Sherif Abushadi on NEAR Protocol’s education platform and developer programs

0:01i'm ashton addison from blockwest capital for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews with sharif abhishadi education at near protocol sharif welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to come on nice thanks for having me austin appreciate it you're very welcome we did speak with elia one of the founders of near protocol in

0:22the beginning of this year and near protocol is just so fascinating to me i think it's one of the huge up and coming uh already up uh you know layer one protocols that has a lot going on and i know that there's a lot to be done in the education aspect of it as well i would love for you to kick it off by just talking a little bit about uh the near protocol and the near education and

0:42then we can dive into the details sure i'll give it a shot i mean um as most of your audience knows uh bitcoin uh invented the clock that ticks in blocks and captures data along the way in a cryptographically unassailable history ethereum put a computer on top of that clock and said well outputs and all the code and then all of the layer ones that have emerged in the

1:10last couple of years are just making that faster and cheaper and more scalable so through parallelization uh polka dot uh transparent chains solana time stamps and does work in parallel avalanche has specialized chains so we're all just working on the same challenging problem which is maintaining a kind of forever history that's economically incentivized truth

1:36and at near i think what i say without any hesitation is this is you know 25 years in the industry this is one of the the the strongest if not the strongest team i've ever uh had the pleasure of working with technically speaking uh near's uh core talent is just um it's it's really hard to believe sometimes the conversations uh that you overhear and how fast things just kind

2:00of pick up i mean it's all open source you can take a look but um that that's remarkable and so as an educator in this space i've been here for a couple of years now i do my best just to keep up and to hold this high bar of you know technical accuracy and at the same time making things accessible to folks who are just coming out of coding boot camps

2:20with a couple of months of experience or uh veterans of the industry with 10 15 years transitioning from you know web 2 and uh and and you know what we most of us think is the is the world wide web today uh people transitioning into this new web 3 space and so so in that sense i think there's really a lot to learn and there's a lot that we can carry over

2:42from what we already know in fact you can sort of think of all of the innovation of the last 20 25 years coming because of the gay guaranteed movement of data around the planet i wonder what we'll see in the next 20 years given the guaranteed movement of truth uh at the same speed that's really a big deal so that's what's exciting for me and i'm sure it's

3:03exciting for a lot of people out there we're teaching people as fast as we can definitely sharif yeah it's very exciting and i i would love to see you know what near protocol is going to look like in 20 years from now and just the cryptocurrency space in general i can imagine it could be slightly different from from what it is now and um i'm glad that you touched there on you know all

3:25the up and coming layer ones there's like so much going on so quickly and you're right about you know just making uh these platforms that uh you know that the turing complete platforms like smarter faster and cheaper you know especially cheaper for access to people around the world that you know are even unbanked and they don't have any access to capital to be able to do

3:48transactions at almost no cost and i know that uh the near that's one of your specialties as well i would love for you to dive just a little bit deeper uh into near and you know in your vision you've already already obviously been working there for a while now and there's so much in the pipeline for near protocol can you talk about you know with all

4:07these layer ones upcoming in the next year or two as some of them rise to the top do you see near protocol as one of those that is just totally leading blockchain innovation look i mean that's a really big idea this isn't i think a kind of uh something you can plan um you know what we've seen in uh teas in the last you know eight

4:36ten months what we've seen in the d5 space in the last 24 months these are things you could hardly imagine uh if if someone had come to you and just really tried to shake you and convince you a year two ago that we would be where we are today uh i i don't think that they would be able to to convince you uh so it's it's really incredible looking forward is even harder because

4:56things are getting faster we can all feel it anybody up speed getting more complicated getting a little bit faster getting a little bit harder to keep up with year in and year out from our perspective it really is about partnerships and outreach it's about education it's about meeting consumers where they are today instead of trying to convince them

5:22that they need to switch to some new way of thinking about the world meet them with the highest quality user experience with onboarding that's seamless with you know user interfaces that look familiar and feel familiar it's also about developers and meeting them at a place where it's easy to think about building an application on blockchain yeah it's just a slow

5:43expensive database that's actually good enough for your first year the price of slow and expensive the trade-off there is that you basically get a database that doesn't lie um and so that that's what's exciting so so in that sense really um many of us like i think kind of see the same landscape um and uh you know we're hoping to attract developers with some of our programs in education

6:07uh we're inviting uh you know developers and researchers and designers to come and join us for our fellows program you can check out near.university for that in fact just this week we launched a program to attract teachers a thousand teachers i would love to see a thousand teachers talking about this and i don't just mean um software development teachers of

