The NEAR Foundation is delighted to announce it is partnering with Elliptic to help enhance security and on chain forensics.

The partnership means both the NEAR blockchain and its native asset $NEAR will have access to Elliptic’s class-leading blockchain analytics and financial crime monitoring services.

“NEAR’s mission is to help onboard billions of users into Web3,” says NEAR Foundation CEO Marieke Flament.

“We can’t do that unless we can create a safe and secure environment for people to explore this new world. Partnering with projects like Elliptic helps us realise this goal faster.”

The agreement will provide users of NEAR with full visibility of the NEAR blockchain across Elliptic’s full suite of products and services. This will initially include screening of crypto wallets and transactions on the NEAR blockchain through Elliptic’s Lens and Navigator products, with plans to incorporate Virtual Asset Providers (VASPs verification) and crime investigation capabilities through Elliptics Discovery and Forensics.

“Blockchain technologies are embedded in the financial mainstream and giving businesses the tools to use them transparently is critical to their safe and secure adoption,” said Elliptic CPO John Connolly.

“Working with NEAR Foundation is another important step towards providing the deepest analytical and technical insight across a broad range of blockchain technologies to ensure businesses can identify trusted partners and work with cryptoassets with confidence.”

Elliptic provides compliance solutions and services for exchanges, protocols and Web3 businesses. Its analytics scan more than 500 cryptoassets and 20 billion+ data points to provide accurate, actionable insights that businesses rely on to mitigate risk and be compliant.

The NEAR Foundation is delighted to announce it is partnering with Elliptic to help enhance security and on chain forensics.

NEAR Foundation Partners With Elliptic To Enhance On-Chain Security

At ETHDenver 2022, a top blockchain conference and hackathon, we proudly announced the launch of Pagoda: the world’s first Web3 startup platform. The Pagoda vision is to empower developers with a fully Web3-native toolset for building, maintaining, and scaling blockchain-based startups.

## Open Source, Integrated: Open Services for Developer-Entrepreneurs
In the first seven years of smart contract blockchains, building out across the Web3 tech stack has made it easier to build blockchain-based products and services. But even as the time from idea to working prototype has shortened with improved tooling, it’s still painful for engineers to monitor and maintain those prototypes and mature them into efficient, growth-ready businesses.

Enter Pagoda, the first integrated Web3 startup platform and end-to-end solution for developer-entrepreneurs.

The blockchain ecosystem still largely relies on many Web2 tools — especially the tools required to monitor an app’s performance and to track adoption and growth. These aren’t designed to work with Web3 products and come with all the platform risks that Web3 seeks to avoid. Every service we use now in Web2 needs to be rebuilt to integrate with Web3, to support the principles of users owning their own data and blockchain-based accounts.

Pagoda’s objective is to offer Web3 native, fully decentralized versions of these tools at every layer of the stack, from the base blockchain protocol all the way up to the application and marketing/distribution layers. The NEAR ecosystem consists of many open source projects that can be integrated as “open services”: a familiar, cohesive development experience on top of a decentralized toolset. By providing interactive tutorials, scalable infrastructure, and operational analytics that are truly Web3 native, Pagoda better integrates them into one simple interface.

## Growing the NEAR Ecosystem: the Best Choice for Founders
Beginning in 2018, NEAR Inc’s original mandate was to build the NEAR Protocol and launch MainNet, which we did in October 2020. From there, we focused on maintaining and evolving the protocol — notably with the launch of sharding, which started in late 2021 — and improving the developer experience.

Now we are a team of 70+ members across 20 countries. Pagoda will continue to contribute to the development of the NEAR ecosystem, as Near Inc did, by building and maintaining the protocol, SDKs, and APIs, while building out more tools and services at every layer of the stack.

The core Pagoda product is the Developer Console.

## Integrating the Web3 Stack: Pagoda Developer Console

![](https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*Lxl25MEcJD0Ckwm7T4Gb1g.webp)

The transition from developer to entrepreneur happens faster in Web3, and it’s getting easier all the time to launch a product. Actually scaling that product requires not just developer tools, but a whole range of tools to support and grow post-launch — all of these are integrated in the Developer Console. This includes a DAO to manage upgrades to applications, deep on-chain analytics, and even triggers and alarms in case of unexpected events. Connecting to users directly becomes even more important as a Web3 product grows, so founders also need easy ways to launch ownership tokens, NFTs for marketing, and notifications for simple communication with users. All of these tools need to be Web3-native from the ground up and seamlessly integrated in a single experience: this is the vision for founders on Pagoda.

