NEO announces South America trip and visits European Parliament

The NEO team is coming to South America, marking its first visit to the continent. Core team members will attend theBlockchain Summit Latam (BSL) in Santiago, Chile on May 8th and 9th. NEO is a sponsor of the event. A hackathon is scheduled to address industry-based issues using blockchain, and developers on the NEO platform will be there to assist those who choose to build on NEO. 500 GAS will be rewarded to the team with the best NEO project.

Following the Summit, A NEO Meetup will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 12, 2018. NeoResearch and Simplipay will provide presentations, whilst Malcolm Lerider (NEO Senior R&D Manager) and Tamar Salant (NEO Global Business Development) will make presentations to serve as an introduction to NEO.

Eariler in the week, representatives from the NEO ecosystem visited European Parliament on May 2 and 3, 2018.

The Smart Economy Expo visited European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium to discuss blockchain technology with regulators. The Smart Economy Expo is a virtual organization backed by Neon Exchange (NEX) and City of Zion (CoZ). Da Hongfei (NEO) and Fabio Canesin (CoZ) participated on a panel that spoke with Parliament.

City of Zion (CoZ) Bounty Program: dBFT improvements

CoZ launched their first software bounty program, which will consist of open development briefs. For the first software bounty, CoZ has asked developers to explore improvements to the dBFT protocol used on the NEO network, particularly alternative protocols like HoneyBadgerBFT, BFTRaft, or FastBFT.

Tech Updates

Alphacat reported a 63.3% accuracy in predicting BTC price rises for their BTC Daily Forecasting bot algorithm. In April, the bot accurately forecasted a daily increase in BTC’s price 19 out of 30 days.

City of Zion (CoZ) released Neon Wallet v0.2.4 update.

NewEconoLabs released a preview of their upcoming blockchain-based game Crazy Gladiator.

Switcheo is developing Switcheo Exchange v2.0, the TestNet will be released Tuesday, May 8, 2018. The decentralized exchange also redesigned their transaction window, plans to upgrade for immediate trade confirmations, and announced a new deposit flow feature.

Parsec Frontiers, a blockchain-based space exploration games, will be implementing a dual token structure with Ethereum and NEO to operate their platform. The upcoming PRSC token sale and subsequent trading token will utilize ERC-20 standards, whereas the infrastructure ad PRSC assets will be based on NEO.

Reports

Alphacat released their mid-month report for April, highlighting branding and community efforts, product development, a new team member, an update to the roadmap and whitepaper, and the ACAT prediction engine.

O3 Labs provided a Q1 update and will soon to support token sales. The update included partnerships, recruitment of new team members, updates to the O3 Wallet, and events held throughout East Asia.

NEO released their monthly report, which highlighted events attended, Antshares ICO refunds, dApp competition winners, decentralization and consensus node progress, and development updates.

Partnerships

APEX announced a partnership with Shanghai Data Exchange, one of China’s largest big-data platforms. The partnership will allow APEX Network to test smart contracts connected to government-based validators.

Ontology made a press release giving notice of a partnership with NAGA Group AG. NAGA is a publicly traded, German-based FinTech company that provides a platform to seamlessly integrate financial markets, virtual goods, and cryptocurrencies.

NewEconoLabs (NEL) partnered with Fenbushi Capital and NEO Global Capital (NGC) for their NEO Name Service (NNS) project. NNS will allow users to create “.neo” domains (instead of public keys) as a receiving address when making transfers.

Asura Coin and O3 Labs have partnered for Asura’s upcoming public token sale. The gaming platform will utilize O3’s mobile wallet platform for their upcoming ASA token sale.

Token Sales and Updates

Spotcoin delayed their pre-token sale due to issues with third party payment processes.

Aphelion announced a 100,000 APH token giveaway in an effort to promote the Aphelion desktop wallet that holds NEO, GAS, and NEP-5 tokens. 1,000 APH tokens will be given to 100 different users selected at random.

Concierge, a travel booking marketplace, provided an update on the CGE token sale that ran from March 31 through April 21. The update corrected the distribution of CGE tokens to align with the model outlines in their whitepaper. Concierge minted a total of 61,571,086 CGE tokens, about 40 million of which will be distributed to the public.

nOS has detailed eligible participants to qualify for their token pre-sale, which include nOS codebase contributors and teams/developers. Participants will have until May 31 to submit their projects for review, and these requirements only apply to the pre-sale.

Exchange Listings

Switcheo listed Loopring NEP-5 LRN token, pairings include NEO, GAS, and SWH.