Following the signing of the MoU, the Ontology Foundation and NEO Foundation have announced to co-fund a Joint Task Force with a total capital contribution of 4 million CNY. The Joint Task Force will press ahead with the development of API standardization, a shared smart contract ecosystem, building open standards for smart contracts, and cross-chain technology innovation.

The Joint Task Force is made up of over 10 people, most of whom are core developers from Ontology and NEO Global Development (NGD), along with some select community members. Senior blockchain developers including Weng Junjie Weng, Yuan Tan, and Peter Lin will also be joining.

In the following six months, the Joint Task Force will be dedicated to the following tasks:

1. API standardization

1) To standardize data APIs and network protocols on the Ontology and NEO protocol layer, the cornerstone of a co-built shared mega ecosystem;

2) To provide uniform APIs and share some SDK parts and development tools on both networks to make the development environment more user-friendly for app developers;

3) To explore and realize multiple use cases of crypto-algorithms on blockchain;

4) To standardize address encoding and make Ontology and NEO networks friendlier to end users.

2. Shared smart contract ecosystem

1) To adopt NeoVM as the sole platform to run smart contracts;

2) To propose a standardized SYSCALL rule for namespace, enabling cross-chain deployment of smart contracts;

3) To conduct R&D on high-efficient Native contract mechanisms;

4) To develop a Go compiler and development environment applicable to NeoVM.

In future, the Joint Task Force will run on a regular basis to explore and seek more cooperation on the development of the protocol layer and application layer of blockchain.