Hey everybody, how's it going? This is Cameron Dennis, CEO of the Banion Collective, I'll put it on near US. And so if you are interested in speaking, please just request. And right now we'll only be bringing up people who
We'll only be bringing up people who are a part of the University of Waterloo, so please DM me on Telegram if you are trying to come up to speak or just request to speak. If I see Amy in the audience, I know that
The founder of KeyPom goes to University Waterloo. So please just request to speak if you are trying to come up on stage. There was a bit of a technical difficulty with the previous link, so sorry for any confusion. But we're going to wait for about two more minutes for the rest of the Waterloo crew to come on.
For those who recently joined, we'll get started in about a minute or two. We're just waiting for the University Waterloo Bletching Club account to come on.
And we did actually, we recently kick off a, let's see, great. Thank you, Optimus. I'm sending you to speaker.
Keep on by using your hands.
Anyone else just please request to speak if you are interested in coming up to this stage. Here we go. We now have the Waterloo Advocating Accounts in the space. Beautiful.
Slowly, just adding people. Thank you everyone for your patience as we get everyone up to the stage.
Great. OX Optimus, do you want to kick it off?
I just want to give the Waterloo blockchain account the speaker permissions. They just joined the channel. Yep, I just am waiting for to get their request to speak. One second.
Perfect, I'll kick the soft bend. So, ladies and gentlemen, blockchain enthusiasts from far and near, point intended, we welcome a occasion in the world of decentralized innovation, especially in the blockchain space. And we're thrilled to present to you this extraordinary Twitter space where
boxing clites with the mighty near protocol. And joining us today is the distinguished guest founder and CEO of Vanien collective and the president and founder of Bath Cameron Dennis who's also an ecosystem at near protocol. So, fascinating fields and let's prepare for a
half an hour space to leave you inspired, informed, and ready to conquer a little bit of this upcoming weekend. So let's first off give a virtual round of applause as we invite Cameron to introduce themselves. Yep, thank you so much. Hey everybody, my name's
Cameron Dennis. I've as OX Optimus highlighted. I am currently running Bany Collective. We help scale near in the United States by running weekly builder groups. So these are virtual groups that if you're building in certain verticals, you can connect with like-minded builders. We do hackathons and demo days and essentially
be the bridge between founders and developers to a lot of strategic initiatives across the ecosystem, primarily focused in the United States. But before joining Nier, I've been actually working with a ton of different layer-one blockchains through the Blockchain Acceleration Foundation, and after working with most
of them. I found out that the biggest barriers of mass adoption were around key management, obviously scale, and giving developers the optionality to build in any program in language. And so that's why I joined the Nuretosystem about two and a half years ago and haven't really looked back since we're building a
a ton of really cool stuff to help abstract the sort of complexities away from Benj users and developers because to be totally frank, blockchains are not the best to onboard people too. And so it took I've been in the space for about six years and super passionate about education and specifically working with young people.
to build innovative stuff. So it's good to be here. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much, Cameron, for sharing your insights and setting the stage for Hackathon Journey. And so I think without further ado, I'd like to kick this off with a couple of questions for Cameron. And so first off,
Here's been shifting the boss blockchain operating system, which is like an OS for the open web. And so I'm interested in hearing more about what motivated this shift and why it's important to both developers and users. Yeah, absolutely. So, now after building the space for quite a while,
and seeing all these different layer ones launch. It is quite evident that these layer ones, layer 2s, layer 3s and so on are kind of erode to nowhere. We are seeing the same uniswap contract is forked and deployed across different L2s. A lot of different liquidity fragmentation.
Lots of blockchain maximalism. So the whole goal here with the blockchain operating system is to provide a single stop shop for anyone in Web3 to seamlessly interface with all apps, given one interface, and then also decentralized those frontends. Because frontends are one of the biggest
I think choke points of the blockchain industry when it comes to centralization. And we have a way to actually put all that React code on chain and render it locally in users browser. And so how do we actually create fully decentralized apps to power the open internet?
