Daily highlights and impressions of NEARCON 2022: day three

It was a remarkable closing day for the largest NEARCON ever. The Near Protocol (NEAR) conference was filled with an air of excitement as entrepreneurs, business development professionals, and investors gathered in an effort to work together to build something that goes beyond the crypto industry, something that is meaningful, impactful, and revolutionary.

You can read my day one recap here while my day two recap can be accessed here.

Among the latest Near Protocol updates that were made on the final day were:

• Switchboard, a permission-less, customizable, multi-chain oracle protocol for general-purpose data feeds & verifiable randomness, teamed up with NEAR to provide app developers with the best tools and data.

• NearPay, a crypto-to-fiat bridge, is in the process of launching its physical debit cards.

On this last conference day, a number of important cryptocurrency topics were discussed, including stablecoins, mass adoption, crypto banking centralization, and sustainability.

In a conversation with Marieke Flament, USD Coin operator and Circle CEO Jeremi Allaire discussed stablecoins’ success. He said:

More and more people and institutions are realizing that this is a very convenient form of exchange, a convenient form-factor, a dollar. And it has capabilities of public blockchains: high degree of security, privacy insurance, low-cost transmissions. We see a lot of growth and demand to use it around the world in emerging markets.

Furthermore, Decentral Bank, a DAO that maintains NEAR-native USN stablecoin, participated in the session “The Stablecoin Tradeoff: Decentralization vs. Mass Adoption.” The discussion focused on whether crypto banking should be centralized in order to promote mass adoption, and how to avoid compromising decentralization goals.

Elena Shiltseva, the CPO of Roketo Business, a crypto streaming solution, during the discussion on “Crypto Native vs. Fintechs for the Future of Payments and stated:

Payments in Web3 face a number of adoption challenges. New businesses are striving to come to Web3, but they are used to Web2 experience. They also aim to manage payments across different currencies and blockchains. Our main goal at Roketo is to provide the best payment experience for DAOs in Web3 businesses. We have recently released an alpha version and onboarding first users.

As opposed to many other blockchains making the news, NEAR is active in reducing its carbon footprint, not just with offsets, which are often criticized for not being enough, but by reducing the carbon footprint in general, which is now possible with NEAR’s very core design solutions: Proof-of-Stake and sharding.

Regenerative economics – also known as ReFi – has been given stage time in accordance with these values. Emiliano Gutierrez from RAIZ, a Lisbon-based vertical farming startup, presented a fascinating case of how DeFi can be used to address the food crisis during the discussion on “Why We’re Backing the ReFi Movement”. Gutierrez said:

We decentralize access to more vertical farms worldwide. Instead of a single entity having to finance the farm in itself, we can empower communities in need to finance and deploy their own farms. There are two key factors here: scalability and traceability. Through DeFi, ReFi and blockchain technology we can accelerate the deployment of more vertical farming worldwide and trace their impact. By leveraging data and different solutions we can actually off-chain data bridged on-chain to see how much impact we are actually generating in terms of water, energy used and land saved, so that we can empower communities to grow more with less and grow more local food.   

A revealing look at NEAR’s history was provided by Illia Polosukhin during one of the last talks. He then introduced NEAR Digital Collective (NDC), a community-driven initiative aimed at increasing ecosystem-wide decentralization through transparent governance.

See you next year at NEARCON

Alex Shevchenko, the CEO of Aurora Labs offered some parting remarks. Invezz previously covered the news of Aurora Labs’ $90 million launch of a token fund built on the Near protocol.

Shevchenko stated:

I am at NEARCON and it’s the last day of this great conference. It is sunny, the weather is much better than the previous two days and lots of great Hackathon submissions here, lots of great connections, an insane amount of people, over 2,500 people visited NEARCON this year. I am super excited about this conference, about the opportunities that it brings to everybody including Aurora. See you next year at NEARCON in Lisbon.

I attended a closing party in the evening. It was a packed house that danced their hearts out late into the night. Joy and unity filled the room as people felt part of something amazing we are creating together.

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