Hack the Rainbow: building a NEAR-Textile Indexer

Yesterday, Near-Textile Indexer won the Textile award at NEAR's Hack the Rainbow! If weren't already following the event, Hack the Rainbow was organized by NEAR to initialize projects that bridge the NEAR blockchain with Ethereum and other protocols. Previous experiments to join NEAR with Textile's technologies got us excited about what else could be built, so we sponsored one of the prize tracks. While there were some great projects built with Textile, the NEAR-Textile Indexer got us really excited about how NEAR and Textile could be combined. Below, we'd like to share more about the project and the developer that built it.

The NEAR-Textile Indexer

The NEAR-Textile Indexer was built by Riqi, a freelance software developer based in Indonesia. Learn more about the Indexer from Riqi's introduction above or check out the near-textile-indexer repo on GitHub.

How did you get interested in Near?

I've been following the crypto space since mid-2017. Back then, the ecosystem was still early, and developing on blockchain was hard, and the documentation wasn't great either.

I stumbled upon NEAR earlier this year, and I think they have top technical teams in the blockchain space and care about developer experience.

Building on NEAR is fun, it is scalable, cheaper and it has working products.

What got you interested in Textile?

I knew Textile back in 2019 when I played around with IPFS to create a decentralized web hosting, which never took off.

Textile's coolest thing is the ThreadDB, where you can easily create a distributed and scalable database.

It's an easy to use API with great developer experience.

The pain point you solved in your hack, how did you learn about it? Was it something you experienced, or did you learn it from other Near developers?

I originally tried to build a decentralized social media app, and as you might know, social apps need a lot of data filtering and sorting that can't be done on the blockchain.

I talked with Jesper from Flux Protocol on how to solve this problem, we both agreed that the solution was to build an indexer.

What are you planning to work on next? Any side-projects or technologies you are particularly excited about?

Currently, I'm building Paras, a social marketplace for digital art cards. We expect to launch in December, so stay tuned!

I'm really excited about the NFTs and Metaverses. It gives me that Ready Player One vibe, which I've always dreamed of.

Thanks, Riqi!

If you are interested in learning more about the project, you can find Riki on Twitter. Give him a follow or star his project on GitHub. We're excited to see what he builds next, and will definitely be following @ParasHQ.