As the NEAR Ecosystem expands and more tools are created, Pagoda will continuously integrate them into the product stack. It’s still early days for the Developer Console, but we encourage all developer-entrepreneurs to try it out and explore the future of Web3 startups.

## Try the Pagoda Developer Console Today
To start exploring the Developer Console and sign up for news and updates from Pagoda, visit pagoda.co and follow on Twitter at @PagodaPlatform.

At ETHDenver 2022, a top blockchain conference and hackathon, we proudly announced the launch of Pagoda: the world’s first Web3 startup platform.

Announcing the Launch of Pagoda, the World’s First Web3 Startup Platform

It’s been a long time coming but we’re finally ready to share with you our lineup of amazing Aurigamists — the investors and partners who helped breathe life into Aurigami!

We’re excited to announce that [Aurigami](https://awesomenear.com/aurigami) has closed an investment round, co-led by Dragonfly Capital and Polychain Capital, with participation from Mechanism Capital, Amber Group, Jump Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Lemniscap, QCP Capital, DeFi Capital, Folius Ventures, D1 Ventures, and Genblock Capital.

Angels include Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora; Julian Koh, CEO of Ribbon; Bobby Ong & TM Lee , co-founders of CoinGecko; Matthew Tan, CEO of Etherscan; Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen; Santiago R. Santos.

We aspire to establish Aurigami as the primary money market on Aurora and behind the scenes, the team is working hard to ship out the mainnet.

Many of you have bombarded us with questions such as “wen WL” and “how WL” since the dawn of time, and right here right now we will be tackling these questions head on — soon.

How soon? In the coming few days, there will be a series of activities and tasks that you can participate in to become a part of Aurigami too 👀 More details of this campaign will be released so make sure you have those notifications on high alert! 🚨

We’re excited to announce our lineup of amazing Aurigamists — the investors and partners who helped breathe life into Aurigami!

Announcing the Aurigamists

Aurora is pleased to announce an important and long-awaited milestone: Etherscan is now integrated into the Aurora chain, bringing the most popular explorer to its users and developers.

This instance of Etherscan on the Aurora network is called [Aurorascan](https://aurorascan.dev/), and leverages Etherscan’s comprehensive feature set and proven reliability. Through Aurorascan, users and developers can get access to developer tools and network statistics that provide extended insights into Aurora's EVM. This is a beta release, as more features will be added soon.

To extend the Ethereum ecosystem, Aurora believes that the proper solution should be as simple as possible to give projects the most seamless migration. For this reason, Aurora uses ETH as a base token—the token in which the transaction fees will be denominated. However, protocol-level/API compatibility is not everything. It is quite important for users and developers to have the same infrastructure projects in place to feel comfortable.

Etherscan is the most well-known block explorer for Ethereum, capable of delivering statistics, token transfers and lists, smart contract source code verification, and issuing read & write calls directly from the UI. Users will be able to view transactions, addresses, and blocks. Developers will also be able to see a wide range of charts and statistics related to smart contract execution, collator data, specific transfers between tokens, and a list of ERC-20 tokens on Aurora.

This instance of Etherscan on the Aurora network is called Aurorascan and is available at aurorascan.dev.

Aurora Integrates Etherscan to Deliver a Familiar Explorer Tool to Users

XDAO team is thrilled to announce the official launch on NEAR Protocol using Aurora — Ethereum compatible scalability solution.

The NEAR Protocol is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain designed to be a community-run platform for hosting decentralized apps (dApps), but with unique sharding technology that makes it considerably cheaper and more scalable than some popular competitors, such as Ethereum. For XDAO, we are using a solution provided by Aurora to seamlessly deploy our solidity smart contracts on the NEAR Protocol and later in this article we will mention Aurora, meaning that it belongs to the NEAR Protocol.

Aurora has zero gas fees and is currently the absolute leader among all the blockchains on which XDAO currently works.This is a great opportunity for all DAO creators who want to launch their project with minimal operating costs and, at the same time, not be deprived of functionality.

In order to transfer funds to Aurora, you can use an official Rainbow Bridge to move tokens from Ethereum. However, to create a DAO, you can do it right now without having a penny in your wallet.

The DAO journey on Aurora starts from this page https://www.xdao.app/1313161554/. It takes only a minute to set up and deploy your own unique DAO and connect it to any other protocol existing in Auroura, such as DODO.

For more information, check out our [DOCS](https://docs.xdao.app/).

