant portion of our
blockchain infrastructure.
So right now, our blockchain infrastructure, you can create fungible, non-fungible tokens
through our SDKs.
And these include solebound versions of each token
so soulbound fungible tokens are great for reputation systems so we have people using
this for point systems and kudos we also have people using soulbound nfts as well just kind
of as like a proof of action so everyone knows kind of proof of attendance um our just rewarding for contributions
so that's nothing special um but what we do is we can wrap every basically all our transactions
carry contextual metadata so right now um we are attaching IPFS hashes to every single transfer.
So if you just think of it like tagging a blog post.
So this kind of solves the meaningless on-chain data of like,
who did this? What happened? Why?
You know, it kind of just like gives some more,
it gives kind of some richness to the to the
transaction so we've built um we've built custom indexes that will index this metadata so it makes
it searchable filterable by people uh and agents so perfect example of this is open source communities
who are someone who's rewarding a contribution in github you can
then include the metadata that includes the repo user the pr id and any other information um i know
that yeah so like we know that near does some really interesting things around kind of the
protocol rewards so yeah it feels really kind of aligned with that which is cool so right now we
are focused so we're actually available on multiple evm chains but as sarah mentioned we have our own
virtual chain that's on there and we are really just trying to take advantage of the uh the speed
and the low cost and just the cross-chain capabilities as we kind of prepare to scale
things because right now these are real issues for us in other EVM chains and kind of Nier has
this amazing solution so we're really looking forward to kind of testing that and see how we go
so kind of going back to what you see on the screen this is very much focusing on the kind
of AI infrastructure and this loop that we're kind of playing to um so just to quickly go
through it we've got kind of the monitoring section so this is around different agents
listening to on-chain and off-chain data so as i mentioned github you listen to pull pull requests
you listen to issues various other things and then on-chain you might be listening to contract
deploys or you might be listening to contract employees or you might be listening to
um yeah see how many people are doing a certain amount of transactions through a certain protocol
so it's essentially these specialized agents who are focused on a specific area platform um to then
kind of understand what's going on within a specific community or project and kind of moving on you then it's about learning and it kind of is a two-part thing really the agents are learning from the data that is gathering but then it's also
learning from the community manager so there's a kind of human input as well because there will be
extra things that need to happen so we are using um rag in it or in order to allow community managers to add the most relevant up-to-date data,
along with all the other real-time data that is pulling in from other platforms.
So things that we have been kind of looking at, a couple of examples, is kind of spotting users
who frequently help each other out. These have been missed by a lot of communities that we're testing with.
There's also users who are interacting
and supporting the community
and the community owners don't even know about it.
So it's really cool insight.
And we can kind of start to see what's important.
So it's really important to know
that each community is very different as we know. And a lot of the current systems as sarah mentioned are really static and it's kind of a
boilerplate it's like a templated system of like go and do a twitter raid or you know go and do
something very basic so it's really important that in this learning phase that the agents are
adapting to like the vibe of each community because a meme community is very
different to a DeFi protocol. They have very different needs, they have very different community
members. So it's just about this kind of a cycle in itself around the learning. It just needs to
keep adapting. Validating is arguably the hardest piece out of this whole thing and is a bit that
we're kind of only just breaking into and this is
essentially around using swarms of again specialized agents to then validate if actions have
actually happened so we've been doing some very first tests on this around discord which i'll
discuss in a little bit later but yeah so examples for the validation process is really around kind
of confirming that something's
actually happened so the goal really is to use a consensus mechanism between multiple agents who
will essentially stake some tokens to then the goal for them is to just validate whether something
has happened and then once consensus has been made between all of them that something has actually
happened um whether it's verifying like a tutorial on post on Farcaster.
So if it's a Nier, for example,
a user has created the tutorial and posted it,
or someone has deployed contracts on Nier,
or someone's joined an AMA in Discord
or whatever the different kind of signals are.
So once that is kind of everyone's come come to consensus on that it's then rewarded so the system
will then log um log the action and it will reward the user and it will add as i mentioned it will
go through our hopefully our virtual chain um and then it can be rewarded on and on any chain
and then the last piece is notify.
Some users might not want this.
That's totally cool.
