**The NEAR Demo Day: Roundtable Link: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1OyJAVrAzMbxb?s=20 Date: Mar 16, 2023** **Participants:** Illia - Co-founder of Near Protocol Marieke - CEO of Near Foundation Alex Shevchenko - CEO of Aurora Labs Alex Chiocchi - CPO of Pagoda Nate - CEO of Mintbase Sandi - CEO of Calimero Network **1. What are NEAR's advantages for developers and founders in a bear market and how can they be utilized for successful projects?** - Cheaper and faster to build with abundant skill sets like JavaScript - BOS allows for stitching together existing components and smart contracts, saving time and cost => Ability to reuse existing front-end code - The convenience of usage and implementation without hassle - Fast transaction speed, low transaction fees, and plenty of space with horizontal scalability via sharding - Easy and fast development enables more time to spend with customers and users, leading to faster value creation and sustaining business. **2. What are the challenges for developers and founders in a bear market and how can they be overcome?** - The bear market presents challenges and opportunities for innovation in crypto - Building in a bear market requires conviction, resilience, and lean thinking - Treasury management is crucial to stretch resources - Technical teams have an advantage in a bear market with fewer distractions - True innovation can thrive without hype in a bear market - BOS provides a non-biased ecosystem for Dapps like Mintbase to build and showcase interesting components **3. What industries do you see as promising for innovation on Near during a bear market?** - Decentralized community-owned systems for the gig economy - Massive multiplayer social experiences can be efficiently created on Near - Micro-networks connecting people in different regions are a massive opportunity - Blockchain makes operations more effective and efficient - P2P commerce can be built easily on-chain using BOS and Near, making it more efficient with robust contracts and dispute resolution - Blockchain technology can open up new marketplaces such as jobs, tasks, funds, cars, airplanes, etc. **4. What are the benefits and use cases of BOS for founders and builders?** - BOS reduces fragmentation in the Web3 space by offering a single place for users to onboard, discover, and interact with various blockchain applications. - It provides an engaging experience, combining search and notification capabilities and a centralized place to find earning opportunities and join communities. - For developers, it abstracts the complex parts of development, removes the need for hosting, building scaffolding, and stringing together different API services, offering a better developer experience. - It allows developers to fork and compose existing front ends, use any backend, and see how other people are using them, allowing for faster iteration. - BOS has the potential to spur other ideas outside of it, such as building a fully decentralized GitHub system. **5. How will BOS evolve and grow in the coming years, and what role will the NEAR Foundation play in these efforts?** 5.1. NEAR Foundation's role: - Raise awareness of NEAR as the BOS - Support the growth of the ecosystem (including infrastructure integrations and strategic partnerships) - Governance and regulation - Helping reframe and evolve the narrative of NEAR in press communication, projects, and events 5.2. Blockchain operating system: - Alpha.near.org is the alpha experience of BOS, with gateways as entry points into the distributed operating system. - The developer experience is the most advanced aspect right now, but the plan is to add seamless multi-chain experiences for communication, social, and commerce, leading to super Dapps which is the target for the end of 2023. - The goal is to reach a billion users in Web3, achieved through partnerships with existing apps and adding seamless and composable experiences. - BOS will create economic opportunities by integrating into existing user bases and providing an easy way for developers to create composable experiences. **6. What are the emerging opportunities for innovation and disruption on BOS, and how can founders and builders take advantage of them?** - It is an opportunity to disrupt the monopolized Oracle's current setup. Use fully permissionless and trustless ways to aggregate Oracle data from different blockchains. - Understand how widgets work, then integrate data from Mintbase using their app or market with an affiliate link. Earn 1.25% of the market fee through your Near Social app. - Business ideas to explore on blockchain include social games, real-world markets, and peer-to-peer services. Developing an app that offers multi-chain DeFi in one experience with a social component. 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