City of Zion (CoZ) is a global community of open source enthusiasts, with the shared goal of helping NEO achieve its full potential. CoZ primarily operates through the community Discord and CoZ Github, central places where the community shares knowledge and contributes to projects.

CoZ is neither a corporation, nor a consulting firm or a devshop / for-hire group.

Governance

There is no formal process in joining CoZ. Interested individuals will have to do the work first, and the submitted code has to be licensed under the MIT License. Consistent contributors will become eligible to join the CoZ organization, and begin collaborating on projects. The governance process of this organization can be found here.

CoZ is not a regulatory body and take no responsibility for the quality of 3rd party smart contracts deployed on the Neo Blockchain.

Funding

Since its inception, the CoZ Council has been in close contact with the NEO Council. The NEO Council provides support to the community, in the form of NEO rewards, which CoZ redistributes weekly.

For individuals who are interested in financially supporting CoZ development, our donation address is AXSoNQEKjmqPBNPg5cNrHyWivfjok3Vj9D.

For transparency, CoZ Council members are excluded from weekly NEO rewards, and any CoZ competitions.

NEO 2020 vision

To be the one

Council members and maintainers of City of Zion projects have discussed how we can support NEO in achieving the goal of being the best platform for decentralized applications in 2020 pushing 100 thousand transaction per second with no sharding. Very fast it became clear to us that we need to scale both our organization and our base technology.

Meta

We now have a new experiment ongoing on how to scale contribution in core projects, currently there are 7 best in class project maintainers and 2 outstanding security researchers working 30h/week on selected initiatives. This is in addition to the 9 council members and weekly rewards system, there will be structural changes to come later but the contributions reward system that worked so well in CoZ will stay and continue to expand. Besides further developing their projects maintainers are in charge of organizing contributions, perform studies and build roadmaps.

Initial projects participating of the experiment are:

Our plans also involve increasing the number of fixed contributors on core projects by having at least an additional fixed contributor per project, initially we selected neo-sharp for this. That brings us the next topic.

Base Technology

To achieve the 2020 goal we will need to develop, test and benchmark several ideas and enhancements in NEO. It will also be needed to allow a bigger number of developers to work on development at core level in a efficient manner. To achieve this CoZ is collaborating with NEO on the specification and implementation of a new standard implementation called neo-sharp. NEO-sharp has three main goals:

1 — To break inter dependencies in NEO to allow a plug-able modular design to be used by node implementations, the modules will consist in: network, VM, persistence and consensus.

2 — To create testing infrastructure for both specification of behavior and benchmark of modifications.

3 — To develop an initial fully compatible version and experiment one new experimental high performance module for each component.

The first objective is already complete, with a design and implementation in place for the modular node. You can see the current NEO design bellow:

Current design

The network part was moved from the center and interdependence on other parts removed from it, the new organization can be seen below:

new client design

At the center is a new light component called “Transaction manager” that define types and compose the modules, VM setup also has seen great work with both neo-hypervm (a high performance parallel C++ VM) and neo-go modules. Currently neo-sharp team is working on Network protocols.

CoZ continues to sponsor development of all other projects not listed in this article, you can see them in our GitHub https://github.com/CityOfZion .

When neo-sharp is considered 90% complete the council is planning together with NGD and NEO foundation leaderships a development sprint in Shanghai to have both teams working in tandem and pushing the boundaries of what blockchain can do today.

Regards,

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