That's sort of just like step one, but once you kind of dive more deeply into it, you start to recognize the power of what we call, not we call, this is actually quite popular in Web2, but component-based design, or component-based engineering. And it's very popular in the front-end development world.
where you just have a huge library of templates that you can fork and really decrease development time for new developers specifically. And what's extra cool about Near is its WebAssembly-based soism. And so you can actually write smart contracts in any programming language that compiles down to WebAssembly.
assembly and this is really cool because you can actually write smart contracts in JavaScript. So if you can write smart contracts in JavaScript as well as fork frontends for other blockchain apps, you can actually do full stack blockchain development all in JavaScript. And this is what the blockchain operating system
enables and the ultimate goal is just to decrease development time for new devs and give users a single stop shop to access any app in Web 3 no matter if it's launched on dear or not. So hopefully that can come from you know there's a lot more we can dive into but at a high level that's the take away.
As very well said, are we passing off to Andrew from Waterloo Blockchain to also from Waterloo Blockchain's court team to ask the next question? Cool, thanks for here. On that note, Cameron, Nier has been shifting, like you said, to become the blockchain operating system and the OS for the Open Web.
For any new users here, that sounds really really cool, but what motivated this shift and why is it important to them? We ask that question. Let's go to the next one. On that note, apologies. But how can you develop this to start using boss like tomorrow?
stopping them. How do you get them going? Just go to nure.org. Nure.org is actually a gateway running on blockchain right now. And so if you go to it, you can just press try it now. And that will bring you on to the onboarding. It's called this is a component. And actually might take, you know, might
might take a second just to explain what this looks like. Assuming that you're trying to create a decentralized LinkedIn or a decentralized Tinder or something like that, you're going to need frontends or what we call components to do certain things.
You're going to need a profile picture manager. You're going to need a messaging function. All of these we consider different components that you can fork and add to your website or your gateway to quote unquote. If you go to your.org right now, all of what you're seeing
are different components. For example, that try it now, button is a component. That, you know, bar where it says Aurora and Kelly Merrow and Sweat, that's another component. And so if you wanted to fork this website, change its CSS, add different logos, you can do this, and it's all actually happening on chain.
And so I think that's really, really cool. And so if you're trying to get started just to build, just go to try try it now. And we also have, you know, nearest pretty renowned for its incredible documentation and developer support. And so if you go to docs.new.org, that's also a great way just to kind of get going. There's also really
clear opportunities for people to start learning boss development. We're going to be kicking off an online bootcamp in early June for anyone interested in full-sack JavaScript development, blockchain development. And the whole goal here is to train people how to actually build on the boss
as well as ship components that people really need. Because right now we're not seeing a ton of end user-facing applications that actually change people's lives for the better. Besides payments, payments is a great proven use case of blockchains.
But when it comes to, you know, DAPS, that gain mass adoption, we haven't really seen that demand. So the whole goal here is how do we decrease the complexity so people can actually focus on building apps that people want. So to clearly answer your question, go to docs.near.org. There's a whole getting involved in near, for it's to start. We have a boss bootcamp kicking on.
often June and we also have a long list of bounties that if you go to the dev hub you can check out all the ways to actually get paid to contribute and build important stuff. I do also want to mention that it is like awesome to see all these like the docs and um good to see more people kind of
building your front ends on near because a lot of DeFi apps are starting to just block off North American users and so by having a decentralized front end it is able to allow more users to use these decentralized apps and be more censorship-resistant.
which I absolutely love. Yeah absolutely. I'm curious Cameron on that note what are some prodigy ideas for people looking to build on near and what are maybe any upcoming bounties that you have that toppled your head or any upcoming hackathons with near? Yeah so
So there's an online hackathon going on right now with Aurora. For those who might not know, Aurora is the Ethereum Virtual Machine rewritten in Rust on Near as a smart contract. So if you're a solid developer, you can actually start building apps today on Near.
in solidity. And so there's an Aurora hackathon going on its online. I think that's kicking off next week. And then there's a big hackathon in Mexico, I believe it's Monterey, about two weeks from now. And then there's the Waterloo hackathon. So plenty of hackathon opportunities. But if you're an engineer looking
to start building something today, I highly recommend going to nirk.social and looking up the Dev Hub and there are a wide variety of bounties that you can actually start building and getting paid for. And so there's like a list of ideas or the handle that you should be looking up
is devgovgigs.near. And there's a long list of ideas. And so we actually have keypom here in the building. So keypom, if you actually have any ideas that you think that hackers at Waterloo might be able to build on, love to give you the stage because those who don't know
one of the co-founders of KEPOM is actually student at Waterloo. And so they're streamlining onboarding, but yeah KEPOM you want to explain a little bit more about KEPOM in ways that people start hacking on it today. Sure yeah hey everyone I'm actually on campus right now as we speak which is funny I'm a little bit of a stroll but
But yeah, I think that a lot of the projects that are built on here right now and a lot of the projects that are built in across all the other L1s are pretty much the same. You got your NFT marketplaces, your DeFi protocols, all this kind of stuff.
