nearcon: the post-protocol era is here
It’s been just over a week since I came back from nearcon and I wanted to share some extended reflections on NEAR and the conference itself. The last time I felt compelled to write about a conference it was DAO Camp, which I thought was a wonderful event and a pretty meaningful moment in the development of the cryptospace.
I’m not sure if it’s the event or my own personal framing of where we’re at now, but I feel a shift coming. We’re entering a new era of crypto.
I’ll be honest, I’ve been Ethereum blind for several years now. I used to research all the new blockchain architectures that came out and even had an autistically extensive knowledge of the ropiest shitcoin ICOs in 2017, but somewhere around the DeFi summer era, crypto exploded in complexity.
It was too much to understand. From an academic perspective, this is when crypto went from being a discipline to a field of study.
You can’t solo it any more, you need a research team, or at least to focus into a sub-discipline. I chose Ethereum and DAOs. And that alone is nigh on impossible to keep up with.
We do this rather naturally, we put our blinkers on to lower the cognitive load enough so we don’t go insane. That, and the common phenomena among builders here, that you get heads down on working on the tech so much that the tech passes you by. It’s very hard to do both.
Learning new protocols (if it’s a real one) generally has its own rich technological language and lore. They can be messy rabbit holes and it’s often wise to steer around them. Dedicate some time to ghost chains and you will understand. I’ll never get the EOS period of my life back.
So anyway yes, I’m basically jaded on new blockchains. I just can’t be arsed looking at your new L2. I don’t care anymore. What’s the point in new blockspace if all we have is the same 10k users chasing the latest ponzus on whatever blockchain is having a mini hype wave, before moving onto the next one. If you’re one of those 10k, I’m not judging, you’re holding this space together, bless you.
So yeah, if it wasn’t for my friend and fellow emergentis David Weinstein who I knew (sort of) outside of crypto stuff, inviting me for a panel on DAOs and collective intelligence and convincing me to look at it, I would have never have done the dive. Nevertheless, I intended to read just enough to not make a clown of myself on the panel, but what I found was compelling.
The tech is good. Really good. Honestly, NEAR is basically Ethereum 3.0. You forget that Ethereum basically had to do the whole upgrade the engines on the plane whilst in flight thing, and that’s slowed everything down, considerably. NEAR had a fresh start and it shows. It’s got a sharded architecture at the base layer, they have nailed high throughput, cheap transactions, native account abstraction and cheap data availability and it’s increasingly aiming to abstract away UX pains from the user with modular tooling.
Which is one of things I found refreshing. There’s almost a desire in this industry to hang on to shitty UX, so you can maintain some kind of chain centric aesthetic. Keep some of crypto guts in plain sight because we’ve grown fond of the pain and we want people to know what chain they’re on. Metamask for example, is best conceptualised as Ethereum branded pain.
In reality, the normies don’t want to see this stuff, in fact it’s the main source of the chasm to crypto. Not just clunky UX spanning multiple janky applications, but a deluge of weird brands, mind boggling techno babble and strange laser eyed cults.
Honestly, we’re a bit weird.
A big theme of nearcon was chain abstraction, the idea that we should both technologically and aesthetically make blockchains disappear. The infrastructure should blend into the background and be talked about as much about as people talk about TCP/IP i.e. abstract away the weird.
Near is abstracting by driving a genuine multi-chain synthesis. The biggest problem in the multi-chain future is that architecturally different blockchains often speak different languages. This creates all sorts of technical and security complexity at bridges. The announced zkWASM prover collaboration with Polygon will allow full chain state to be thrown around between blockchains with different base languages (in this case closing the gap between NEAR and ethereum). They’re also working closely with eigenlayer blending the blockchains at the execution layer, which alongside the NEAR network being useable as a data availability service for EVM L2’s, it’s ultimately enabling Ethereum itself to scale.
This is why I think we’re heading into the post-protocol era. Not only are there too many blockchains for the normies to understand (the number of L2s is going to get ridiculous), they’re all blending into a strange digital mulch that only hyper nerds will be able to unpick.
Elsewhere in the conference Illia laid down some very interesting and ambitious ideas about the synthesis of crypto and AI. Illia was (is) an AI guy, and was an author on the seminal “Attention is All You Need” paper, a precursor to GPT. It’s honestly kinda wild he jumped from that achievement to go an build an actually interesting blockchain architecture like this, but now the basis is there, it looks like it’s time for those things to converge again. I suspect it was the plan all along.
