Happy Hacking | November 15th, 2019

We have just opened the registration for the next week of Stake Wars. If you are interested in participating, please join us on Discord; you will find more information in the validator channel. So far we have received lots of feedback that allowed us to improve the testnet, fix bugs, and make the program more accessible for everyone. If you are thinking of joining, please have a try, the Near team is here to support.

The third episode of our “Lunch & Learn” series is out, in which Alex discusses the challenges of implementing light clients in Proof-of-Stake systems. In “Lunch & Learn” Illia and Alex share the design, assumptions, and implementation of NEAR Protocol. 

Lastly, we are increasing our efforts to gather community and developer feedback. If you are in the Bay Area, please pass by our office for one of our “Blockchain Hack Nights”. The first one will happen next week – Sign-up here! 

For everyone who cannot make it in person, we would still love to hear from you. Please fill out the following form. Someone from the team will get in touch.

COMMUNITY UPDATE

• Our goal is to build a self-sufficient community. To get there, we are in the process of changing the structure of the ambassador program to give local hubs more autonomy and to operate independently from Near. 
• The Future of Blockchain Hackathon has started! We currently have 30 teams signed-up to build on NEAR. Some teams are looking for additional team members; if you are interested, have a look at the overview and join the fob-hackathon channel in our Discord.

UPCOMING EVENTS

We are launching “Blockchain Hack Night”; a bi-weekly meetup for developers and blockchain enthusiasts in the Bay Area. Besides talks on dApp and blockchain development, we will help you get started building your own dApp on NEAR. The first one will happen next week – Sign-up now!

WRITING AND CONTENT

• Have a look at Gavin’s article, summarising the AMA between Staking Hub and Illia. Take me to the article.
• To learn more about our approach to sharding, have a look at Alex’ talk at the second annual Scalar Capital summit.
• We have more ambassadors from Europe getting involved. A big shout-out to Markus, who has started a German Medium site; articles include a German translation of “The Beginner’s Guide to the NEAR Blockchain”.

ENGINEERING UPDATES

156 PRs across 23 repos by 27 authors. Featured repos: nearcore, nearlib, near-shell, near-wallet, near-bindgen, assemblyscript-json, nomicon, near-ops, near-contract-helper, borsh, stakewars and near-explorer;

• Release v0.4.5 of nearcore
  • Merklization of execution outcomes in nearcore
  • Reduce wait for validators who are offline, remove mem leak in nearcore
• Finalizing the Finality Gadget in NEARCore — the finality gadget described in https://near.ai/post is now fully implemented, integrated and tested. Under normal circumstances whenever a block at height `k` is published, the block at height `k-2` is irreversible.
• The final PR in implementing proper state sync in nearcore.
• near-shell 0.14.1 published 
• Updated transactions ordering doc, add an example in nomicon
• Fixed server-side rendering of node pages in near-explorer
• A three-part PR (1, 2 and 3) improving transaction pool and implementing delaying receipts to prevent spamming shards in nearcore
• Major overhaul of networking code in nearcore
• Implement runtime fee per touched trie node in nearcore
• NEP outlining the details of the Proposed implementation of the randomness beacon
• Node & Staking and visual changes in near-wallet

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED

Join us: there are new jobs we’re hiring across the board!

If you want to work with one of the most talented teams in the world right now to solve incredibly hard problems, check out our careers page for openings. And tell your friends!

Learn more about NEAR in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol. Stay up to date with what we’re building by following us on Twitter for updates, joining the conversation on Discord and subscribing to our newsletter to receive updates right to your inbox.

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