## What are DAOs on XDAO for?

- **Trust Management** — Collect funds and invest in other projects through launchpads and other platforms;
- **Venture Investments** –Reducing the risk of loss of funds. Make investment decisions in companies in which you have a stake;
- **Hedge Funds** — Connect to any DeFi protocol and deliver liquidity through the DAO;
- **Gaming Guilds & NFT Funds** — Create a DAO and use it as a guild. You can also jointly buy and sell NTFs;
- **Project Money Management** — Manage your shared project budget;
- **Charity** — Distribute funds transparently and securely through the DAO.

In fact, there are a lot of ideas for creating a DAO. All you need is a concept for managing shared finances.

Read the XDAO Blog to dive into DAOs if you haven’t done it yet!

XDAO team is thrilled to announce the official launch on NEAR Protocol using Aurora — Ethereum compatible scalability solution.

XDAO Is Deployed On Aurora. XDAO is officially launched on NEAR

Machina, the sharded data storage project created in collaboration with NEAR, Aurora, and online security protocol HAPI, is launching on NEAR to revolutionize how data is stored. The Machina team, which received a grant from NEAR Foundation, chose NEAR because of the simplicity and ease of writing code and deploying/testing Smart Contracts, as well as to take advantage of its carbon neutral, proof-of-stake blockchain.

Designed to provide scalable, cost-efficient, and immediately retrievable information on-chain, Machina uses the unique sharding properties of NEAR’s Nightshade to scale up the data stored proportionally to the number of validators joining the network. Entities using Machina’s storage are not tied to any specific payment model of any particular currency or asset. Instead, storage payment is deducted in stablecoins, which ensures that developers and users alike have an easier time dealing with fees.

Machina will use file-based storage, storing every transaction directly into it, removing the runtime needed to trigger the retrieval or uploading of data. The platform makes on-chain data accessible on-chain, along with all of blockchain’s security measures like consensus and decentralization. This will help usher in a new era of smart contract development.

By instituting a reliable, immediately retrievable, and always-online on-chain storage solution, Machina can be used by both NEAR apps — with the help of EVMs such as Aurora — and Solidity-based Smart Contracts on Ethereum. Beyond storing data, Machina allows dapp teams to query data and retrieve it without any off-chain requests, meaning Web 3 has a new tool for mass adoption.

## Data, done differently

To minimize time, energy, and computational overhead, Machina employs a method called File Fingerprinting, which maps data, giving each dataset a unique identifier. This means each validator will only have to approve or disprove the integrity of data by a given short text string. Consensus validation is then made based on the reached agreement on the fingerprint.

Unlike other proposed solutions of decentralized data storage, like Arweave, Storj, and Filecoin, Machina doesn’t use an energy-intensive proof-of-work protocol to validate or inversely invalidate the integrity of data. Instead, it leverages NEAR’s Nightshade sharding, allowing Machina to scale as more players join the network.

“The implementation of sharding on NEAR is crucial to set out a new standard for on-chain immutable storage,” says Dona Mara, CEO of Hapi. “Machina acts as a separate shard within the NEAR Blockchain.”

“This means that any dapp built on NEAR can communicate with Machina including storing and querying data. Interoperability is possible with NEAR nodes being installed in the blockchain that you want to interoperate with. Moreover, Rainbow Bridge might be of help in facilitating that.”

## Storage, without the gas

Since Machina will not use smart contracts, it will not have arbitrary Turing-complete computations. In other words, Machina won’t need to attach gas.

“We will be able to completely remove gas as a concept and not require attaching anything to the transactions,” says Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora. “To allow storing of huge amounts of data we can charge different fees depending on when the last time the given data was accessed.

The Machina storage network is currently slated for a Q4 2022 launch.

Machina, the sharded data storage project created in collaboration with NEAR, Aurora, and HAPI, is launching on NEAR to revolutionize how data is stored.

Introducing Machina: The World’s First Proof-of-Stake Storage Solution, Built on NEAR

NEAR will for the first time offer Proof-of-Stake (PoS) delegators the chance to earn rewards in more than one token. Launching with Aurora, the Ethereum scaling solution that allows projects built on Ethereum to utilize the cutting-edge technology of the NEAR Protocol, stake farming contracts will allow validators to distribute more than one token to delegators that help secure the NEAR network.

This gives NEAR validators the unique opportunity to attract more capital while ensuring new and growing projects can take part in network security as well as gain exposure to delegators.  

