Rust Smart Contracts Introduction on NEAR — Lesson 3 🦀

Mutable Functions

Time to modify your smart contract state! In this episode, we break down what mutability means in Rust and how to use it effectively in NEAR contracts. You’ll learn the difference between read-only and mutable functions — and how to safely update your contract data 💥

✏️ What you’ll learn:
🔴 What mutability means in Rust
🔴 How to use mut and &mut self in NEAR contracts
🔴 Read-only vs mutable functions
🔴 Best practices for safely modifying state

📺 Watch the lesson here
👨‍💻 Code examples

🔖 Stay tuned — more Rust smart contract tips and NEAR development best practices coming soon!

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✉️ NEAR Dev News #74 is live!

📌 THIS WEEK’S FOCUS: Strawberry Computer
AI-powered, open-source tools for building personal devices & apps. Real-world demo: Near Ukraine Guild dashboard built in minutes via Berrry.app.

🖥 Also inside:
🔴 Freelance bounty — compare NEAR with another chain
🔴 $906K earned on NEARN — 18 open listings waiting
🔴 rpc .intea .rs — short, fast, free RPC endpoint (beta)
🔴 Rust tutorials — mutable functions + running localnet/devnet
🔴 The State of AI on NEAR — DCML, Agent Hub, Shade Agents & more
🔴 NEAR + Privy — instant wallets, no seed phrases (500K accounts covered)
🔴 House of Stake Alpha live — full launch Aug 14
🔴 Rotate NEAR wallet seed instantly in INTEAR

💥 NEAR is the blockchain for AI — from personal devices to autonomous agents.

🔗 Read + subscribe: http://dev.near.org/newsletter
🔖 Available freelancing opportunities here

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Rust Smart Contracts Introduction on NEAR — Lesson 4 🦀

Default & Initialization

When you deploy a NEAR smart contract, it starts empty — and if it’s not initialized, it can crash. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to set it up correctly from day one 💥

✏️ What you’ll learn:
🔴 Why smart contracts need initialization
🔴 Using impl Default for simple starting values
🔴 Creating custom initialization with #[init]
🔴 When to choose Default vs #[init]

📺 Watch the lesson here
👨‍💻 Code examples

🔖 Stay tuned — more lessons on efficient and secure NEAR smart contract development are on the way.

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🆕 Introducing “Attention” — by Illia Polosukhin

Why we need user-owned, verifiably private AI — and how blockchains can help us get there 💬

In this new newsletter, Illia shares high-level insights at the intersection of AI and Web3:
🔷 Risks of corporate-owned AI & centralization
🔷 Why open, decentralized AI matters for our future
🔷 How crypto can provide identity, governance, and payments for AI
🔷 Building a state-of-the-art, user-owned AI ecosystem

We’re at a fork in the road: AI can either serve corporate profit & control — or empower users & communities. Read more in "Attention" 👇

🔖 Subscribe & read

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🚨 New NDNA (#3) is live

1⃣ This week’s issue looks at how economic breakdowns can quietly kill blockchains — without a single hack or bug. Using Monero’s current “profitability attack” as a case study, we explore how misaligned incentives push out good actors, centralize control, and drain life from a network.

2⃣ From privacy coins to DeFi airdrops, the pattern is the same: when the people who take the biggest risks aren’t rewarded, trust erodes. And when trust erodes, ecosystems can fade into “zombie chains” — alive in code, dead in practice.

⏳ NDNA blog now drops on Mondays — with the Podcast & YouTube versions released on Tuesdays.

NDNA is an opinionated weekly newsletter and podcast looking at the news in and around the NEAR developer ecosystem.

🔈 Podcast | 📺 YouTube | 📰 Substack

New API Support for NEAR Builders 👨‍💻

The NearBlocks API sponsorship is now open — with support from the NEAR Foundation & Infrastructure Committee 🫰

Plans & limits:
🟢 Startup ($79/mo): 400K calls/month · 150 calls/min
🟢 Standard ($299/mo): 3M calls/month · 400 calls/min
🟢 Professional ($899/mo): 9M calls/month · 900 calls/min

What you get:
🟢 Commercial use allowed
🟢 Comprehensive NEAR blockchain data via REST APIs
🟢 Same source that powers the NearBlocks Explorer
🟢 Professionally maintained, high-performance infra (GET via HTTP/cURL)

➕ More information about NearBlocks

🔣 Deadline: ~45 days left
🔣 Submit Now

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🚨 New NDNA (#4) is live

🗯 Bridge hacks have drained billions — but the real killer might be baked into how bridges work. This week, we look at how NEAR Intents flips the script, making cross-chain swaps seamless… and possibly ending the hacker’s favorite payday.

