However, she almost passed up on the chance to move into Web3 in 2015 because in her mind bitcoin was connected with illicit substances. She was approached by a headhunter who wanted to pitch her to a bitcoin startup.
“And I thought they’d got the wrong number. I did not want to work for drug dealers.”
However, curiosity got the better of her and she decided to investigate further – to ignore the screaming news headlines of the day – with the result she ended up working with blue chip Circle headed up by Jeremy Allaire.
“That was a great privilege to enter this space and work with someone who was incredibly visionary.”
So, it is not surprising that her next significant move was to become the CEO of NEAR Foundation. She tells the story of the inspiration behind NEAR, outlining the passionate story of the co-founders Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov. Their first idea was to build an AI company, taking the name from the fiction novel Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzwell. They wanted to build a platform that was also able to easily pay freelancers for their content. Initially they thought blockchain was the answer until they discovered it was both slow and expensive.
The co-founders went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out the problems. They interviewed at least ten different protocols trying to figure out the good bits and the bad bits.
“They wanted to know what works and, in the end, pulled all the best bits into their layer one protocol, NEAR. It’s probably the most user friendly and it’s certainly the most scalable blockchain out there.”
Flament joined in 2022 to help grow the ecosystem and as CEO of the NEAR Foundation she has three very clear goals.
“We help raise awareness of NEAR and we help grow the ecosystem in a sustainable fashion, basically the ecosystem needs to be self-sustaining. And then we have the task of working on everything related to decentralization and governance.”
Finding developers and applications is key to the Foundation’s goal of growing the ecosystem and as part of that, NEAR has created a developers’ hub that is fully open source.
“The idea is that anyone can contribute and make proposals. These in turn are voted upon by the community with the successful proposals being rewarded.”
NEAR.org is the first fully decentralized website where developers can create code or content and engage with other developers. This engagement, whether at protocol level or in building Dapps is a pipeline to help bring in other developers and encourage more growth and collaboration.
“It’s not just about developers, though. We are reaching out to founders through our platform called Horizon. We allow founders to list their projects and they can access fractionalized work, meet CFOs, CTOs, legal experts, as well as having access to backers and funding.
“Access to capital is not the only bottleneck in our experience, sometimes the bottleneck is knowledge. We try to match founders with resources and vice versa.”
Another bottleneck can be ease of use. Web3 is still very technical with silos of groups and communities. It can be difficult to get on board for a newbie.
“At the NEAR Foundation, our number one priority is to make onboarding to Web3 as easy as possible and to make the steps seamless. In Web2, users can use their socials or email to generate accounts, we need that in Web3, for of course users don’t care which blockchain they are on.
“As a result, we want to attract the billions of Web2 users into Web3 – so we are doing this by partnering with large brands to bring people across. Loyalty is a great use case for mass adoption.”
Flament is also passionate about diversity and inclusion. This is now the second year that the NEAR Foundation is celebrating female Changemakers, bringing a spotlight onto women making a difference.
“Fundamentally blockchain is a transformative technology and we are building the technology of the future. Therefore, if we don’t have a large and accurate representation of the world at the table then we are heading for a catastrophe.
“I’ve studied in very masculine environments where women are in the minority and so when I work in balanced environments, I can see the difference. It’s not just gender – teams who have different languages, different backgrounds – but coming together for a common purpose can be very powerful.”
Last year at NEARcon, diversity was important. A total of 76 different countries sent delegates and women made up 38% of the attendees.
“Diversity attracts diversity. We are very happy to provide important role models for anyone out there thinking of joining this space.”
In this crazy world of technical innovation, Flament sees geopolitics also having an impact with different parts of the world approaching Web3 in different ways.
“I sometimes think that Asia is overlooked but there are incredible things happening there. At the core of blockchain and crypto is the ability to effect change. So, despite different continents putting different rules in place, people are mobile, teams are mobile. If they don’t like the rules in one place, they can move to another.
“Blockchain technology is for the most part permissionless, open source and unstoppable.”
Anyone wishing to find out more about NEAR should go to the website NEAR.org and check out what NEAR is calling the Blockchain Operating System. And if walking is your thing, check out sweatcoin.com