I love the push to boss and I love the push to decentralizing the front end stack as well. But what keep homerly aims to solve is the onboarding sort of problems that a lot of people are vastly familiar with. And we really came out of the idea of we need to push nearest tech to the limits and create
some really awesome projects to showcase what you can do on there. But to directly answer the question, I think there's a whole ton of stuff that you can do to pair, you know, boss with key palm and utilizing kind of abstraction, because I don't think we do a good enough job at utilizing it right now. And a lot of things in Web 2 that
Backtracking a little bit, a lot of the reasons why Web3 came to be, I think a lot of those ideas are not really being executed on because there's a high barrier to entry for an everyday user, like for example ticketing, or I've talked with Cameron for, I don't even know how many hours about all these different use cases, like for example,
For example, food tickets and university students getting payments and ticketing is a huge one in my opinion and gaming and decentralizing that. But there's a huge barrier to entry for an everyday user. And by utilizing, keep on, not just keep on, but near the kind of traction model you can really lower the barrier to entry and fast off as
a great way as well to just lower that barrier to entry. So now we have access to a whole different market that was previously not really accessible because the barrier to entry was too high. And one of the use cases that I'm personally the most bullish on is ticketing because it's a really big problem right now and there's a solution that's so clear right now and it can only
really be done on near. For example, what's the issue? Well, you have centralized infrastructure like ticket master. When their servers go down, everything is messed up. You also have the issue of scalpers. Combining NFT ticketing with something like a key palm trial account or with an easy onboarding mechanism, you can solve all of that
that in decentralized the compute power so that the infrastructure is now is no longer maintained by a centralized authority. And so I think that, you know, thinking about a lot of the projects that Web 3 kind of came to be about are now possible because Nier has the account at your action model baked in. And so we can now use
use that to create really, really cool experiences. Like for example, auto registrations into a Dow is a tutorial that's coming out in the next like three days where you know, send someone a link and they onboard onto near and they got automatically registered into a Dow or get an NFT or get some fungible tokens or you know, got automatically signed into boss and start making components
and stuff and it's really cool what you can do right now and I think that we're in a really awesome time where we're just discovering and pushing the stack to the limits and figuring out all these different new features and technologies and if I was to build their hands down 100% I would be on near right now building out technologies because there's so many
potential companies and so much technology that you can use, you just go out and find it. And yeah, I mean like the docs and boss and DevGovDow and all that kind of stuff, it's really, really cool. But the number one thing is that we sort of solve the onboarding problem now. And so there's a whole world out there that we can just go explore.
I do want to comment on this actually because KeyPom is the only project I know that is actually solving this onboarding problem like just your context on how hard it is for an everyday usage onboard crypto like first okay you got to create an exchange account then you got your KYC then you got to load funds into that
Crypto Exchange accounts. Then you got to figure out how you can even conduct a trade on there, which as a first time user is very nerve-wracking. And then you got to create your own crypto wallet. You got to save your key phrase. Then you got to somehow learn how to withdraw from the crypto exchange into your crypto wallet. And only then can you actually start
So, we start interacting with the blockchain and the fact that KeyPom is able to cut a lot of these steps out is honestly amazing. Well, yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, we just provide the infrastructure so that someone can like click a link and then enter a username and start using the app, right? So, the onboarding problem for new users solve, right? Now it's time to take the ideas
That sort of spawned web 3 and build out companies and build out solutions for them right and that's the really cool aspect of things because a lot of web 2 brands even right now want to get into web 3 is just too high of a barrier to entry and so now that the onboarding problem solved we have access to an entire market that was previously not kind of accessible to
And so it's really exciting times ahead. And the boss just sort of makes all of this unified. And it's really, really quite fascinating. And just to expand on that, like for those who might not know, a kind of abstractions are pretty big deal on the Ethereum ecosystem right now with a new standard that was pushed about
a few months ago. The whole idea here is instead of wallets just being used to sign transactions like Metamask, it is actually used to manage your account. What I mean by that, it's more like API keys rather than just like a stamp. Why this is powerful is because you can create
much more robust social recovery features, easy onboarding, like what KEPOM does, and just for very tangible use case. If I give you $10 of USDC to go buy something specific, or just to go buy something specific, there's a good chance that you just take that USDC and run.
