Marieke Flament is CEO of the NEAR Foundation. NEAR is an emerging layer 1 blockchain specifically optimized for usability, along with speed and security. NEAR was founded in 2018 to improve on aspects of layer 1s then in existence. In its short history, NEAR has built an extremely strong institutional backing and vibrant developer community. NEAR has raised an impressive $530m+, according to Crunchbase, from an incredible list of investors including Tiger Global, FTX Ventures, Jump, Alameda, a16z and many more As CEO of the NEAR Foundation, Marieke is responsible for ecosystem development across developers, entrepreneurs, investors and users. In this conversation, Marieke and I discuss competition among L1s, NEARs efforts to establish a foothold as a newer protocol, developer and investor motivations in selecting blockchain infrastructure, opportunities and potential risks deriving from NEAR's institutional investor base, prevailing web3 developer and entrepreneur sentiment given current market conditions, balancing growth and community stewardship as an emerging L1 and much more. If you're interested in this space and want to go deeper, we recently published a deep dive analysis of NEAR, available to Premium Rebank subscribers at rebank.cc. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Marieke Flament.