NEAR is the first proof-of-stake blockchain to support stake farming contracts. This will provide opportunities for the NEAR ecosystem to further decentralize by allowing validators to take a more active role in supporting new and emerging projects.

“The new validator model allows for better alignment of the incentives in the NEAR ecosystem. We’re looking forward to seeing the collaborations between projects and professional validators and delivering much more value to the users,” says Alex Shevchenko, the CEO of Aurora Labs. 

## What is Proof-of-Stake?

Proof-of-stake is a type of consensus mechanism used by blockchain networks to help keep them secure. It requires users to stake the network’s base token to become a validator. Validators play the same role as miners in proof-of-work networks like Bitcoin: they help order transactions and create new blocks. 

Proof-of-stake networks like NEAR, however, come with a number of improvements over proof-of-work. They use a lot less electricity to power the network – NEAR is certified carbon neutral – and doesn’t require expensive, specialized hardware to be a validator. 

As a result, proof-of-stake networks are likely to be more decentralized than their proof-of-work counterparts, as more people can meet the requirements of being a validator. 

## Staking and validating on NEAR

For validators to take part in securing NEAR, they must stake a certain amount of $NEAR tokens as collateral. Once staked, these tokens are then used to ensure the validator acts honestly. If the validator tries to cheat or change the blockchain record, the network burns part of the stake as punishment. 

There is a minimum threshold for how much $NEAR must be staked, which validators can invite delegators (token holders who want to secure the network without running validation hardware) to contribute to. Delegation is the opportunity for all token holders to stake in partnership with a validator, leasing a small portion of their validating node. Delegators can lock their funds into a staking pool and receive rewards.

## Challenges with existing PoS Mechanism

In the current system, just like any other proof-of-stake network, a user delegates the base token—in this case, $NEAR—to the validator and receives the same token back as a reward from staking, which is currently around 10% of annualized return. 

The current PoS mechanism creates a misalignment of interests from the professional validators, who specialize in server management for staking, and ecosystem projects, who build and grow the NEAR ecosystem. Previously, ecosystem projects on PoS networks couldn’t receive any benefits from validator rewards. With this new update, they now can. 

## A New Option for Validators and Delegators 

In NEAR’s new stake farming system, ecosystem projects can partner with validators to incorporate the project tokens’ farming into their rewards structure. This allows validators to split the NEAR staking rewards with the projects. 

At the same time, stake farming also creates a more compelling proposition to delegators who now get both NEAR and project tokens, with a much higher APY in most cases. This newly found synergy will likely accelerate NEAR’s ecosystem growth with further network decentralization.

Aurora is the first project to adopt this new vision for validators on NEAR. Going forward, other projects will also have the opportunity to take part in this radical new vision for securing NEAR and supporting the ecosystem.  In Aurora’s case, its DAO approved the new staking farm. The launch of the new Aurora validator is a fulfillment of the Aurora DAO promise to distribute 3% of AURORA tokens to the NEAR community.

While this is the first farm launched by Aurora, there is flexibility to open more in the future. 

This upgrade to NEAR protocol is one of several planned this year that will help the network further decentralize, become more inclusive, and help accelerate its mission to onboard the world into web3. 

NEAR will for the first time offer PoS delegators the chance to earn rewards in more than one token.

NEAR Launches Stake Farming To Unlock Ecosystem Rewards

NEAR Protocol has successfully raised $150 million in its latest funding round, accelerating its mission to help billions of people learn and use blockchain and decentralized technologies.

The round was led by Three-Arrows Capital with participation from several crypto-native funds including Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Jump, Alameda, Zee Prime, Folius, Amber Group, 6th Man Ventures, Circle Ventures, and MetaWeb.vc — the NEAR ecosystem fund. The round also included several top angels including Alan Howard, Santiago Santos and Aave Founder Stani Kulechov cementing NEAR’s reputation among industry leaders as a fast-growing blockchain that combines simplicity, scalability and security.

“We are excited to support the NEAR team and ecosystem as they scale blockchain applications,” says Kyle from Three-Arrows Capital.

“With multichain interoperability of Rainbow Bridge, Aurora (EVM), Octopus (Substrate), and NEAR native’s Nightshade sharding technology, NEAR is best suited for empowering blockchain applications for mainstream adoption,” says Amos Zhang, founder of MetaWeb.vc.

“We’re delighted to be backed by such a fantastic group of investors. It provides proof of what’s been built, and what’s to come,” says Illia Polosukin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol.

The funding builds on the $65.9 million raised by the project so far, from backers across the globe including DCG, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com, and Baidu Ventures.