And you actually don't have to use that for the thing I told you to use it for. But now you're able to then define with key palm what public wallets you want to actually force the user to spend it on so I can give you near to go to play a contract on main net and you can't just go pocket that near and think of it.
it like verifiable on-chain gift cards is a good way to see it. And this is going to unlock tremendous use cases because now you can onboard people to web 3 without actually having them create a wallet until they actually see the value of web 3. And to me all these blockchains honestly are just
means to an end. And that end is a world where people can verifiably own their money, data, and governance without a third party. And the prerequisite to that is easy onboarding. And so I'm very bullish on key palm to solve this problem. Just to piggyback off of that, I think I think, honestly, near is going to become the utility chain that really enables
the experiences that crypto was sort of inceptionized for. You can't really do a lot of those things on other chains. And so by having near as like the central hub for everything and you know piggybacking on the boss narrative, it's really really cool. And having near as the utility chain that enables all these use cases because
you can really only do them on near at the moment and this is why I think, "Meir," like this is why I've been in near for about three years, right? I'm not leaving. I've never even, I'd like honestly asked me anything about other chains. I'm like, you know, it's good, but near does it better. And you know, you might say, "Okay, yeah, the smart contract asynchronous
aspect in the charting makes the developers I feel a little bit more complicated, but it enables the really awesome use cases. And if you're a really good dev, you can get past that and you can really push things to the limits. And this is why Nier will become the utility chain unified by the boss narrative and bridging your identity across all these different chains because rather than having a profile
on ETH, a profile on a polygon, a profile here, maybe your Uber profile, your Lyft profile is different profiles. It's a you as a person are yourself and you own your data and that gets transferred across all these chains using boss and it's pushing towards that narrative and I don't know man, nearer, nearer's awesome and the technology that it provides enables so many use cases.
100% I couldn't agree with you more. I guess for both of you Cameron and Kepam, what are your top three favorite projects built on here with no bias towards Kepam? Of course.
Yeah, so first thing, I think it's actually the reason why Nier got started in the first place. For any of those AI lovers out there, the co-founder of Nier actually co-wrote the paper called Attention is All You Need, which describes transformers for the first time and that T and Chat GPT stands for Transformers.
And so, near original vision was to create a mechanical Turk. And for those who might not know what that is, these large language models need labeled data to train to create superintelligence. But a superintelligence is completely dominated by a few large tech companies
the world might not look as good as if it might look if it was actually governed by its users. I mean the super intelligent being, the AI that we're actually seeing take serious form in the last couple months. And so the original projects for near before building a layer one was how do you pay people
to label a data set in a verifiably accurate way. And so this project is called Near Crowd. It was actually the first project ever built on Near. And now there's this sort of reinvented version of it called Near Tasks to essentially pay people to label data to trade
large language models. And the reason why they ended up building a layer 1 is because there was no network at the time that the gas fee was lower than the payment itself. And so if I'm paying someone in Bangladesh, you know, 10 cents to label a data set, the transaction fee is 30. It just won't work.
They built the scalable, you know, sharded blockchain to honestly just create a user-governed superintelligence. And I know it's hell of an ambition, but I love it. And I say that's probably like my first favorite project is Nierkrad. Second one would be Reff Finance.
is a MM Dex on here and what I really like about it is you can actually pull liquidity from Aurora which is the different shard that is EVM to actually start addressing this problem with liquidity fragmentation across different ecosystems or different shards
And I think that's a huge benefit because I don't know about you guys, but if there's any defy people out there, liquidity fragmentation is probably the death to defy if there is going to be death to defy. And so solving for this liquidity fragmentation issue and giving users a really straightforward way
to interact with DeFi is great. And then third, I really love KeePom. I mean, I know that's, I don't work for KeePom, I don't have an investment KeePom. This is just like the reason why I joined Nier was because a kind of abstraction is a prerequisite to mass adoption. And something that a lot of people in the crowd might not know.
