At Friend A Labs, I am the only non-developer. That means there is a healthy ratio of 75% devs to 25% marketing and everything else. I’m the one least familiar with APIs, smart contracts, and NFTs on a code level.
But what I lack in that, I make up in effort and trying to learn more about services that can make their lives easier. One of the challenges when building in Web3 is that a lot of the space still relies on Web2 tools for monitoring performance and tracking adoption and growth. Obviously, using Google AdSense and tracking individuals to target them isn’t necessarily aligned with the Web3 ethos, nor is relying on other Web2 tools to maintain your dApp.
In the NEAR ecosystem, there is one player that addresses these challenges by providing devs with web3 native tooling for their needs: Pagoda — the product development arm of NEAR.
Pagoda launched at ETH Denver, a top blockchain conference and hackathon this year. It is the first web3 startup platform and is on a mission to “empower developers with fully web3-native toolsets for building, maintaining and scaling blockchain startups. “
With Pagoda, developers gain access to fully decentralized versions of tools at every layer of the stack, from the lowest blockchain level to analytics, and wallet services, all the way up to marketing tools leveraging NFTs.
All these tools come integrated into a simple interface that makes using it intuitive even for those new in the space. In Web3, it’s easy to start building a product; the harder part is growing an audience and a customer base to turn it into a profitable endeavor. That’s what the Pagoda tech supports entrepreneurs with.
Benefits of it include:
- maintenance-free node access
- collaboration with other devs in the ecosystem
- total control over RPC interactions
- tools to launch products fast and scale them
- tutorials and prompts + hands-on support.
Using Pagoda
Needless to say, I am probably not the target audience, but I signed up nevertheless to check out what hides behind the sign-up page.
Once logged in, you can choose whether to start with a blank canvas or do one of the tutorials. As we’re building with NEAR NFTs, I picked the from zero to hero NFT tutorial.
This tutorial covers everything from the basics of NFTs to minting them on NEAR and building fully-fledged smart contracts.
With Pagoda, projects can more easily build their own Indexer to establish a logic their app uses to process Near protocol data.
Someone like me who can barely write a console.log(); that’s still a bit far-fetched but indeed interesting for those with experience developing.
More recently, the Pagoda team has launched a JavaScript SDK.
Why that matters?
The leading smart contract languages are solidity and Rust. Both aren’t the easiest languages, I’ve been told. And there are only around 2.5 million devs who mastered them. JavaScript, on the other side, is used by 20 million developers.
With the SDK these developers can build smart contracts, test them with workspaces and benefit from pre-loaded libraries such as RegEx (regular expressions you can use to validate and check for all kinds of things such as email address validity), Math, and Array.
The JavaScript SDK brings Near closer to mass adoption by enabling devs to spend less time learning an entirely new language, and giving them more just to build. Ultimately, what will bring more people into an ecosystem isn’t the cool tokenomics but apps they want to use. And these are created by developers.
Dev Hours and Working Groups
The Pagoda team is also hosting weekly dev-rel hours on Discord, where any developer can drop in ask questions, and discuss the problems they came across. Additionally, the team is hosting working groups. These groups are focused on discussing and voting on NEAR enhancement proposals (NEPs). NEPs then establish the roadmap of the protocol. The next session will take place on August 22nd and will discuss NEP 359.
NEP359 covers the introduction of a non-transferable NFT standard. Basically, a soulbound token, but on NEAR. All the details on that are here: https://github.com/near/NEPs/pull/359
And if you want to check out Pagoda’s toolkit, head to their website. Overall, it’s a great starting point for any dev looking to start in the NEAR ecosystem and grow their business. And if you know JS and want a little challenge, why not try building a dApp in less than 30 minutes?