6:29course if you have a technical background that's great but i'm actually thinking of the history teachers the philosophy teachers the economics teachers the home economics and social studies teachers that are going to kind of inspire the imagination of youth to spend some time trying to think about the world and where it's going to be in the next 10 or 20 years

6:50i don't know if i'd have shown you this thing 25 years ago and told you what i do with it today you would hardly believe it so where are we going now that we have this new tech it really is that kind of time and we need more than just software development engineers and speculation to get there i think we need some some really big ideas and some fresh ideas

7:08and so that's what we're hoping to attract that's who we're hoping to attract with this thousand teachers program very cool sharif and yeah i agree it's funny you say that you know about the cell phone people can't even believe it and i think you know if i walked into a classroom and my teacher was talking about near protocol and my head would be turning but i think you know a couple

7:26years down the road it might be completely normal to be talking about you know all of these protocols that are the future of the internet um so that's super interesting and when you were talking about you know all those building blocks for the protocol what's needed what i was thinking of in the back of my mind until you said it was the developers you know it's hard to

7:47have lots of applications that people around the world are using if there's no developers and development to actually build those applications and i would love for you to talk a little bit more about how easy is it on near protocol to develop applications and you know can developers easily move from outside of blockchain or from other blockchains to

8:06develop on near yeah i mean uh you know without comparing any of the development ex uh you know it's really up to developers to come and check it out and see what it feels like we hear often uh from developers that come uh that things are very easy surprisingly easy on near from a technical perspective the abstractions are clean the tooling is easy to use and maturing quickly

8:33the apis are well documented and examples are you know full and complete and so on so it feels welcoming it feels like a place that that sort of that you belong quickly and uh and so that's exciting to hear um uh in terms of you know give me some data you might say we have a program in place right now a near certified developer where people are coming in

8:58and learning how to spell near on a thursday building a demo before dinner and then a starting fellowship full part-time you know paid work in the community on monday uh so i don't know that's like two business days turn around from what is this thing to you know uh thank you so much i'd like to contribute today yeah it's incredible developers it's you know uh junior devs

9:24uh with again just few months experience out of boot camp uh they come in they sort of get an idea of what this thing is and they can start building uh it's like a serverless function it's like an api call it's that you know familiar mental models that they're using to build these things so in that sense it's really uh remarkable definitely yeah to be able to do that in

9:47two days is very remarkable and you mentioned there as well something about getting paid and you know i know a lot of these blockchain startups at least the founders are working on things with with sweat equity or just working on cool projects but is there other incentives and can developers get paid if they start working and building on near uh yeah i mean there's no question so

10:11aside from the you know existing uh funding opportunities like the open web consortium like you know some of the grants that we've issued we just recently announced 800 million grants 350 allocated for d5 projects through proximity labs and 450 for ecosystem funds the education team alone in the last 90 days has uh distributed about a million dollars worth of mere tokens and uh we

10:39plan to increase that in the next 90 days so if you look at sort of where are we we're at this inflection point in terms of how much effort and energy and outreach we're doing to reach uh people out there so the opportunity for people coming in the door is really significant it's a fantastic opportunity actually in terms of teachers in terms of fellows developers

11:00and residents teachers and residents architects and researchers and residents and so on those are full and part-time opportunities that are compensated in year tokens which are liquid on the market now and um uh the the you know the only question is what's your experience where are you in the world and we compensate you fairly so it's it's a pretty simple negotiation

11:25incredible and uh so i'm guessing that's open right now for developers to go to the platform and obviously if they can do it in two days and already start getting paid it's going to be pretty easy um so what's the best way for developers to get into that it's surprisingly easy near.university is is where you can go to register for near certified developer

11:49and other courses you'll also find their links for fellowship programs ambassador program for university students teachers programs grants fellowships you're certified instructors and we're even hiring folks for the core team as well so we're looking for some uh some teachers with 10 20 years experience in the industry that can come and help us kind of raise

12:12the bar on what it means to change the future of education in the space as well definitely that's great so yeah it's not just it's not just for developers you know if if you you know about kobe don't know exactly how to code then there are still opportunities to contribute with nir i think some of the most interesting opportunities uh asham because in the end coding uh it's becoming

12:35commoditized but uh thinking is where the value is so i'll say again um of these thousand teachers uh you know where are the philosophers and the historians and the artists and musicians and animators and illustrators that are going to help us imagine a future that we can't yet see i like that thinking thinking is where the value is love it sharif thank you so

12:57much for coming on uh i'm really excited to see near protocol grow and i'm sure your team will be back in the near future i would love to get an update then i will leave the near dot university uh links and the community links as well for near in the description box below for the viewers thank you so much for taking the time to come on and all the best with

13:17mir thanks so much pleasure was all mine