So, is every wallet on Near is by default human readable. So think of it like Ethereum name service, ENS, built into the protocol. And so, why this is cool is because I'm Cameron. Near. I created that when I created my first account and you right now can go to Near.org and create an account human readable.
in about 10-15 seconds. That's insane. Like if you're trying to do the same thing on ETH as a OX Optimus highlighted, you'd have to go get a change account, download Metamask by ETH.
it in the meta-mask. Go to UNS, rent a name for a lot of money, pay a $20 gas for you or whatever it is. The fact that you can do this in one swoop is amazing. So keep on, shout out to you guys for
are actually innovating around this because this is why I joined the Nureco system originally. That, in fact, you can actually write smart contracts in JavaScript. So yeah, I would say those three, near-crowd, wrath, and keep on.
Awesome. Ben, do you want to jump into your top three favorite projects while we have time? Honestly, I would say roughly the same thing. The only thing that I would add that there's a lot of projects coming out with ticketing sort of advancements and I think that that's really, really, really cool. And there's a lot of cool stuff being done by like Harmonic.
I think there's some projects coming up targeting like university students and fair
There are ways to interact with campus vendors and school loyalty points at University of Water, like, scholars and stuff, but revolutionizing the way that those are handled in a more fair way. But yeah, there's a lot of really cool stuff happening.
Right now is a pivotal time in not just near as timeline, but crypto as a whole where now that we have the technology sort of built and infrastructure there, it's really time for a lot of people to get creative and to create new spaces that solve a lot of things in the real world that were previously not solvable.
Thank you for the insight. On that note, I guess for both of you or just for Cameron, is there anything else you'd like the developers to know or anyone else in this call? Yeah, we have office hours. I think it's twice or three times a week in Discord where you can actually connect with DevRel.
near Inc. and out of this pagoda. So that's really cool. We have the Boss Boot Camp, that's online. And if anyone's based in San Francisco, New York, we're going to have physical workshops as well in these cities to kind of give you the very sort of tangible community that a lot of you seek. And then we do demo days. If you just go to
Actually, nearbuilders.com, you can see all of the builder groups that we run. So if we have any builders in the house that are very sort of focused on certain verticals and want to connect with like-minded people, you can do that. But everything that you need to develop is at docs.near.org.
And I would love to see more experimentation around optional custody and social recovery because this again is something that the entire blockchain industry needs to solve before looking on board billions of people. And we're getting there like new
the count model is a prerequisite to it, but at the same time we need people like everyone in this crowd to innovate and experiment and fail and try again. And you know we have a really cool program that's actually just launching called Your Horizon, which is a sort of enough strategy.
So, you can actually get your project off the ground. And so, highly, highly recommend checking out that near horizon. And if you're a founder, but if you're a service provider, IE, you can also find a link to the project.
developer that's looking for work or security auditor or lawyer or accountant looking to increase your book of business. There's a sort of service provider feature on this on-chain two-sided marketplace to support founders. So definitely check that out if you're interested and sort of die
and the last thing that I'm very excited about, which everyone should start to keep an eye on, is this huge initiative called the Neertigital Collective. And this is an initiative to actually decentralize the Neur Foundation. And I've been at Neur Foundation for quite a
a while, I think almost longer than anyone besides the CFO and a few others. But now I'm joining the ecosystem to actually unite the community to govern a large treasury. And in short, what we're building is a digital government.
That's powered by the protocol, like everything is on chain. And the whole goal here, like my motivation to get in this space is actually to automate government. And this is by far like the closest thing that I've seen to actually push those bounds. And so we're actually standing up a bunch of grassroots dows to
There's EK stuff, there's bridging, there's like this ecosystem literally has everything. So my hardest thing, I guess my piece of advice would be to focus on a niche and get really good at it. And I'd say great niche to start is onboarding. So check out Kipal for that.
Thank you so much, Karen. I want to express my deepest gratitude to all our participants and our surprise guest, Benji from KeyPom. Your enthusiasm and dedication are what make events like these in spaces truly extraordinary. But before we wrap up, I just want to direct our focus to
the upcoming Hackathon this Friday in Waterloo. It's not just a competition, it's a catalyst for change. So I can't wait to see all of you there bringing your skills and ideas to the table. Together let's set forth on this adventure and make a mark on the world with blockchain. So mark your calendars and get ready for an unforgettable Hackathon experience. Thank you everyone.
everyone see you all this Friday. I do also want to give a huge shout out to Nier Foundation for being a gold sposter for the sack of dawn. They're making this possible and I want to express my deepest gratitude for them. Thank you guys. Also guys, keep up the great work. We'll talk soon.
Thanks everyone for joining. - Thanks, y'all.