Ep. 54 - You Will Get Destroyed By Someone Who Focuses More on People w. Kendall Cole, Proximity Labs

Wild User Interviews Podcast (Wuipod)

Kendall Cole is the founder and CEO at Proximity Labs, also known over time as the 'Defi Arm' of NEAR Ecosystem.

On this wide ranging conversation with Kendall, you can actually hear the energy and the tone in the room change as time goes on. As we keep hitting him with quirky jokes, and asking genuine questions from every angle, Kendall finally starts to open up and share some top tier insights and alpha. Some of the topics discussed include:

• Unconventional Origins of NEAR Protocol. Unlike other web3 ecosystems, NEAR was birthed by a rare cohort of 'outsiders': big tech type, competitive programmers, and other giga brains. This has led to everything being reimagined and built from the ground up, which has presented some early challenges around implementation and communication: but could it be the secret for long term success?
• Origins and Evolution of Proximity: spanning across three stages we see Kendall's team solving the 'deep application layer', recruiting and enabling external teams to build on NEAR, and now putting al pieces in place to kickstart the BOS flywheel
• Beyond BOS as we know it. As Kendall touches on BOS, we finally get a glimpse of where this is all going. We aren't just the sidekick, a simple front-end. With the addition of remote accounts (coming soon) NEAR will be able to provide a unified user experience being a core access point to smoothly transact on any blockchain [Mind-melt alert!]
• NEAR Data Availability - we geek out on how L2s (optimistic rollups) work on Ethereum, the challenge of storing State, some of the emerging Data Availability solutions such as Celestia and Mantle. Then Kendall explains how NEAR has very cheap state which, inadvertently, is the best solution at the moment for all these L2s...
• MORE

Resources
Blockchain Operating System (BOS) - https://www.proximity.dev/BOS
Ignas Defi Interviews - The Endgame for NEAR Protocol, interview w. Kendall: https://www.ignasdefi.com/p/the-endgame-for-near-protocol-an
Startup Chile - https://startupchile.org/en/

Coindesk - How AI, web3, and Humans can work together to solve global, complex problems https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/08/01/how-ai-web3-and-humans-can-work-together-to-solve-complex-global-problems/
Laura Shin Podcast w. Illia - When AI and Blockchain Meet, How Can Each Technology Benefit? https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/unchained/id1123922160?i=1000620761192

The Knowledge Project w. Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-knowledge-project-with-shane-parrish/id990149481?i=1000626771622

Modular Blockchains & Data Availability
Celestia - https://celestia.org/
Mantle - https://www.mantle.xyz/
Eigen Layer Data Availability (DA) - https://x.com/eigenlayer/status/1706349539169538241?s=20

Follow on Social

Kendall - https://twitter.com/kendaIIc
Proximity Labs - https://twitter.com/proximityfi

AVB - https://twitter.com/AvbNear
Wuipod - https://twitter.com/wuipod