In the first quarter of p>222, NEAR Foundation saw explosive activities in the ecosystem. NEAR City Hall is a good place for the growing global NEAR community to see the implementation of these new projects, as well as meeting, learning, teaching and promoting the Web3 movement and NEAR adoption.
In March, NEAR Town Hall discussed ecosystem renewal, MetaBUILD 2 winners, DAO, etc. This is the highlight of NEAR City Hall, which can be seen on NEAR's YouTube channel or below.
Marieke Flament, CEO of NEAR Foundation, introduced the latest situation of Ukrainian members of Near Community in her opening speech. As Flament explained, many of them have settled in Lisbon, Portugal, which is one of the major European centers of NEAR ecosystem.
Flament reiterated the foundation's commitment to raising platform awareness, supporting projects through grants, and creating a safe way for decentralization by participating in policy formulation and supervision. She also showed some updated data of NEAR community.
As of March, NEAR Community has enrolled 4, students and 12 NEAR certified teachers, and the funding has increased to $124 million, distributed among 59 recipients. The ecosystem has also grown from 3 projects and DAOs to 429, with 11 million transactions (up from 95 million in February) and 5.2 million wallets-an increase of 1 million wallets in a single month.
Flament also highlighted the recent news reports about the fund-raising activity in Ukraine, Unchain Fund. These include Cointelegraph feature, the Wall Street Journal column by NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin and Sail GP's NEAR announcement.
listen to Marieke's speech here.
Chris Ghent, global brand strategy and partner director of Near Foundation, introduced SailGP announcement and Unchain Fund in detail.
"Sailgp is one of the most exciting and rapidly developing sports," Ghent said. "The goal here is to see real estate as something that we can promote real deep integration. The alliance is seeking to announce a DAO, so we hope to see it develop in the next few weeks and months with the approach of May in the third quarter. From ticketing to NFT, this is largely a deep technical integration and a global entry into the market. "
Ghent also introduced in detail the continuous cooperation between NEAR and Brave, a privacy protection browser-especially the acquisition of the homepage of Unchain Fund and NEAR's education plan. He also emphasized NEAR's support for "Play Magnus", a charitable chess activity that is beneficial to the humanitarian work of the Unchain Fund in Ukraine.
Ghent's part also features "digital marketing", talking about 7,, global impressions and explosive social media participation.
Catch Chris's conversation here.
Maria Yarotska of Pagoda, the hackathon coordinator of MetaBUILD 2, announced the winner of MetaBUILD 2 at NEAR City Hall.
"I'm glad to tell you that we just finished the biggest hackathon in NEAR's history with a prize of 1 million dollars and nearly 4, participants," Yarotska said. "I managed the review process while fleeing the war in Ukraine, and I am really proud of the community that made this process happen and delivered some very exciting projects."
"congratulations to Voog, MetaAds and NEAR Playground," she added. "Enjoy your bounty and don't forget to respond to all potential investors."
Yarotska also encouraged the unsuccessful teams to participate in the next MetaBUILD hackathon. For complete details about the results, please read "MetaBUILD 2 Hackathon Winners" on NEAR's blog.
You can see Maria's speech here.
Yadira Blocker, head of experience marketing at NEAR Foundation, gave a speech on Near's participation in the Paris Blockchain Week Summit. NEAR spokespersons will be in PBWS (April 12-14), so be sure to find them in the exploratory phase of the summit.
for more information about NEAR's activities in PBWS, please visit near.org/pbws.
From April 18th to 25th, NEAR went to DevConnect in Amsterdam (more details will be released soon), and then to Consensus 222(6 in Austin (June 9th to 12th).
"[* * * knowledge] is very important for the NEAR ecosystem," Blocker said. "We will be partners of Block 4, and we will share more information soon."
Sherif Abushadi said that NEAR Education continued to recruit new teachers through its global education program. Although 5, people registered for the program in the last week of March alone, Abushadi pointed out that only 12 people were certified by NEAR.
Abushadi also highlighted the remarkable growth of educational scholarships in India, Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela and other countries.
want to get NEAR certification? Visit near.university/certify.
You can see a clip of Sherif here.
next, Josh Daniels, the fund director of NEAR Foundation, talked about the core fund vision and statistics of the Grants team. So far, the Foundation has issued 234 direct grants and promised to invest $15.4 million in 222. In addition, eight projects have raised about $7 million, and currently 84 projects have raised $35 million.
Daniels also pointed out that NEAR Grants is currently exploring a grant pool for selected projects as part of the Ecosystem Fund.
"This was announced on NEARCON last October," Daniels said. "We are very committed to continuing this process."
Daniels also talked about the expansion of the NEAR regional center. Funds have been provided to four centres to support local initiatives and projects in Kenya, the Balkans, Latin America and Ukraine.
check out Josh's speech here.
Mildred Idada, the head of Open Web Collective, made a number of updates in NEAR City Hall, including the 4th announcement of OWC Accelerator.
"This will be our largest batch so far," Idada said. "Like other batches before, we hope to see projects from various industries and departments. So, if you focus on DeFi, NFT, and development tools-we want to see it all. "
she also pointed out how each project in the accelerator can earn as much as $65, after Demo Day.
"This means that you will get $15, on the first day of joining the program," Idada said. "At the end of the demonstration day, you will get another $5,. Really, this allows all of you to concentrate and build. "
In March, there was also a group on NEAR DAO in the town hall, which was chaired by Darren Rovell, a sports business analyst and ESPN alumnus. Team members include Ben Johnson (SailGP), Don Ho (Orange DAO), Rev Miller(Unchain Fund) and Julian Weisser (ConstitutionDAO).
after Rovell's successful introduction, Ben Johnson of SailGP kicked off with the background of how SailGP cooperated with NEAR to help create a groundbreaking sports team DAO. Rev Miller of Unchain Funds talked about using NEAR-based DAO startup board Astro DAO to create an Unchain Fund DAO for humanitarian work in Ukraine.
Next, Julian Weisser explains why the constitutional DAO is important in showing the possibility of people gathering around the same goal.
"This doesn't mean,' Hey, we're going to buy a constitution, and then we're going to try to flip it in five years, or we're going to have a token and have it appreciate,'" he said. "People are involved, including people who have never created encrypted wallets before, because they want to be part of something that can arouse their emotions. Like many cultural relics, the Constitution has important cultural implications for many people-some are positive and some are negative. "
"Another fact is that it is interesting," he added. "It has this meme component. You combine it with a 7-day deadline. If we start from 9 days, we will have no motivation. "
Don Ho, managing director of quan tstamp, talked about why DAO is an important structure of Orange DAO, which is an encrypted group composed of Y Combinator alumni.
"I think DAO is interesting, especially in the context of Orange DAO, because it allows the community to really own the efforts of the community," Ho said. "What is an orange DAO? It is the largest collection of builders in web3. First of all, we have more than 1,2 YC founders, all of whom are part of this DAO, and they all want to build in web3-accounting for 2% of YC founders. "
"However, the craziest thing is that the YC community itself has no inherent mechanism to capture the value it creates," he added. "Therefore, in Orange, we hope to create a community-owned fund and institution to promote the development of web3."