NEAR Ecosystem Leaders on Web3 Mass Adoption

To celebrate the milestone of 1000 teams building on NEAR, we reached out to a number of them to shed some light on the people behind the projects.

Over the course of 10 weeks, you will read some personal insights of these NEAR Ecosystem leaders.

Today’s question (answers in random order):

INFRASTRUCTURE

Illia Polosukhin - Co-Founder @ NEAR Protocol

This year makes engagement a top priority. We saw growth of users through bull market but the users left as the excitement faded. Creating engaging experiences that get people to return is the most important part on my side.

Alex Shevshenko - CEO @ Aurora Labs

It’s simple: our goal is to make sure that the biggest set of tools, expertise and developer resources are capable of working with NEAR. One additional thing to mention in particular is that Aurora Labs is working on the container solution.

Louis Liu - Founder @ Octopus Network

In 2023, we will create a new NEAR liquid staking asset to replace OCT as the exclusive collateral asset to ensure the security of all Octopus appchains. Then OCT token will not capture value directly from appchains but receive fee streams from the liquid staking pool. This mechanism will be open to other NEAR ecosystem projects. We hope it will open up an innovation space for any L2 and middleware protocol that wants economic security from NEAR L1 while keeping an independent consensus from the NEAR blockchain.

Bowen Wang - Head of Protocol @ Pagoda

Usability of NEAR Protocol. Many innovations on the protocol level can dramatically reduce the barrier to entry for users and make it easy for developers to build dapps.

Sandi Fatić - CEO @ Calimero Network

We currently see 2 huge problems with Web3 which are obstacles on the road to mass adoption:

• Privacy - since all the transactions are on the blockchain (public), and you might not want all the data to be visible and public.
• Scaling - Usual transactions per second (TPS) on public blockchains will have limitations to onboarding billions of users. While they can be increased with sharding, they still don’t scale infinitely when it comes to a big number of transactions.

Calimero’s Private Shards are a solution that addresses both those issues.

DEFI

Claudio Cossio - Co-founder @ Meta Pool

Educate users in emerging markets how to leverage a Liquid Staking Derivative as a mechanism to hedge inflation in our countries, especially Latin America where we have seen that in the recent months it has been a very important problem that needs addressing.

Fiat is becoming a problem for everyone that wants to save and increase their purchasing power. With current market conditions our currency is less valuable by the week and makes it impossible to have any savings that is not US Dollar based.

That is why we are actively pursuing to work with fintech´s in the region to develop solutions for this and in the coming months we will be announcing some key partnerships.

Evie - Business Development Manager @ Trisolaris

My role at Trisolaris is currently the most important agenda item to drive adoption to Near. My job is to drive important and valuable partnerships that will advance the entire ecosystem. Some notable ones from outside the Near ecosystem would be Synapse, Brave and Axelar. There are many more and the most important item is bringing the first cross chain swap capability in Near.

Fauve Altman - Marketing Lead @ Ref Finance

Working to work with bridges to increase ease to move between networks.

Marko - CEO @ Tonic DEX

The single most important agenda item for contributing to mass adoption is to focus on user experience.

One of the biggest barriers to mass adoption of Web3 and decentralized solutions is the steep learning curve and complexity involved in using these systems. Many people find it difficult to understand the underlying technology, navigate the user interfaces, and manage their digital assets.

To address this, it's crucial to abstract away the complexity of the underlying technology and provide a seamless experience for users. This includes designing intuitive user interfaces, creating helpful documentation and tutorials, and providing robust support.

Furthermore, I believe it's important to focus on use cases that are relevant and appealing to a broad range of users. This means developing products and services that provide tangible benefits to users, such as lower fees, faster transactions, and greater security.

Ran Yi - Co-Founder @ Orderly Network

Our most important mission is to onboard more builders to Orderly Network and NEAR ecosystem, to build Web3 creations that can benefit millions of people.

Mass adoption will only happen if we set up a comprehensive trading ecosystem and make the onboarding as smooth as possible with low costs, robust liquidity, and great user experience, so users can easily migrate from centralized applications to decentralized solutions.

We want Orderly Network to be the default liquidity layer that any application can use. Let’s say a year down the road, users using any dApp on NEAR, whether it’s REF Finance or any other dApp, are actually accessing a point of trading where the liquidity is connected to Orderly Network. This means users could have a smooth trading experience with very low costs.

Uladzislau Dziarkach - CPO @ Roketo

In the Web3 market, there is a confirmed demand for on-chain transaction accounting. Rocketo knows how to solve this problem.

NFT

Carolin Wend - COO @ Mintbase

Making onboarding easier.

Chris Gale - Co-founder @ Few and Far

Simplifying user onboarding. The friction that exists today is too much for the average user. We must make the best UI/UX to help onboard the next billion users. This is a big focus for us all at Few and Far.

Riqi - Founder/CEO @ Paras

We are doing a web2.5 strategy for 2023. We’re planning to onboard thousands of people through multiple verticals, like comic and phygital. We will use a mobile platform as the main medium to onboard as many people as possible.

GAMEFI/GAMING

Oleg Fomenko - Co-Founder @ Sweat Economy

Build products that hundreds of millions will use and that means that we need to look into MOBILE. Mobile will unlock access to whole continents of largely unbanked populations and will allow web3 to become their first and preferred way of managing not just their money but any of their assets online.

Jon Hook - Co-Founder @ PlayEmber

Focus on the content and try to make web3/blockchain technology almost invisible. To onboard mass consumers you need to build content/applications that they will use and play everyday vs throwing web3 in their face in a way that they don't understand or worst scare them! UX/UI/infrastructure - of course this is all critical. But without a front end ( eg a game, social network, utility app) - then mass market consumers are not going hang around Shima Capital were joined by some amazing other investors like Big Brain Holdings, Warburg Serres, Hyperithm, Lyrik Capital, Huobi Ventures.

It was very proud moment for the team, especially in the current bear market. Massive thank you to the team and all our early supporters.

ECOSYSTEM

Blaze - Champion @ NDC (NEAR Digital Collective)

Helping Champion the NDC. In the first phases, it is focused on funding the grassroots community to foster ideas and innovation and, more importantly, onboarding regional and global communities.

Sasha Baksht - Founder @ Learn Near Club

It is simple - (L)Earn methode. Learning process is painful so I believe that proactive learners can do a better job if they get small regular bonuses to keep their interest in learning warm. This way we can help to create a habit to learn and contribute to the web3 ecosystem and this is how value is being built exponentially.

Aliaksandr Hudzilin - Co-creator & DAO member @ Human Guild

Homebrew & Human Guild, if not counting my contributions to the early NEAR team. Via Human Guild, we’ve seen 14 or so applications going to mainnet at this time, with 4 getting traction.