INTERVIEW WITH ROB: HEAD OF PARTNERSHIPS @ NEAR FOUNDATION
Thanks for doing this interview with us, Rob! Let’s start with how you find out about NEAR and currently what are you most excited about for NEAR from your current role?
ROB: Yeah, thanks for having me! Happy to share a little about my team and what I do at the NEAR Foundation. I found out about NEAR when I was checking out some alt L1s. I’d been in the crypto space since around 2013, so I had seen the challenges that had come up in the past with some of the older L1s. As I was researching, I started to see what NEAR was doing and how they were trying to address scaling for mass adoption- and this was very eye catching.
What does the current partnership pipeline look like for this year for NEAR? Any tidbits of info or sectors that you can share about these partnerships?
ROB: For the first part of 2023 there were a lot of announcements that were more enterprise-based partnerships that were more consumer-facing. Things like the International Cricket Council and such. Over the last three to five months, pretty much since NEARCON, the focus has been more on modularity and the overall growth of the blockchain.
Chain abstraction, as you know, has been a big focus for us. The question is more “How are we scaling the blockchain as a whole?” versus “How we are driving user adoption onto NEAR?” This marks our philosophy shift, and as a result you’ve seen more announcements on the Arbitrum and Polygon side and similar things like that. A lot of different roll-ups- Starknet, Caldera, and Movement Labs to name a couple. Partnerships more focused on the question of how we are going to scale blockchain together in the modular focus will continue, with less in-your-face enterprise partnerships and commercial deals.
NEAR’s focus on consumers led to many strong partnerships like with KAI-CHING, the top application in TX and UAW on dappradar.com.
How do you expect these partnerships to benefit the NEAR ecosystem?
ROB: Our partnerships that we are working on are less about how this benefits NEAR per se, but more how does this benefit everyone in the blockchain space. If you are building on a roll up, and you don’t care about your data availability coming directly from Ethereum, the you can easily see NEAR’s data availability solution as a great opportunity to save money. I think we are about 80,000 times cheaper or something in that range, which is insane.
We look at NEAR’s partnerships more holistically with the goal that they are driving user adoption and make it cheaper for developers to build. That’s how I would look at it- it is less about brand awareness. Brand awareness is going to come from people building cool things, which happens by making developers a focus in partnerships.
A Data Availability comparison graphic from the near.org.
With the Bitcoin halving upon us, and a lot of interest in crypto resurging. Does NEAR have any big protocol-wide goals for the end of 2024?
ROB: On the protocol side, the big one for us is sharding. Phase 2 of sharding will be coming out soon and is slowly rolling out. Ultimately that is hitting on the objective of scaling the network. Since we have so many consumer-facing applications and we’ve seen a bit of congestion, so this next phase of sharding will be crucial for helping us scale.
How does the team feel about NEAR’s current Brand, and are there any major updates or focuses in improving the brand for this (i.e. Illia and AI, Account Abstraction, DA, etc.)?
ROB: NEAR has been criticized previously for being in a lot of different narratives, and I agree. We have been all over the place. The focus has not changed since the beginning, but we’ve seen different hot topics, like DA (data availability). We had DA already as part of our tech stack but we weren’t talking about it. As we think about our overall strategy, it is really about having this overarching theme that everyone understands, and that is chain abstraction. It is really about telling how something like NEAR data availability fits into the chain abstraction narrative.
As we think about the brand and our priorities, it is more about dialing in our focus and less about trying to talk about everything, and how we plug these other things in. Like with AI, we haven’t announced anything publicly, but we have Illia who is a top AI OG. He has been doing a lot in the community, like that talk about AI as well as the Nvidia GTC Conference panel “Transforming AI” on March 18. He was just at Stanford doing a talk and at ETH Denver he talked about chain abstraction and user-owned AI. I wouldn’t highlight AI as being the only thing NEAR is working on, but more of something behind the scenes at the current time.
How does NEAR want to be seen in the wider crypto ecosystem?
