Interviewee: Alex Varga from Newton

Interviewer: StarkNet Chinese Community

Newton is the Q&A platform that focused on Cairo smart contract developers and the StarkNet Ecosystem, similar to Crypto-native Stack Overflow. Developers are allowed to ask questions through the Newton platform, and it rewards token bounties on those technological questions for incentivizing other developers to answer questions more positively. Newton sets a precedent of on-chain Q&A platform integrating with a incentive system.

StarkNet Chinese Community has an interview with Alex Varga from Newton.

Q1: Can you please introduce yourself and the team behind Newton?

A: I’m Alex, Backend & Growth and Newton.so. I like programming all my career is around hackathons, web technologies. Newton team is cross-functional and it consists of 3 devs and 1 designer. Everybody does a bit of everything.

Q2: What is Newton? How did you conceptualize it?

A: The idea came from Victor, our founder. One day it came as an obvious conviction to him that we could get a much better version of Stack Overflow by adding token incentives on top.

Q3: What is Newton all about and how does it work?

A: It is Stack Overflow for crypto w/ token bounties. We’re 100% focused on Cairo and the StarkNet ecosystem right now. At the core, we’re making a marketplace for open source Q&As. We’re creating a way for people to tweak the incentives behind knowledge transfer.

Q4: Why do you focus on Cairo lang?

A: Cairo is super interesting. It is unique and unlike most other smart contract programming language. ZK Rollups are the future and StarkNet is a great chain, a great community. To make a great product it helps to have someone that needs a lot of help. Because it’s so new and unique Cairo needs much. more help than Solidity.

Q5: What is the roadmap for Newton?

A: Very soon we’ll announce a test program for our bounty contracts. After this we want to build mirror integrations with Stack Overflow, Discord (we already duplicated StarkNet’s Discord) and Telegram. The future of our roadmap includes Pool mechanisms so DAOs and protocols can fund bounties for whitelisted devs and the answer validation protocol.

Q6: Any suggestions to new devs learning Cairo?

A: Start with Cairo Playground and Newton’s 17DaysOfCairo.

I think best you can do is to try build something new, don’t spend too much energy on theory and docs: you will get much more fun after submitting your first StarkNet contract. Afterwards you can master Cairo using different bootcamps, starklings, cairo 101 or anything else. Cairo is a revolutionary language, everyone should try it!

Q7: What is your mission?

A: Our mission is to an efficient information market that result in an on-chain record of knowledge, proven by the mechanism of a consensus protocol. In simpler words: making knowledge flow between people super fast and build up the world’s knowledge library.

Q8: So you’re competing with the stack overflow, why?

A: We’re actually not competing with them. We see ourselves more as a layer on top, on a market they don’t even serve today. Stack Overflow is one of the many of open source developer content platform we want to aggregate and distribute on. It is fair to say we love what they do and it’s a great inspiration.

Q9: Do you plan to expand into other programming languages?

A: Yes of course. The ambition to help as much people as possible is a very important core value. It is what differentiates great companies from good ones. But we will open up to more people only when we know we have created a lot of value on the StarkNet ecosystem.