Highlights of The Newest NEO Global Development Report

Based on community feedback, a newly-organized NEO Global Development (NGD) report was released for the month of August.

Moving forward, NEO will break their monthly reports down into the following sections: Highlights, Developmental Progress, Community, Events, and General Progress. August was a productive month for the NEO team. Let’s take a look at what they’ve been up to.

Highlights

NEO created a 3-month-long Blockchain Game Development Competition, the first of its kind, to encourage developers around the world to create games on their blockchain. The competition was hosted by a Chinese development community called NewEconoLabs (NEL), and saw more than 200 developers register.

These winners were announced on August 31, 2018, and an award ceremony was held in Shanghai. Entries were judged in a fair and transparent manner by a panel of judges, which included NEO founder, Erik Zhang, and NEL founder, Yongxin Liu.

The team behind CardMaker was voted as the contest winner, earning the developers a reward of more than $115,000 in NEO GAS.

CardMaker combines a normal card game, a role-playing game, and user-generated content with the blockchain. Users need to generate new cards in order to unlock higher levels of the game.

This competition took an initial step in the right direction for further development of more advanced games on the NEO blockchain.

Developmental Progress

The NEO network suffered a series of spam attacks in August, flooding the blockchain with meaningless transactions. NEO is implementing 2 adjustments in efforts to evade further attacks.

First, the transaction fee has been increased to 0.001 GAS, which is a big move considering there weren’t transaction fees before the spam. If these attacks continue, then the transaction fee may be increased to 0.01 Gas. Secondly, NEO CLI-3.0 is being tested simultaneously, which will avoid the repeated validation of transactions in the memory pool.

These two developments should put an end to all the spam transactions on the NEO network, while facilitating faster transactions on the NEO blockchain.

Core Updates

Aside from their response to the malicious attack, here are the core updates released in August:

Released NEO and NEO-CLI 2.8

Tested NEO-CLI 2.8 and added documentation for exchange developers

Implemented NEP-8 — “NEOVM Stack Isolation”

Released 10 NGD MainNet seed nodes

Added sync.ngd.network

Tested NEO-CLI 3.0 preview

Developed, tested, and deployed SGAS smart contract to TestNet

Community

Along with some major strides in development, the NEO project also worked towards developing a stronger relationship with their community. Co-founders Da Hongfei and Zhang conducted a joint AMA session on the NEO subreddit for the first time in 2018. They did a thorough job answering some tough questions, while taking many suggestions to improve the project into consideration.

The NEO team appreciates suggestions given by the community members, and in order to amp up this cause, they introduced a dedicated mailbox: suggestion@neo.org. They also created a #suggestion command for their Discord channel. Each month, NGD will address the best suggestions submitted by the community in the monthly report.

A careers page is being added to the NEO website, which is expected to go live sometime in September 2018. Eager, interested, and talented individuals can submit their resumes to join@neo.org before this page is published.

In efforts to give back to their community, the team hosted a City of Zion tutorial competition, and held a smart-contract workshop in early August 2018 at the BSL Hackathon in Santiago, Chile.

Events

There have been numerous workshops conducted to help people develop new dapps on the NEO blockchain. Several online courses, hackathons, and conferences were held to educate people around the world, and inspire new developers to hone their craft.

You can find a complete list of events on NEO’s official blog.

General Progress

The NEO team participated in several interviews in the month of August, and also took part in multiple live streams, answering users’ questions and concerns. Hongfei improved external relations after meeting with Japanese politicians and industry leaders. Some of the more notable meetings included:

The Ministry of Finance of Japan, who praised their non-mining-based dBFT consensus mechanism , and expressed interest in future collaborations.

Former president of Sony, Nobuyuki Idei , confirmed the potential for game development on NEO’s blockchain.

Hongfei also met with AnyPay , a mobile payment provider, who expressed a willingness to learn more about NEO’s technology.

NEO hired Stacy Li, co-founder of ZKChainNews, as their new PR and media manager. Li brings valuable experience and connections to the table, and will be running the NGD media and PR department.

The NEO project has seen some major developments in the month of August. The NEO team entered the cryptosphere relatively early, and seems to be taking advantage of their position by maximizing their efforts across multiple domains.

You can learn more about NEO’s advancement by visiting their website, their subreddit, and following them on Twitter. For technical improvements, check out their GitHub.