## Fueling Decentralization

The funding will be used to accelerate adoption of Web3 technologies through ecosystem funding, developing NEAR’s regional hubs and raising awareness for the brand, the projects building on NEAR and its global community to new audiences.

NEAR has already established communities in Asia, Africa and Europe, and is looking to help support emerging communities in Latin America, Turkey and India.

“We are delighted to have such a fantastic list of backers supporting NEAR’s mission,” says Marieke Flament, NEAR Foundation’s CEO. “We are looking forward to leveraging the funding to improve access to blockchain technology in an ever growing list of countries across the world.”

NEAR Protocol has a proven track record of supporting its fast-growing ecosystem. In 2021, it allocated $800 million (now valued at $1.8 billion) — the largest of any layer 1 blockchain — to help fuel its mission to decentralize the community and help users reimagine finance, creativity, and identity in new and inclusive ways.

As part of that allocation, Proximity Labs, a research and development firm targeting the NEAR ecosystem, created a $350 million grants DAO (now valued at $800 million) aimed at projects, organizations, and individuals building decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on the NEAR blockchain.

Since mainnet launch in Q4 2020, the NEAR network has processed more than 70 million transactions, and supports over 2.3 million accounts. It has 200,000 community members, 1,700 actively monthly builders and more than 100 guilds. It also became the first truly sharded blockchain, in Q4 2021, running with four shards on mainnet, with further upgrades scheduled for 2022.

NEAR Protocol has successfully raised $150 million in its latest funding round.

NEAR Raises $150M To Help Accelerate Mass Adoption of Web3

NEAR Foundation is pleased to announce that it has awarded a grant to Fusotao Protocol, a verification protocol for an order book-based matching system. Using the paradigm of “execute off-chain, verify on-chain”, Fusotao aims to facilitate the creation of a new era of Web3 crypto trading.

Fusotao will use the NEAR Foundation grant to help accelerate the building out of the DAO’s functionality as well as grow its user base.

Trading and investing in crypto carries risk regardless of which type of exchange one uses. Centralised exchanges (CEX) present risks such as hacks and foregoing asset custody, while decentralised exchanges (DEX) present the challenge of high transaction fees and low efficiency. Fusotao intends to disrupt this by providing a user-friendly order-book based DEX with zero-cost gas, low latency, and high security.

As a substrate-based application chain (appchain), Fusotao is designed to hold users’ assets and verify matching transactions from off-chain exchange services. Fusotao will collaborate with Octopus Network to ensure blockchain security and enable Fusotao’s interoperability with NEAR or any IBC-enabled blockchain.

Fusotao will launch its testnet at the end of February 2022, as well as FXDX, which is the first order book-based DEX in the NEAR ecosystem. The community can earn rewards by trading on FXDX or directly share transaction fees through staking tokens on the FXDX or other DEXs backed by Fusotao Protocol.

Fusotao’s immediate goal is to support a number of upcoming DEXs that trade NEAR ecosystem’s token and promote the NEAR ecosystem. In the near future, Fusotao aspires to be a core component in driving development of DeFi using its high performance and high security features.

NEAR Foundation is pleased to announce that it has awarded a grant to Fusotao Protocol, a verification protocol for an order book-based matching system. 

Fusotao Protocol Brings Order Book DEX to NEAR Ecosystem

We are happy to announce that imToken now fully supports Aurora for our iOS and Android users. As a non-custodial wallet, imToken lets you handle your assets on Aurora with full control, use DApps and more.

Aurora is an EVM scaling infrastructure built on the NEAR Protocol, which is a high-throughput, scalable and future-safe platform, with low transaction costs for users.

The ecosystem of Aurora contains not only the Rainbow bridge, an official bridge to transfer tokens among the Ethereum, NEAR and the Aurora blockchain, but also leading industry projects like Terra/Luna, 1inch, DODO, The Graph, Chainlink, NEAR, Definer. Lately, Aurora has integrated Moonpay as well, which lets users buy NEAR token via fiat currency.

The latest version of imToken allows users to:

- 💸 Manage Aurora asset balances,
- 💹 Observe all token prices,
- 💱 Send and receive Aurora-based assets,
- 📊 Build their DeFi portfolio and
- 🎮 Use DApps on Aurora

To get started, download the latest imToken from Google Play, Apple App Store, or directly at token.im.

Entering the wallet and switching to ‘Aurora’ in the menu on the top.

