Within 2 hours, the Red Pulse Initial Coin Offering (RPX ICO) has raised the maximum hard cap of 405,844 NEO. (Note: Any source that claims the RPX ICO is still ongoing is a scam!) City of Zion would like to congratulate the Red Pulse team on their successful crowdsale.

NEO Network Performance

The RPX ICO was the first ever crowdsale conducted directly on the NEO network. This crowdsale demonstrated the first large-scale interaction with smart contracts on the NEO network, providing the network with its first major load test. ICOs, on other platforms such as Ethereum, often resulted in a sluggish network and transaction delays. While NEO’s dBFT consensus algorithm is designed to achieve consensus with higher efficency and greater network throughputt, no amount of theoretical calculations can simulate the reality of real-life conditions. For this very reason, CoZ was closely monitoring the NEO network during the RPX ICO.

Key Observations

Smart Contract Invocations:

A total of 13,966 smart contracts invocations were executed on the NEO network over this time period, of which, nearly all called the RPX smart contract method `mintTokens`.

A total of 543,348,500 RPX tokens were successfully minted and transferred to user accounts, totalling 10,097 smart contract executions.

Refunded Invocations:

A total of 4182 refund events were triggered by the smart contract method `mintTokens`. (Note: RPX has stated that these refunds will be processed within the next two weeks.)

Crowdsale statistics:

A successful `mintTokens` execution used around 1043 VM operations, while an execution that resulted in a refund used 809 VM operations. Within the hour and six minutes that the token sale was active, a total of 12,296,409 VM operations were executed.

A total of 9,575 unique addresses participated in the RPX ICO. Half of these, approximately 4,800 unique addresses, participated through CoZ’s Neon wallet.

The top 3 blocks with the most transactions were block 1445025 (3,242 transactions), block 1444902 (2,951 transactions), and block 1444903 (1609 transactions).

Final Thoughts

At the moment, the consensus nodes for the NEO network are operated by the NEO Council in China. By Q1 2018, NEO Council aims to control less than two-thirds of the consensus nodes.

We are pleased to note that the NEO network continuted to operate efficiently with minimal network impact, even under extreme network events. Block generation time initially slowed down to 3 minutes to process the largest block, but quickly recovered to approximately 25 seconds. Throughout the entire RPX ICO, consensus nodes were able to achieve consensus and propagate new block transactions to the rest of the network.

In closing, while we consider this performance to be excellent, NEO Council and City of Zion areworking closely together on upgrades, that will increase the throughput of the NEO network.