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