Also, Click the ‘DeFi’ on the Aurora wallet, then you are able to follow your Defi portfolio on imToken.

Clicking the ecosystem button on the main page, that brings the user to their favorite DApps on Aurora.

After you enter the Aurora ecosystem and open the DApp, like Rainbow Bridge. Choose the existing token that you want to transfer.

We are happy to announce that imToken now fully supports Aurora for our iOS and Android users. 

imToken now Fully Supports Aurora

NEAR is pleased to announce that [API3](https://awesomenear.com/api3), a leading first-party oracle solution that makes real world data accessible by smart contracts, will integrate its first-party oracle into the NEAR and Aurora blockchains. API3’s oracle, Airnode, is deployed natively within the API provider’s back-end infrastructure.

With Airnode, API data can be queried from blockchains without having to use specialist node-operating middlemen. This architecture both eliminates the Sylbil-vulnerable third party node layer and reduces fees by cutting out the “middleman tax” paid to these node operators for their services.

API3 [has made over 180 Web2 APIs](http://api3.org/apis) accessible to Web3 using Airnode so far. The API3 catalogue has a wide variety of data feeds across price, sports, weather, travel, randomness, and a range of other data categories.

This also includes over 400 institutional grade Open Banking APIs that deliver composability for onboarding and KYC (know your customer), transactions and account data, merchant and ATMs, and a range of other open banking use cases. These were recently utilized by a state-owned bank in El Salvador for a hackathon, supporting the exploration of inclusive on-chain financial services.

NEAR is committed to supporting the integration roadmap that prioritizes the deployment of crypto, forex, commodity, and equity data feeds to support the demands of DeFi. This will see API3’s catalogue of Airnode-enabled APIs being made accessible to dapp developers on Aurora and NEAR.

Ecosystem builders are encouraged to engage with NEAR Foundation and the API3 DAO. We are committed to supporting projects that will use NEAR’s easy, fast, and secure blockchain and API3’s oracle solution to power decentralized applications.

NEAR is pleased to announce that API3, a leading first-party oracle solution that makes real world data accessible by smart contracts, will integrate its first-party oracle into the NEAR and Aurora blockchains.

API3 Connects NEAR with Over 180 Web2 Data Providers

NEAR is pleased to announce that Terra, a leading blockchain protocol deploying a suite of algorithmic decentralized stablecoins, is integrating its UST stablecoin on the [NEAR](/near-protocol/) and [Aurora](/aurora-dev/) ecosystems. This integration is made possible through a partnership with leading DeFi protocols [NearPad](/nearpad/) and [Rose](/rose/).

NearPad, which aims to be the DeFi hub on Aurora, includes a DEX AMM product where users will be able to trade assets and provide liquidity with UST pairs. Rose is a stableswap and borrowing protocol on Aurora that allows users and other DeFi platforms to tap into deep, capital efficient, stablecoin liquidity.

The partnership between Terra, NearPad, and Rose will facilitate the growth of UST to new ecosystems on both NEAR and Aurora. Users will be able to bridge assets directly from Terra to Aurora via Allbridge or from any of the other supported chains. Both NearPad and Rose will offer incentivized opportunities for users to deposit UST liquidity into the protocols, which then can be accessed by the wider NEAR and Aurora communities.

“Partnering with Terra to bring UST to ecosystem to our community will be a big step towards growing the Near and Aurora ecosystem,” says Aiden Knox, Founder of NearPad and Rose. “I’m excited to be working closely with the Terra team to not only bring UST to NearPad and Rose, but also for the deeper integrations and collaborative projects this partnership enables.”

UST’s expansion to the NEAR ecosystem demonstrates the importance of a move toward a multi-chain,composable future. Users will have access to the benefits of protocols built on NEAR technology without any compromise in terms of having access to some of the most popular assets such as the leading decentralized stablecoin.

“NEAR has been built for simplicity, security and scalability,” says Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR. “Stablecoins like UST provide a simple interface to store value and interact with apps which need to use a stable unit of account. Connecting NEAR and Terra ecosystems via Allbridge allows apps like Rose and NearPad to offer new ways to use stablecoins to both communities.”

“We’re excited about the NEAR ecosystem and are looking forward to continuing UST’s cross-chain expansion via NearPad and Rose,” adds Jeff Kuan, Head of Business Development of Terra. “Working with strong teams like theirs, we’ll see UST embedded more deeply in the global DeFi ecosystem.”

NEAR is pleased to announce that Terra is integrating its UST stablecoin on the NEAR and Aurora ecosystems.

