NEO

Details of the discovery and quick patch of a Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability was released this week. The issue was discovered by the Qihoo 360 Core Security team, who identified and tested the vulnerability, and submitted it to NEO as a bug report on August 15th. It was noted that “within 7 minutes after we emailed the NEO official to notify this vulnerability, Erik Zhang, replied directly to confirm the existence of the vulnerability and submitted the bug fix within an hour.”

In addition to the vulnerability patch, NEO also recently experienced an accidental blockchain fork. Instead of a fork as they are conventionally understood in the blockchain community, NEO’s fork was instead caused by a rare issue in consensus where two valid blocks were proposed. Although this did not actually stall consensus, it did create confusion amongst nodes as they became stuck on the conflicting block. The solution to this issue is to add a third stage to NEO’s consensus mechanism, which has been in development by City of Zion member Shargon since July 16th.

NEO Global Capital

NEO Global Capital (NGC) joined KuCoin’s Global Titan Ambassador program, which is designed “to help find the best projects available in the crypto world.” NGC is the third addition to the cryptocurrency exchanges ambassador program.

Games

NewEconoLabs launched CryptoGladiator on August 13th. CryptoGladiator is a NEO blockchain based game where players collect gladiators with unique appearances and abilities through market transactions and cloning. Gladiators can be taken into the arena to participate in competitions to win prizes.

Ryu Coin launched its beta platform on TestNet and has entered the NEO.game competition. Ryu Coin is a wagering platform built on NEO that allows players to bet on themselves in games of skill. During the beta release, wagering will only be available on Slime Soccer. Slime Soccer is a test game that was submitted to the neo.game development competition.

Interviews

Igor and Vitor Coelho, co-founders of NeoResearch, an open-source community focused on developing cutting-edge technologies for the NEO blockchain, were interviewed by NEO News Today. The brothers answered questions on topics such as their migration to NEO, the creation of NeoResearch and how NEO can reach 100k transactions per second.

BlockSports co-founders,Tsering Redmond and Mirren King-Smith, were interviewed by Lewis Harland of NEO London community. In the informal “Fireside Chat”, Redmond and King-Smith discussed the beginnings of their sports betting project, decentralization, data oracles, their upcoming BSX token, and the NEO blockchain itself.

Competition

Pikciochain announced the opening of registration for its Hubble Challenge Hackathon. Registration for the hackathon will be open until the 5th of September, with the hackathon taking place from the 6th to the 25th of September. There are four main themes for which developers can submit entries: Proof of Usage, UI/UX, SDK/Libraries, and decentralized applications (dApp). The prize pool will consist of 40,000 PKC distributed to the best contributions, decided by contributor votes.

Education Efforts

Spotcoin introduced the Black Sea Blockchain Institute, which will seek to enhance “education research and innovation to expand blockchain technologies in the region.” The institute will be a registered technical college that is recognized by the Georgian Ministry of Education and Science as well as the Council of Higher Education Accreditation.

Rebranding

Gagapay has rebranded to Network GURU, and aims to be a smart marketing tool that will allow companies to run their own affiliate, referral, loyalty, bounty or other marketing campaigns, all within a single smart marketing interface.

APEX

APEX announced a cross-chain rewards giveaway through its KRATOS One special node program. Cross-chain rewards will include tokens from other blockchains and projects that are technology or ecosystem partners of the APEX Network. All rewards will be distributed by the APEX Cross-Chain Controller Hub, which is where the terms and cooperation model has been established.

APEX announced the second wave of the KRATOS One special node program, which incentivizes the operation of its nodal ecosystem. There are three tiers of rewards that have varying requirements in CPX tokens to qualify for the token rewards.

Zeepin

Zeepin Chain announced it will launch its MainNet on August 31st, and outlined how ZPT and GALA tokens can be migrated from the NEO blockchain to the Zeepin Chain.

Zeepin released its monthly project update, which includes information on the MainNet launch, a technical whitepaper release, progress on their suite of dApps, CryptoGalaxy updates, and updates to ZeeRights and ZeeWallet.

Ontology

Ontology partnered with Spuul, a video platform that provides 60 million users with the ability to stream, download, and watch over 10,000 hours of Bollywood movies. Spuul will develop a dApp for the content industry using Ontology’s blockchain infrastructure. The dApp will also adopt ONT ID (Ontology’s distributed identity framework) for the platform’s user identity needs.

Ontology has formed a bug bounty with Chinese blockchain ecosystem security consultants, SlowMist, to reward hackers for discovering and disclosing security issues on the Ontology platform.

Ontology will host a corporate MainNet launch event in Tokyo on August 24th, and will host a public event on August 25th.

Project Reports and Developments

Travala has listed more than 70,000 new properties spanning 12 countries. This brings the total number of properties that can be booked with AVA tokens to 77,632. In addition to the new listings, Travala has improved the user interface (UI).

Alphacat released its project update for the first half of August 2018. Highlights included continued developments of its forecasting engine, analysis tools, and ACAT Store.

Trinity released its project update for the first half of August 2018. Highlights included progress on its state channel networks which are currently deployed on the MainNets of NEO and Ethereum.

Red Pulse announced it will provide users the ability to stake PHX tokens on PHOENIX platform wallets, beginning August 20th. Staking the PHX token will make owners eligible to receive additional tokens through an inflation protocol. Red Pulse plans to initiate its inflation protocol upon enabling staking on the platform, increasing the token supply at a rate of 10% of the total PHX supply per year.

Token Swaps

Guardian Circle swapped its GDM tokens for GUARD tokens after a storage injection vulnerability was found in the original smart contract. The airdrop replaced GDM with GUARD tokens at 1:1. The token swap took place between August 13th and 16th.