It’s a tough time to be in Web3 at the moment: war in Europe, crippling inflation, and an increasingly pessimistic outlook over the growth of the global economy. That’s led to a steep contraction of the Web3 ecosystem, both in users and available capital. 

But for us at the NEAR Foundation, this moment of great duress is an opportunity to focus our efforts on what we believe is the long term future of this industry. It’s time for conviction.

Web3 and NEAR are both in their early stages, and as such, there are still things that need long-term commitment both in time and resources in order to deliver the promise of decentralized technology. 

At its highest level, we believe the focus of the ecosystem should be on bringing more users to Web3, continuing to build out key infrastructure, and demonstrating why NEAR is the best solution for developers, founders and creatives. 

A Commitment to the future 

NEAR is the best layer one technology platform. Bar none. Ethereum paved the way for companies to build and create their own worlds on top of a blockchain. But NEAR’s sharded design allows millions of people to use this technology without skipping a beat.

NEAR’s focus on being simple to use, easy to build on, and fast to access funding and talent, means NEAR is primed to become the de facto choice for companies looking to onboard the next billion users to Web3. 

With the launch of SWEAT, we demonstrated NEAR’s capability of bringing millions of users on chain without outages. But that’s just half the challenge. NEAR is a network for a billion users, but onboarding a billion users requires thousands or millions of applications to create an immersive, inclusive Web3 world.  

We are just at the beginning of this journey to making mass adoption happen and as a result, there are lots of views on how we might get there and what steps need to be taken. 

At present, the Web3 pie is small. There are fewer than 20,000 developers working consistently across the Web3 space. In Web2, meanwhile, there are more than 20 million Javascript developers worldwide – NEAR has built a Javascript SDK for any Web2 developer curious about Web3. 

In terms of users, there are believed to be around 70 million crypto wallet users regularly interacting with a blockchain. There are more than 5 billion internet users who regularly use the internet. NEAR has the easiest onboarding in Web3 thanks to native account abstraction, a key feature to enable onboarding of millions of users. 

For us at the Foundation, our goal and strategy is clear: attract the Web2 world to build and use Web3. This is going to take time to do, but firmly paves the way to enable our vision of 1 billion users onboarded into Web3 in 5 years. 

The NEAR ecosystem has the talent, the technology and the funding to ensure it can achieve these goals. We plan to continue working on making NEAR the best place for Web2 devs and founders, by introducing more resources for builders, new education initiatives, and more coming soon.

So yes, we are in a tough market. And it’s time for conviction. The next wave of innovation will be a fight for mass adoption. NEAR is the best platform for end-user applications on Web3. NEAR is where mass adoption will happen.

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