On July 4, 2018 at 21:00 (GMT+8), NEO Foundation initiated the election of new consensus nodes, starting the era of decentralization of NEO. The candidate node run by City of Zion, after running smoothly on TestNet for over six months, got elected as the new consensus node. City of Zion (CoZ) is an independent, international group of open source developers working on NEO blockchain.

A webpage has been set up on NEO official website for monitoring NEO blockchain status as well as information of consensus node candidates and their votes. (Weblink: https://neo.org/consensus)

Timeline of NEO decentralization process:

Nov. 2015: TestNet launch.

Apr. 2016: ANTSHARES-GUI integrated the consensus node voting system.

Oct. 2016: MainNet launch. 7 consensus nodes hosted by NEO Council got voted.

Jul. 2017: ANTSHARES-GUI was renamed to NEO-GUI; updated version was released.

Jan. 2018: Voting algorithm was optimized.

Jan. 2018: NEO-GUI was updated to be compatible with the optimized voting algorithm.

Jan. 2018: The node hosted by CoZ started to run on TestNet.

Apr. 2018: The node hosted by KPN started to run on TestNet. KPN is one of the largest telecom companies in the Netherlands.

Apr. 2018: The node hosted by Fenbushi Capital started to run on TestNet. Fenbushi Capital is the first China-based venture capital firm that exclusively invests in Blockchain-enabled companies.

May 2018: Enhancement of the P2P network.

Jul. 2018: A monitoring webpage of consensus node candidates was launched.

Jul. 2018: NEO Foundation voted for new consensus node CoZ.

End of 2018: NEO Foundation plans to vote KPN and other partners as mainnet consensus nodes.

2019: NEO plans to open public campaign for election of all consensus nodes.