ROB: NEAR wants to be known as a Layer 1 blockchain, but one that is modular and that can help people scale, whether you are in Ethereum, NEAR, or whatever blockchain you like. It is really about making blockchains more invisible so you don’t have to think about which blockchain you are using. If we are achieving this chain abstraction narrative, then that will be successful.
What is something that the marketing team has had to learn in the past 12 months, and are there any areas of the brand or partnership funnel that you are trying to avoid?
ROB: You have to be nimble in this space as things change quickly. Something the marketing team has learned is that you need to have some conviction. That goes back to my point earlier about NEAR’s brand being all over the place. If you are going to many different places and you don’t have conviction on one of them, then you are gonna have trouble, right? But we have this conviction about chain abstraction and how it will benefit people, and that is the most important thing. It takes time for people to understand what you are about, so sticking to the narrative is the big thing.
I mentioned being nimble and I think the NEAR Foundation marketing team has an obligation to support the ecosystem. And that means supporting a lot of our partners, whether its a wallet, exchange, or top dApp. Making sure these different partners are aware that we are here to help and support them and amplifying the great work they do is another important part of our job.
Illia gained NEAR a lot of exposure in participating in the NVDIA AI Panel (source)
On the day to day, what are you in charge of personally in relation to partnerships in the NEAR ecosystem?
ROB: Partnerships are really big, especially when we’re trying to get out of the NEAR Ecosystem. We have a lot of great people within the NEAR ecosystem talking about NEAR, but as we expand outside of this we want to make sure our partners like Polygon or Eigenlayer are also talking about us. The only way the ecosystem will grow is if people outside of the NEAR community know about us! So leaning on these partners and making sure they have the support they need is a big part of my role. These partners can be everything from a dApp, wallet or exchange- any part of the ecosystem is a potential partner.
Another big part of my role is announcements. I would say about 95% of which come out of the foundation come from myself and our team. We do a lot of coordination and make sure everything is organized properly, and are less involved in the weeds on the technical stuff.
What does success for NEAR marketing look like to you and your team?
ROB: Web3 is a hard thing to market as a whole. I think what our responsibility is and what success looks like is storytelling about everything happening in the ecosystem. With these top consumer apps, we need to help people understand what they are whether they use them or not. We need developers to understand that NEAR is a good place to be building, whether it’s an application fully on NEAR or utilizing the data availability side.
There are a lot of opportunities for builders, and partner support is a big thing in helping get this message out. I don’t ever want a partner to feel like the NEAR Foundation is not here to support them- that is our goal. It is my job to make sure our partners are feeling the love. I think ultimately success comes down to strong communication with everyone on all the great stuff that is being built, whether it involves partners, or other ecosystem projects like NEARWEEK or you guys!
As an Ecosystem NEAR is both a protocol for developers and a publicly listed token. Would you say your focus is on improving the understanding and visibility of the token, or increasing engagement and usage of the protocol? Why?
ROB: I think it is 100% about the usage of the protocol and less about the token. It is important that the token is there, but if it is going to be successful it is because things are being built on the network. It’s not so much one or the other, but rather more that you need to make sure things are being built and you need to focus on developers. If you are doing that side of things, everything else is going to fall into place.
If NEAR marketing is successful, what does NEAR look like as a Brand and Ecosystem 2 - 5 years from now?
ROB: If everyone can wrap their head around chain abstraction and account aggregation, and associate these with NEAR as a top player, then that would mean success. It's not an easy task. There are a lot of other people trying to do what we are doing in the sense of chain abstracting, it is not NEAR specific. But if we are out there helping to shape the narrative with other organizations that have the same beliefs, then we’ll be set up for success. Beyond that I mentioned that making sure builders know of NEAR as a good option for them as they are choosing a blockchain, so having lots of builders choose NEAR would mean success. And the last component is our partners. For them to know that the foundation is here to help support their mission and help with their storytelling, I think this ties it all together.
