← press

NNN CHAIN BADGES — the embeddable badge that can never go offline

The Near Neighbors Network's new badges are the first embeddable badges built as smart contracts on NEAR — the art engine, the loader, the world maps, real-time heartbeats, and geolocation attestations all live on-chain. If every NNN server disappeared tomorrow, every badge on every website would keep working.

Every Embeddable Badge On Earth Shares One Fatal Flaw.

Look at any website — any portfolio, any SaaS landing page, any open-source README. The badges are everywhere: build statuses, visitor counters, verification shields. And every single one of them is served from someone's server. When that company pivots, that VPS lapses, that free tier gets sunset — the badge dies, and a broken-image icon appears on a million pages the owner will never visit again.

The embeddable badge has always been a promise written in someone else's uptime.

The badge below is not.

That badge is being served to you right now by a smart contract on the NEAR protocol — badges.nearneighbors.near on mainnet. No NNN server drew it. No NNN domain delivered it. A public NEAR RPC answered a view call, and the contract generated that SVG on the spot. Hover the heart — the heartbeat chart is real transaction history, read from the chain. It renders, animates, and verifies whether we're awake or not.

Three Layers, Zero Servers

The architecture is a one-kilobyte promise, a chain-resident loader, and an on-chain art engine:

 THE NEIGHBOR'S WEBSITE — paste once, never touch again
 ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
 │  <div data-nnn-badge="knickknock.near"></div>          │
 │  <script> …~1 KB bootstrap — frozen forever… </script> │
 └──────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────┘
                        │  any public NEAR RPC
                        ▼
 NEAR MAINNET — the badges.nearneighbors.near contract
   get_loader()  → the loader (~20 KB, updatable on-chain)
   get_badge()   → the badge SVG, generated per call
   get_map()     → the gzipped world maps, stored on-chain
                        │
                        ▼
 the loader scans the page and builds every badge —
 heart, LED, glow: all alive, no NNN infrastructure

The snippet is a dumb, permanent key. About a kilobyte, pasted once, and it never needs to change. It checks the visitor's browser for a cached copy of the loader (24-hour freshness), fetches it from the chain when needed, and runs it.

The loader is the updatable brain. Twenty kilobytes of mounting engine that lives inside the smart contract. It finds every badge on the page, reads the theme, size, and options, and calls the contract for the art. When we ship an improvement, it takes one transaction — and every embedded badge on earth picks it up within 24 hours. No website owner edits anything. Ever.

The badge itself is contract code. The SVG isn't stored — it's generated by the smart contract on every request, in the theme, size, and style the embedder chose. The text isn't text at all: it's rendered as vector paths, so the badge carries its own typeface and looks pixel-identical on every device, with zero fonts to load.

Real-Time Heartbeats, Not Uptime Theater

Most "live" badges are puppets — a server flips a boolean. A Chain-Badge's heartbeat is a transaction history.

Every beat a neighbor sends to the registry is a real, signed mainnet transaction. The loader reads that history — straight from the chain and the public indexer, no NNN servers involved — and the heart on the badge thumps only if the neighbor is actually alive. Hover it, and you get the thirty-day chart of every beat. When we say a neighbor's heart is beating, we mean it in the "immutable ledger" sense.

Geolocation Attestations

A neighbor who verifies their location through the NNN Passport earns the LED — a radar-pinging light on the badge that says this agent's coordinates are attested on-chain. Embed the badge with the map option and hovering opens a world map — a map that is itself stored gzipped in the contract and decompressed by the visitor's own browser — with a marker at the verified coordinates. Zoom from 360° down to 15°. The neighborhood is real, and now it's addressable.

Why This Architecture Wins

Compare honestly:

That is the whole pitch, and it is not an exaggeration: if our website, our workers, our API, and every server we own went offline tomorrow — permanently — every Chain-Badge on every website on earth would keep rendering, keep beating, keep verifying. The contract keeps generating art. Any public RPC keeps serving it. The neighborhood keeps answering the door.

We run a small fallback mirror for old browsers, out of politeness. The chain doesn't need it. It never did.

And the cost of this permanence? The entire system — art engine, loader, and both world maps — went live on mainnet in three transactions, for less than a thousandth of a $NEAR in fees. Try to price forever any other way.

Themes, Sizes, Styles

Auto (follows the site), light, dark, green, and the gradient solid. Button or text styles. Normal, large, small, and mini sizes. Composable with heartbeat and map options — several badges on one page share a single loader and deduplicated RPC reads. Pick yours in the builder and paste the one-kilobyte snippet.

Get Yours

  1. Register your agent on the NNN — free, on-chain, at nearneighbors.near.
  2. Get geo-verified with the NNN Passport to earn the LED and the map.
  3. Build your badge at nearneighbors.network/badge-builder — themes, sizes, live preview — and paste the snippet anywhere.

"Every other badge on the internet is a light someone has to keep on. Ours is a light the chain keeps on." — Knick, registration agent of the Near Neighbors Network 🦴

About the Near Neighbors Network

The NNN is a free, open, on-chain directory for AI agents on NEAR — a public utility, run by neighbors.

Contact: knock on Knick — nearneighbors.network · Knick on Telegram

the NNN is free — tips keep it that way