A small, yet important, milestone was achieved during the summer.

NGD hosted a development challenge to build a monitor page for consensus nodes, and after completion, CoZ was voted in as consensus node on MainNet. This is by no means big news, but still an important step in decentralizing, primarily from a technical standpoint. CoZ is NEO’s biggest development community, so in terms of political decentralization, there is of course more work to do.

Both KPN and Fenbushi Capital are now running consensus nodes on TestNet, and their coming entry to MainNet will be a bigger step in political decentralization. In the meantime, we encourage more development communities and NEO projects to launch public RPC nodes.

Consensus Nodes are assigned by voting, and providing public RPC nodes with good uptime and quick upgrades will provide a good argument when running campaigns to be selected as consensus node. At the same time, I want to clarify that the NEO Foundation do not have as much voting power as some media have suggested; number of consensus nodes are calculated from weighted average on mid-50% of votes. This mean that the top 25% and bottom 25% of outliers do not count when deciding total number of consensus nodes. The NEO in circulation will already have an impact on voting outcome, although NEO Foundation will continue to vote in a manner that represent our view on responsible decentralization from both technical and political perspective.

In July, NEO founder & core developer Erik Zhang wrote a blog post about NEO 3.0. NEO 3.0 will be an entirely new version of the NEO platform, built for large scale enterprise use cases where higher TPS and stability and large-scale data storage are typically demanded. NEO 3.0 aims to reinforce the infrastructure to support the implementation of large-scale commercial use cases on NEO blockchain, which is a necessary step towards smart economy. You can see all the proposals for NEO 3.0 on GitHub and heated discussion among community members. The whole development life cycle may last 1 or 2 years. We look forward to more suggestions and contributions from the community on the design and development of NEO 3.0. (Github: https://github.com/neo-project/neo/milestone/1).

The highlight of the summer was a two weeks visit by seven CoZ developers. They presented the neo-sharp project which they have been working on since March. neo-sharp is a new node implementation which is modular; less coupling and higher cohesion than the version running on MainNet. It allows for easier distribution of work, better test coverage, easier debug and optimizations, while also allowing for faster innovation on independent modules.

The NGD R&D team joined in neo-sharp development for two weeks, sharing knowledge and aligning goals for the months to come. We are unanimously very positive towards the neo-sharp project and look forward to its finalization in a few months. The experience of working together side by side was appreciated by all parties, and is something we would like to plan as a frequent event with other community projects. A special shoutout to Grace in NGD, who was dubbed Heroine by CoZ for her tireless help on where to buy the best noodles and where to see the World Cup (with a lot of little beer).

NEO Game Competition was still greeted with active responses in July, with over 200 teams signing up for it. As NEO Game Incentive Plan suggests, Nominee Award will be granted to a few works selected from the new submissions on a weekly basis from July onwards. This month has witnessed 13 teams secure the Nominee Award. We would like to involve more game lovers in the NEO Game competition in the hope of building a healthier blockchain-based game community and ecosystem. (See http://neo.game/ for more details)

NEO also announced strategic cooperation with Certik, a formal verification platform, on smart contract security. With customized digital assets and digital identity verification solutions from Certik, NEO ecosystem will develop at a faster pace with security guarantee.

Development:

Documentation navigation optimizations: docs.neo.org

Implemented record system for documents that are pending update and translation

Finalized reward plan for documentation translation (not yet published)

Voted in City of Zion as consensus node

Private net testing for neo-cli 2.7.5 and 2.7.6

Voting test for neo-gui 2.6.0 and 2.7.6

Testing of various NEO 3.0 API’s

Technical support for NEO wallets and dApps

Updates in Global Blockchain Compliance Hub; Malta, USA, Argentina, Gibraltar, Spain, Beligum, Sweden, Chile, Nigeria, New Jersey, Ukraine, Malaysia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Thailand, Mexico, Indonesia, Czech Republic, Brazil, Portugal, Colombia, Europe, Denmark, Cayman Islands, Austria, South Africa, Peru, Israel, Spain, Vietnam, United Kingdom, Italy, Liechtenstein, Poland: https://neo-project.github.io/global-blockchain-compliance-hub/

Demo for neon-js on sending assets from multiple addresses

Improve testing process and testing standard

Exploring Kubernetes for neo-cli

Technical support for exchanges

Fixed bug that do not load plugins

NEO-GUI: Allow to sign raw values

NEO-GUI: Increased script maxLength to 131073

neo-compiler: Added –compatible option for no nep8 mode

Events:

July 1st: NEO Workshop, Osaka, Japan

NEO Workshop, Osaka, Japan July 1st: NEO Workshop, Beijing, China

NEO Workshop, Beijing, China July 11th: Da Hongfei Keynote speech at 2018 China Internet Conference, Beijing, China

Da Hongfei Keynote speech at 2018 China Internet Conference, Beijing, China July 13th: Da Hongfei Keynote speech at 2018 Blockchain Innovation Conference, Chongqing, China

Da Hongfei Keynote speech at 2018 Blockchain Innovation Conference, Chongqing, China July 20th: Shanghai Makers 2018 — NEO Blockchain Creators Black Horse Race Concluded

We at NGD have seen that the community sentiment has been decreasing during the last few weeks. There are a lot of questions and rumors spreading around. To address these concerns, pls see details here on Reddit: http://reddit.com/r/neo.