🗯 One shift could link every major chain — and change how we think about moving value forever.

After this, you might never look at “bridging” the same way again 👀

NDNA is an opinionated weekly newsletter and podcast looking at the news in and around the NEAR developer ecosystem.

🔖 Step onto the other side of the bridge and see what’s waiting:
🔈 Podcast | 📺 YouTube | 📰 Substack

Rust Smart Contracts on NEAR — Lesson 5 🦀

Ownership & Borrowing

When you’re building NEAR smart contracts in Rust, ownership and borrowing are your guardrails for memory-safe, predictable code. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use them to avoid bugs and keep your contracts clean and reliable 💥

✏️ What you’ll learn:
🔴 What is Ownership — how moves/copies prevent leaks & crashes
🔴 Borrowing — immutable & vs mutable &mut, and when to use each
🔴 Common mistakes & fixes — using moved values, multiple mutable borrows, forgetting to dereference in NEAR methods
🔴 Best practices for NEAR — &str vs String, when to clone() vs borrow, keeping borrow scopes short

📺 Watch the lesson here
👨‍💻 Code examples

🔖 Stay tuned — more lessons on efficient and secure NEAR smart contract development are on the way.

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✉️ NEAR Dev News #75 is out!

📌 THIS WEEK’S FOCUS: Race of Sloths
Turn your GitHub PRs into on-chain reputation. A bot + NEAR-powered leaderboard that gamifies open-source contributions.

🖥 Also inside:
🔴 $300 + royalties bounty — design Black Dragon sports jerseys
🔴 DevHub winner: near-rpc-typescript (typed NEAR RPC for TypeScript)
🔴 NEARN hits $1M earned — 18 open bounties live
🔴 Chain Abstraction demo: one login, swaps across NEAR + Arbitrum
🔴 Shade Agents: Vlad Frolov on AI + privacy workflows
🔴 New Rust tutorials: initialization, ownership, borrowing
🔴 Mainnet upgrade 2.7.0 → 9 shards live
🔴 Illia’s newsletter Attention — verifiable, user-owned AI

Someone farms XP in games, someone in races. The grind is the same — but the rewards are different 🌡

🔗 Read + subscribe: http://dev.near.org/newsletter
🔖 Available freelancing opportunities here

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DevHub Bounty Winner: TypeScript RPC for NEAR

The “Automate Generation of TypeScript RPC Client for NEAR Protocol” bounty goes to Peter Salomonsen 🏆

near-rpc-typescript delivers a type-safe, auto-generated TypeScript client for NEAR JSON-RPC — generated from the official spec to speed up integrations.

Congrats and thanks for the great work, @petersalomonsen! 🎉

🔗 Bounty & Repository

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Near Studio — a VS Code extension for NEAR smart contracts

Build and deploy NEAR smart contracts right from your editor 😁

What it does:
⚪️ Compile & deploy contracts with quick commands
⚪️ Smooth developer workflow inside VS Code
⚪️ Makes experimenting on NEAR way faster

First release — try it today, ⭐️ the repo, and share your feedback/ideas or open a PR for @OxF3stus

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Also saves code review time, BUT if you don't agree...

👉 Just try it 👈

Good news for NEAR builders ✔️

... and data teams!
Apply to get $99/month Pikespeak API Package — for free!

🟢 Full access to the Pikespeak API
🟢 50+ NEAR portfolio & explorer endpoints
🟢 5 requests per second
🟢 150,000 requests/month included

Build smarter with the Pikespeak API 🫰

🔣 Deadline: ~19 days left
🔣 Submit Now

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Rust Smart Contracts on NEAR — Lesson 6 🦀

Conditions (if, else, else if) and Compound Conditions (&&, ||)

When you’re building NEAR smart contracts in Rust, conditional logic is how your code makes smart choices. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to express rules, handle branches safely, and keep your dApps predictable and clear 💥

✏️ What you’ll learn:
🔴 What if / else are — making decisions from contract state & input
🔴 Comparison operators — ==, !=, <, <=, >, >= in practice
🔴 Else if chains — checking multiple cases in sequence
🔴 Compound conditions — combining rules with && (AND) and || (OR)
🔴 Live example — compile, deploy, and test outcomes based on conditions

📺 Watch the lesson here
👨‍💻 Code examples

🔖 Stay tuned — more lessons on efficient and secure NEAR smart contract development are on the way.

