Inspiration
NearBlimp is our hack version of OpenZeppelin, a popular dev tool for developers in Ethereum that one NEAR user in 2020 put as the "Gold standard open-source smart contracts for everything, with docs, tools and guiding and paid maintainers." In that post co-founder Illia Polosukhin calls for the NEAR community to band together to post ideas for things that were missing inside the NEAR ecosystem. In our tackling of the NEAR Bounty for HackTX, we found this space ripe for improvement and motivational for our team to provide the bare-bones of our version of OpenZeppelin for the NEAR ecosystem!
What it does
NearBlimp is a website that aims to be the go-to place for smart contract references for developers in the NEAR ecosystem. It currently aims to provide API-level documentation on the most popular and audited smart contracts from the NEAR Standards to the vetted community-made smart contracts that the ecosystem has built on top of. We did extensive research on NEAR contracts to compile extensive, easy-to-follow documentation tailored specifically for developers looking to build on top of and implement their own contracts using NEAR.
How we built it
NearBlimp is built entirely using mainly JavaScript with the React framework and Firebase to host the database and website.
Challenges we ran into
Unfortunately, one of our team members had to drop out early from feeling ill, severely reducing our speed and thoroughness of documentation for NEAR smart contracts.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Pushing out the website and seeing everything come together! Our "researchers" who did more reading than hacking are proud of learning about the NEAR blockchain and their smart contract system in such a short time span.
What we learned
The power of friendship! But, seriously, learning about blockchains for the first time and tackling NEAR's specific blockchain. We learned how sharding and other innovations baked into the protocol of NEAR differentiates them from other chains, how smart contracts are coded from gas-conscious approaches from NFTs to staking contracts, and how applications are built on top of blockchains.
What's next for NearBlimp
NearBlimp's next steps are to improve the UI drastically and incorporate data into the audited smart contracts (data such as how much money is locked into each, fluctuations, and transaction throughput using NEAR datalake, security information using AvengerDAO, etc.) that can eventually be sorted and visualized. Also, API-level documentation improvement after we reach out to NEAR experts for feedback.
Additionally, we plan to automate smart contract data retrieval in the future, both for standard contracts and audited contracts, by scraping data from various sources including the NEAR data lake repository, the NEP repository, dApp documentation sites, and more.
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