But then you want to be notifying your users where they're at.
So they want to know because all of this is going to be happening in the background.
So they don't know what's necessarily what they've been rewarded for.
So it's just really important to keep them in the loop on that.
So that's kind of the whole, that's quite a high level view the whole cycle and the loop will just keep repeating and
the goal is for it to just get smarter and faster and more aligned and will require like less and
less input from the community managers because it will just learn so much. So yeah, I guess we, you know, all of us devs have probably seen how Cursor and V0 and other
AI tooling has completely transformed how we write code. You know, how I wrote code a year ago
is extremely different to how I do it now. We kind of want to do the same for communities.
So, you know, going from communities, sorry,
from humans doing everything to agents doing the heavy lifting.
So then within communities, humans can focus on, like,
what they're good at, being creative, building connections
to other people, just building cool shit
and bigger picture thinking. So I think, yeah, if we can get to that that would be awesome um
where we're at right now we're very much in this monitoring phase in terms of the ai infrastructure
we are focusing on discord because that's where a lot of communities are at the moment we're
testing with a couple of different Discord communities.
We are testing with Aurora and TurboChain as well at the moment.
So what we can do right now is generate these impact reports.
So it is listening using an agent and also Discord bot
to then identify who the top contributors are,
the key topics, and then a bit of sentiment analysis over a given period of time.
So this in itself, there's already tools that can do this.
We're very aware of that.
But it's really important to know that these reports give the agent context to start suggesting on-chain rewards.
to start suggesting on-chain rewards.
And for now, rewards need to be approved
by community managers,
unless they just want to stick it into like a YOLO mode
and let it do it what it wants.
But I wouldn't recommend that.
So right now, they're recommendations by design
because it will suggest them.
And then if the community manager is like,
ah, okay, this one's a like ah okay this one's a bit rogue
this one's a bit less than it needs to be it means that you can then change it and then reward it
manually but then what that does is once the rewards are then on chain it's then indexed as
i mentioned earlier and then it can be used for context for future reward recommendations. So it's trying to keep building that knowledge for the agent,
specifically around the community that it's supporting.
So, yeah, so this loop is just really important.
And the goal is really to remove the human intervention as much as possible
over time as it learns.
At the start, it won't know enough,
but it's just about fine
tuning those models as much as we can so um early feedback is really positive on the impact reports
um and we are just about to push out some reward recommendations and just let that go loose and see
what happens um but yeah i think it's going to be really, yeah, really exciting to see these kind of self-optimizing
agents within communities. So yeah, we are opening up our beta. We are looking for communities who
are interested in using open format to kind of train their own AI co-pilot. You'll get access,
like we can give you one-to-one support um we can also do we've
got custom reward automations and like on-chain contribution tracking and also these self-optimizing
agents so yeah we're already working with a couple of other people aurora and turbo as i mentioned so
um if you are interested yeah just uh fill in the form and we'll book in a call and get some shit rolling um yeah that's it thanks a lot
thank you so much for coming on guys amazing to see what you guys are building and um looking
forward to um trying your product have a ton of ideas on how to utilize this so lastly i just want to say thank you so much everyone for coming today and
remember that the future coordinates are near and it's not waiting What you saw today was in theory, it was pure execution.
NIA is not pitching ideas.
It's shipping infrastructure for AI, for agents, for the next era of the internet.
In a world where intelligence is abundant, coordination is the new alpha.
And NIA is where coordination scales scales you heard elia say it
robotics is coming someone needs to coordinate all those robots this community is grinding
building and showing the world what's possible you're early but more importantly you're very
essential shout out to every dev founder and community contributor pushing the vision forward
to every Dev, Founder and Community contributor
pushing the vision forward.
Nia isn't just a protocol, it's a movement.
As always, what was just presented
is not financial advice.
Do your own research, use your own judgment,
but if you're paying attention, you know where the signal is.
Subscribe to Nia Week to stay in the loop.
And if you're building something amazing,
like all these other projects,
this stage is yours.
Do not hesitate to hit us up if you want to come along next month.
So everyone, see you next month.
Keep building, stay agentic, and remember the future coordinates on Nier.
See you all next month. Bye. .