I can’t help but be excited about this convergence. I’ve long thought the synthesis of these two things would be exciting (the third major pillar is mixed reality aka “the metaverse”). Crypto gives LLMs material execution. It’s not just chit chat, it’s putting knowledge into action. In fact, one of the hacks at the conference did (as far as I’ve seen) the first LLM triggered on-chain treasury trade using Intel SGX technology. Pretty cool.
Where I’m personally interested, is the synthesis of AI and DAOs and there was a strong positioning at nearcon that AIxGovernance is where it’s going. At one point Illia unironically proposed the creation of an AI president, which I loved because it sounds mental, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I genuinely think a machine intelligence could represent us better than an ideologically blinded and avarice powered career politician for example. In fact, I intend to prove it.
Outside of the tech, nearcon was fun, the parties were good, the venue was good, the people were good. I enjoyed it, but it also felt more intentional than many conferences I’ve been to, which are often fairly unstructured affairs perhaps with a few themed tracks. This was very much a conference to further the near network with the usual ecosystem teams sharing work and young hackers being educated on new stack developments, but also a central narrative strand that exposed participants to the values of the network. I recommend watching the Near Foundation’s Chris Donovan make the case for an Open Web anchored in privacy, autonomy and permissionless systems as a great example of giving the whole enterprise a grander purpose.
Despite the notable ecosystem coherence, there is also evidence of genuine efforts at deep levels of decentralisation. They’re going hard at digital democracy, as is evidenced by their recent elections. The recent set up of the NDC (Near Digital Community) is an attempt to further decentralised control of the foundation’s treasury allocation, a parallel contender for best efforts there alongside the Arbitrum Foundation work. Decentralising foundations is going to be one of the major indicators of advanced progressive decentralisation in the future.
I got really into exploring the politics around the NDC set up, which is really quite fascinating. From what I can gather the whole experience was rather painful. The real limitations of nascent governance systems and the very real human dynamics that get spicy when power and money is involved has left everyone feeling a bit bruised and mildly traumatised. However, ecosystem complexity (drama) is an indicator of real decentralisation and unpicking all that technodrama in the NDC set up alone is a worthy PhD thesis. Decentralisation is messy and only the platforms that genuinely want it will be willing to pay the cost, and I get the sense that’s the case here.
Overall, what I saw was very different to the new-L2-on-the-block-that-I-can’t-remember-the-name-of-but-paid-for-those-cocktails-on-that-boat vibes, and seeing a whole vibrant ecosystem that didn’t even know existed makes you realise that hardly any do exist Bootstrapping an actual ecosystem with its own culture, aesthetic, values and tools takes years. It doesn’t happen organically either, it takes years of intentional curation, experimentation and genuine hard work.
Which brings me to the clown market that is crypto. NEAR is valued at around 20% of Shiba Inu token, an actual dog ponzi. There’s newly launched blockchains without a stitch of human activity on them that have valuations in the several billion dollars. Its nearest neighbour competitor at moment is Solana which, is more than 10X the valuation, which although has equivalently good tech (they’re nearest neighbours on novel L1 architecture IMO) has got a token supply cornered by a rekt ponzi. It really doesn’t make any sense to me.
I mean it does, I just don’t like it. The crypto markets are basically a hyper-Keynesian beauty contest, people buy things to chase hype, sentiment and memes not technology and fundamentals, as sad as it is. I do however think that’s all likely to change when the real and genuine network effects kick in and is an indicator of how early we are. It’s just degens trading on memes at the moment.
I think it’s time for us to realise that we’ve discovered the roving group of crypto nutters willing to tolerate the abstract nonsense that is served up to us daily in this industry in the form of low effort cash grabs, outright scams and exploding centralised ponzis. The user universe of that crowd is limited. It’s time to start thinking about the new cohort of people that might actually use these tools for something useful and they just don’t want to see any of it, it all needs to be abstracted away.
More broadly, nearcon made me realise that I’m increasingly finding the blockchain tribalism in this industry just profoundly lame. The incessant squabbling over what’s the best blockchain is just boring. Any normal human that walks through the door right now has zero chance of understanding any of it. If anything it’s turning people off.
In summary, what I saw at nearcon was in my opinion a sign of things to come. Blockchains will blend and merge and become enshrined in a complex substrate of Open Web infrastructure. People will stop caring about what blockchain they’re on and just use the apps that leverage them and the ecosystems that chase that will do very well. Ethereum will continue to dominate with its constellation of “aligned” L2’s, but most of them will fail to generate any kind of personality or real ecosystem. Genuine contender L2’s like NEAR and Solana have a chance to build out their own value thesis and attack genuine adoption at the social layer. I think it’s quite likely that happens at the apex of crypto, governance and AI and I’m looking for a place to lead that charge. I’m genuinely considering NEAR.