Terra Partners with NEAR and Aurora, Bringing UST Stablecoin to Boost DeFi Growth

In line with the multichain future vision, DODO is expanding the list of networks it is available on. DODO is officially launching on the NEAR Protocol, using Aurora as the Ethereum-compatible scaling solution! Not only that, but DODO have reached an agreement with the NEAR team to have DODO as the **‘blue chip’ decentralized exchange (DEX)** on their platform. This unprecedented deal will ensure that DODO has ‘first mover’ advantage in this new and exciting space.

The NEAR Protocol is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that’s intended as a community-run platform to host decentralized applications (dApps), but with unique sharding technology designed to make it much **cheaper and more scalable** than some popular competitors like Ethereum. Does this mean the hardworking developer community has to reprogram the whole DEX from scratch? Not at all! Using Aurora as the Layer 2 go-between, DODO is able to seamlessly deploy onto the NEAR Protocol, despite having been developed to be compatible with the EVM.

“We’re excited to see big Ethereum players coming to Aurora to expand their businesses,” Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora, said, “I’m glad that in such a short timeframe we were able to satisfy all the technical requirements of DODO: RPC methods, The Graph integration, and others. And now on Aurora we see **one of the most influential decentralized trading protocols** being fully operational.”

## Why DODO On NEAR?

You might be wondering, “Ok, yet another chain DODO’s integrating with. Why should I care?” You might also be surprised to learn that Aurora currently has **an average block time of one second and zero transaction costs** (you read that right)! The NEAR Protocol and Aurora are fast, low-cost, easy to use, secure, and meet all of our technical requirements. The NEAR Protocol is also climate neutral, so you can save the environment and save money, too. Based on these and other considerations, the DODO Team has determined that NEAR/Aurora will likely be the “next big thing” in Layer 1 technology. Together, we foresee this deployment ensuring DODO’s continued growth and market success for years to come.

There has never been a better time to make a dApp on NEAR - and if that’s something you’re into, please don’t hesitate to contact DODO.

## Looking Ahead

DODO expect to achieve the following over the next six months:

- Total Value Locked (TVL): **$100M+**
- Volume: **$300M+**
- Users: **100k+**
- Transactions: **100k+**

To achieve these, the DODO and Aurora/NEAR teams will collaborate in a marketing campaign to promote the deployment, and especially our generous user incentives, on all official channels.

“Our deployment on the NEAR Protocol is unlike our other recent multichain campaigns,” said Diane Dai, DODO’s CMO, “Since DODO has a unique ‘blue chip’ advantage on NEAR, we are more prepared than ever to bring market-leading liquidity to as many people as possible.”

Aurora believes that the launch of DODO is an important milestone in creating a healthy NEAR and Aurora ecosystem with strong partners and a great variety of products for the community.

DODO is coming to the NEAR Protocol by launching on Aurora.

DODO launches on Aurora to encompass the features of NEAR blockchain

## Overview

In Q1 2022 the NEAR Foundation plans to stake 1,500,000 million NEAR on Meta Pool. This will help decentralize the allocation of NEAR tokens in new /current validator nodes and help secure the network– which are both core to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocols such as NEAR.

## Background

We approached the NEAR Foundation during NEARCON to explore options for collaboration in a way that could have the largest impact on the ecosystem.

We decided not to apply for a grant, since we already had meaningful commitments from our early backers and the current fee structure allowed us to bootstrap the protocol.

As an alternative, we proposed that the NEAR Foundation stake liquid tokens on our platform. Going back to our earliest AMA´s and webinars, we have said: — our goal is to help decentralize and strengthen the NEAR network — so we developed this delegation structure and began discussing it with the NEAR Foundation Funding Team.

## Growth over Grants

Instead of Meta Pool receiving a sum of money in a one-time grant, we are receiving support via adoption of the Meta Pool model. The NEAR foundation will become a user of Meta Pool just like any individual user: depositing 1.5 million $NEAR tokens, which can be withdrawn at any time, and receiving the equivalent balance in stNEAR.

The NEAR Foundation’s plan to delegate such a large amount to Meta Pool is a strong vote of confidence that should send a clear message: Liquid Staking is an important part of the growing NEAR ecosystem and Meta Pool is a strong project supporting this staking model. As a prerequisite of this delegation commitment Meta Pool will complete a full review / audit of their smart contracts & codebase. Once this delegation is completed we are optimistic that other large major projects will begin to explore committing to delegations with Meta Pool in the upcoming year.

