The Ontology Foundation and the NEO Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding on May 14th, 2018, concerning strategy and technology integration.

Whereas: Ontology is a distributed trust network that focuses on digital identity, data exchange and other trust collaboration scenarios. NEO is dedicated to realizing a distributed network that serves the smart economy. Both Ontology and NEO share a common technical understanding and vision, and both wish to promote blockchain technology and its applications.

Purpose: Ontology and NEO together provide compliance-ready, regulatable protocols to global developers. These protocols are supported by NeoVM with exceptional finality and a smart contract system with a robust and stable infrastructure-level network.

As such, the Ontology Foundation and the NEO Foundation have agreed to cooperate as follows:

Key Cooperation Areas

1. Ontology will provide digital identity, data exchange services and other customized services. NEO brings a mature and complete smart contract platform as well as distributed network infrastructure services to the table.

2. Smart Contracts: Ontology and NEO will work together to build a smart contract ecosystem, fully support the development and adoption of NeoVM and NeoContract, and collaborate on developing smart contract open standards.

3. Data Integration: Both parties will provide standardized technology interfaces (APIs, SDKs, etc.), and share and communicate development achievements and research results.

4. Cross-chain: Both parties will push forward with cross-chain research, with the eventual goal of producing integrable mainnets.

Shared Resources

Cooperation will be further facilitated by two initiatives:

1. Ontology and NEO will together set up a joint taskforce (comprised of representatives from both parties) dedicated to realizing the goals specified above and to moving forward on other relevant projects.

2. Jointly providing funding to relevant research institutions. Funding will be earmarked for academic research dedicated to exploring blockchain technology development, including but not limited to consensus algorithms, encryption algorithms, cross-chain protocols, and formal verification. Other communities, institutions and individuals that share the same interest in blockchain protocols are more than encouraged to join in these funding initiatives.

Li Jun, Founder, Ontology Foundation

Zhang Zhengwen, Founder, NEO Foundation