A Technical Introduction to NEAR Protocol with Bowen Wang

Today’s guest is Bowen Wang, the Head of Protocol Development at Near. This episode will serve as a technical introduction to NEAR for engineers who are new to the protocol.
Today’s guest is Bowen Wang, the Head of Protocol Development at Near. This episode will serve as a technical introduction to NEAR from the point of view of an EVM developer. Bowen and I discussed a lot of the inner workings of NEAR: we went into sharding, asynchronicity on NEAR, javascript smart contracts, and NEAR’s analogues to account abstraction. We also discussed how Aurora works, which is an EVM scaling solution built on top of NEAR. If you’re interested in expanding your domain knowledge to other L1s and learning how a great engineer thinks about building a developer career, I think you’ll like this episode.

3:20 Bowen’s Background
8:50 Understanding NEAR mental models for EVM devs
11:51 A token transfer on NEAR under the hood 
14:35 Sharding on NEAR
19:33 Asynchronicity 
25:32 Token contracts on NEAR
26:51 NEAR account model - all accounts are contracts
29:00 Account access keys
32:00 Human readable names (NEAR’s ENS equivalent)
36:40 Aurora, Rainbow & EVM compatibility 
43:45 NEAR meta transactions
48:35 Zero knowledge light clients
51:35 Developer experience on NEAR
56:30 Developer advice
57:31 Long term vision for NEAR

NEAR: https://near.org/
Aurora: https://aurora.dev/
Bowen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BowenWang18
A Technical Introduction to NEAR Protocol with Bowen Wang
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