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🚨 New NDNA (#5) is live

AI tools like Strawberry Computer promise to make coding as simple as describing your idea — “vibe coding” that can spin up apps in minutes. But if shipping becomes effortless, what happens to security, taste, and trust? 🤔

This week we look at the growing divide:
🔷 AI can generate code, but it can’t generate judgment
🔷 The flood of cookie-cutter, insecure apps — and what’s at stake when security fundamentals are skipped
🔷 Why the future belongs to builders who blend speed with product sense and rigorous testing

From insecure clones to the next wave of Web4 apps, the question isn’t whether AI can build — it’s whether the products are worth using 🗯

NDNA is an opinionated weekly newsletter and podcast looking at the news in and around the NEAR developer ecosystem.

🔖 Pick whichever format suits you best and get the details:
🔈 Podcast | 📺 YouTube | 📰 Substack

Rust Smart Contracts on NEAR — Lesson 7 🦀

Loops (for, while) & Safe Iteration

When you’re building NEAR smart contracts in Rust, loops power batch actions and list processing. In this lesson, you’ll learn to iterate efficiently, avoid unbounded work, and keep gas predictable 💥

✏️ What you’ll learn:
🔴 What loops are — repeating logic without duplicating code
🔴 For loops — ranges & iterators over collections you control
🔴 While loops — explicit exit conditions and state-driven flows
🔴 Step control — .step_by(), break, continue, enumerate()
🔴 Gas-safety patterns — caps, pagination/chunking, and early exits

📺 Watch the lesson here
👨‍💻 Code examples

🔖 Stay tuned — more lessons on efficient and secure NEAR smart contract development are on the way.

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

Stop burning time — start shipping 👨‍💻

Quick reminder: free RPC/API sponsorships are closing soon ⏳
Clock’s ticking — submit before the windows close:
🔷 Lava RPC — 5d left (Aug 31)
🔷 Pikespeak API — 16d left (Sep 11)
🔷 NearBlocks API — 34d left (Sep 29)
🔷 FastNear RPC — 35d left (Sep 30)

🔖 Don’t pay for infra you can get sponsored. Apply now

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Rust Smart Contracts on NEAR — Lesson 8 🦀

Match & Enums

Enums + match = expressive, total, bug-resistant logic. In this lesson, you’ll model contract state clearly, replace magic numbers/strings, and make branching explicit — all with compile-time guarantees 💥

✏️ What you’ll learn:
🔴 What enums are — and when to use them instead of ints/strings
🔴 match fundamentals — exhaustive branches, _ wildcard, guards
🔴 Domain modeling — UserTier::{Basic, Premium, VIP} and real logic
🔴 Storage & ABI tips — deriving traits, Borsh for state, Serde for views
🔴 Safety patterns — avoiding partial matches and hidden panics

📺 Watch the lesson here
👨‍💻 Code examples
What should we cover next? Drop it in the comments ✍️

🔖 Stay tuned — more lessons on efficient and secure NEAR smart contract development are on the way.

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✉️ NEAR Dev News #76 is out!

🤑 THIS WEEK’S FOCUS: PublicAI
People-powered data for AI — label → validate → consensus → earn $PUBLIC. Portable on-chain reputation meets real rewards.

🖥 Also inside:
🟢 NEARN hits $1.24M earned — 15 open bounties live
🟢 $100 bounty — design Solvium mascot + sticker pack
🟢 Tooling update “NEAR Thanksgiving” — sandbox revamp + auto RPC clients
🟢 New tool: Sign in with NEAR (Better Auth plugin)
🟢 Global Contracts (mainnet) + near-sdk-rs 5.17.0
🟢 Virtual EVM Chains on NEAR with Aurora Cloud
🟢 Omni Bridge CLI — move ERC-20/SPL to NEAR as NEP-141
🟢 New Rust tutorials: conditions, loops, safe iteration

🫰 AI needs data. Now it pays.

🔗 Read + subscribe: http://dev.near.org/newsletter
🔖 Available freelancing opportunities here

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