## Advantages of Staking with Meta Pool.

This are the main advantages that our liquid staking platform offers:

- The tokens that are staked on Meta Pool will be capital efficient.
- Support new validator nodes coming to the network.
- Help improve the censorship resistance of the protocol.
- Incentivize retail token holders to discover liquid staking.

## Tokens that are capital efficient.

When the NEAR Foundation stakes the 1.5 million NEAR on Meta Pool, the protocol will mint around 1.49 million stNEAR (approximately). This NEP-141 token can now start to flow back into the ecosystem. The NEAR Foundation Funding team will begin to explore creative ways to utilize tokens to support the broader ecosystem.

## Decentralisation and Censorship Resistance

The key part here is that the NEAR tokens are not locked on one validator node and it will flow to 51 validator nodes, it will also accrue $META rewards so the NEAR Foundation will also have voting rights on our ASTRO DAO. These $META tokens could also be delegated to projects that have overlap with Meta Pool.

It is a green field opportunity that we are really excited to be collaborating with the NEAR Foundation upon. More details will be provided as we finalize the commitment date.

### Securing the allocated tokens.

Another important aspect to disclose is that the tokens will be non-custodial, that means that during the 24 months that it will provide staking to Meta Pool the NEAR Foundation will have complete control over the tokens.

### Being the new validator on the block.

Launching a validator node requires work, just have a look around the documentation or ask the Open Shards Alliance Discord, it requires deep knowledge and a team that can maintain the infrastructure to keep the node running efficiently and be cost effective.

When NEAR Foundation starts staking on Meta Pool, it will distribute those one and half million NEAR tokens to new nodes and also allocate it to the top performing nodes that sit outside the Top 10. The protocol needs new validator nodes to come in and keep the network running and provide the base for all our DApps to run on.

Thus improving the performance of the NEAR network protocol. We are convinced that this partnership will be a success and will show that community is part of the DNA of the protocol.

## Next Steps

Our commitment is that on January 3rd all the Meta Pool smart contracts will be audited by Blocksec, who is a Tier 1 security firm.

These are the repositories of the contracts that will be audited:

- Staking contract — https://github.com/Narwallets/meta-pool
- $META contract — https://github.com/Narwallets/meta-pool/tree/master/meta-token

Once the audit has been completed and we have implemented the changes/improvements to our smart contracts, then the NEAR Foundation will finalize the delegation.

2022 is looking bright! Keep on staking!

In Q1 2022 the NEAR Foundation plans to stake 1,500,000 million NEAR on Meta Pool.

NEAR Foundation embraces Liquid Staking by committing 1.5 million $NEAR to Meta Pool

On December 8th, Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage, rendering a large number of projects and websites inaccessible. If you own an IPFS-based front end, then you didn’t experience the effects of this outage at all.

With this AWS crash in mind, NEAR is pleased to announce 4EVERLAND — an IPFS-based hosting service — is bringing its one-stop service for deploying front ends to the NEAR ecosystem.

IFPS, or InterPlanetary File System, is a protocol and peer-to-peer network used for storing and sharing data in distributed systems, like blockchains. 4EVERLAND’s IFPS protocol frees apps’ data storage and access from centralized servers, guaranteeing better data security and trustworthiness. It will also allow dApp developers and users to explore more of Web3’s possibilities.

4EVERLAND provides DDNS, Data I/O, Cert Manager, and other modules in the gateway layer, which are compatible with Web2 access experience. Developers can quickly complete DWeb deployment in minutes without any plug-ins and additional learning costs.

4EVERLAND is also providing global acceleration and data analysis services for all front-ends that are deployed on 4EVERLAND, which will make for more helpful project operation and maintenance.

The 4EVERLAND team is now welcoming all NEAR developers to deploy their front-end on IPFS, either as the main site or as an alternate site. To encourage front-end development on 4EVERLAND, the team is currently offering a number of rewards.

4EVERLAND already launched a ‘First Leap’ program to encourage outstanding projects to deploy their front ends on IPFS. In addition to that, 4EVERLAND is providing 30 extra business version free places for the NEAR Ecosystem, sponsoring six months of services to advance NEAR ecosystem development. Outstanding NEAR developers will also have the opportunity to become 4EVERLAND’s whitelist members and get Dev Grants, while enjoying diversified service rights from 4EVERLAND.

NEAR is pleased to announce 4EVERLAND — an IPFS-based hosting service — is bringing its one-stop service for deploying front ends to the NEAR ecosystem.

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