NEO Global Development Monthly Report — October 2018

October is an important month to NEO, marking the anniversary of the NEO MainNet deployment. NEO Global Development participated in many events over the course of the month, some public and some private, and began our hackathon tour across Europe.

Below is the NGD monthly report for October 2018.

Highlights

NEO MainNet 2 Year Anniversary

NEO celebrated the two year anniversary of its MainNet launch, which took place on October 17th, 2016. NGD would like to thank our community for its many contributions over the past two years, as the NEO ecosystem would not have prospered without your support. (https://neo.org/blog/details/4112)

NEO Decentralization Progress

KPN was voted in as a consensus node on the NEO MainNet in the latest election held on October 20th, taking another step towards decentralization. (https://neo.org/blog/details/4117)

NEO Creative Design Competition

The first NEO Creative Design Competition received entries from over 100 designers from more than 30 countries, demonstrating an abundance of design talent within the NEO community. The competition concluded this month with prize winners announced. (https://medium.com/neo-smart-economy/the-1st-neo-creative-design-competition-successfully-concluded-58babe26cc46)

Community Expansion

We are pleased to see the NEO community continuing to grow around the world. Japan-based NEO developer community, Keymakers, has been making progress in education and technical documentation, opening the door to NEO for many Japanese speaking developers. AmazoNeo, is another a newly established community organization focused on growing NEO in Latin America. NGD also held its first meetup in Russia, with the purpose of engaging local community resources.

Development progress

Core updates

• NEO MaNEO MainNet & TestNet has been upgraded to 2.9.0.
• Released NEO-CLI 2.9.1（https://github.com/neo-project/neo-cli/releases/tag/v2.9.1）

Added：

• Add constant storage for NeoContract
• New smart contract API: System.Runtime.Platform
• New smart contract API: Neo.Account.IsStandard
• New smart contract API: Neo.Transaction.GetWitnesses
• Allow the RPC server to bind to local address
• Allow client certificate to be checked on the RPC server
• Allow setting additional GAS to be used in RPC commands invoke* for RPC server
• New CLI command: claim GAS [all]

Fixed：

• Fixed a bug in the RPC server
• Fixed denial of service with bad UPnP responses

Other updates

• “How to become a consensus node” technical docs were released (https://github.com/neo-ngd/reference/blob/master/如何成为共识节点v1.2.md).
• NEO consensus node page (https://neo.org/consensus) was updated to give a comprehensive view of NEO node status, with the purpose of facilitating NEO governance. The new page contains a portal to allow NEO holders to file applications to become consensus nodes.
• KPN was officially elected a consensus node running on NEO MainNet at 6:13:12 on October 20th, 2018 (GMT+8). The number of consensus nodes controlled by the NEO Foundation has now decreased from 7 to 5.
• 10 seed nodes were deployed on the TestNet and updated to the current height for the community to quickly access the TestNet.
• “Community Tutorials” created by the NEO community were added to the repository for quick access by developers. The documents cover topics such as NEO basics, nodes and smart contracts (http://docs.neo.org/communitydoc.html).

Community

The community continues to expand steadily this month with new followers on various social media platforms, showing consistent growth. The NEO Discord also opened a new channel for Keymakers this month. Keymakers is a Japan-based developer community led by Miki Hayama, director of Ecosystem Growth, and was founded in May, 2018.

Social Media

• Twitter: 317,844
• Facebook: 30,300
• Reddit: 97,058
• Discord: 22,882
• Medium: 2,030
• Youtube: 3,223
• WeChat: 16,850
• Weibo: 8,350

New Community

A new community called “AmazoNeo” began to take shape. Its purpose is to extend NEO’s reach in Latin America and enhance its presence in local industry, the public sector, academia and the public eye.

Events

NGD kick-started the European hackathon tour, which will span three countries and extend into November. We have seen exceptional skills demonstrated by the participants of the Delft, Rotterdam, and Berlin hackathons. Additionally, the 5thsession of the NEO Blockchain Open Course was held in Shanghai and attended by enthusiastic developers. Lastly, NGD core members participated in many events held around the globe.

Workshops

• October 20th: NEO Blockchain Open Course (5thsession): NNS system design and implementation, held in Shanghai.http://www.itdks.com/eventlist/detail/2720
• October 23rd: NGD held a NEO Smart Contract workshop in Moscow, Russia, led by Peter Lin, NGD R&D director.
• October 25th: NGD held a NEO Smart Contract workshop in St. Petersburg, Russia, led by Peter Lin, NGD R&D director.
• October 26th: NGD held a NEO Smart Contract workshop in Berlin, Germany, led by Peter Lin, NGD R&D director.

Hackathons

• October 17th-18th: NGD funded a prize pool for the hackathon held during Blockchain Summit LATAM in Columbia.
• October 20th-21th: A NEO Hackathon with a theme of “Build dApps on NEO with Golang.” was held in partnership with the Delft University of Technology in Rotterdam and Delft. This event was the first stop of the NEO Hackathon Tour (https://github.com/neo-ngd/Hackathon/blob/master/events/10.20-NEO-Blockchain-Hackathon-Rotterdam-Delft.md).
• October 27th: A hackathon with a theme of “NEO Blockchain and AI” was co-hosted by NGD and Dorahack in Seoul.
• October 27th-28th: A NEO Hackathon with a theme of “Build NFT dApps on NEO” was held in Berlin. This event was the second stop of the NEO Hackathon Tour (https://github.com/neo-ngd/Hackathon/blob/master/events/10.27-NEO-Blockchain-Hackathon-Berlin.md).

Conferences

• October 1st: Johnson Zhao, NGD general manager, gave a speech at “HEL Tech Conference” in Helsinki, Finland, introducing NEO to technology and law specialists.
• October 5th: Johnson Zhao, Lili Zhao, Ecosystem Growth (EG) director, and Tamar Salat, EG manager, attended the Delta Summit, where Johnson Zhao also delivered a speech to introduce the NEO Smart Economy (https://www.delta-summit.com).
• October 11th: Da Hongfei, NEO founder, delivered a keynote speech at The 19thWorld Knowledge Forum in Seoul, Korea. (https://medium.com/@parallel38/eab33e3624e7)
• October 17th: Johnson Zhao gave a speech at “Token Alliance Roundtable Tokyo” in Tokyo, Japan.
• October 17th-18th: Tamar Salant delivered a keynote speech at Blockchain Summit LATAM in Columbia (http://blockchainsummit.la/).
• October 22nd: Johnson Zhao delivered a keynote speech titled “Build a compliance ready blockchain” at the East West CryptoBridge Conference in Frankfurt, Germany (https://ewcc.io).
• October 31st: Steven Liu, NGD software developer, gave a speech at the Blockchain Technology Seminar held in Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and convened a meetup.

Meetups

• October 2nd: A NEO Meetup was held by NGD at the Microsoft headquarters in Helsinki, Netherlands, attended by Li Jiaying, NGD EG senior manager and Johnson Zhao, who also gave a speech.
• October 23rd: NEO Meetup was held by NGD in Moscow, Russia.
• October 25th: NEO Meetup was held by NGD in St. Petersburg, Russia.
• October 26th: NEO Meetup was held by NGD in Berlin, Germany.

Competitions

The NEO Creative Design Competition successfully concluded, with over 100 webpage and icon design submissions. The prize pool totaled an amount equal to US $30,000 in GAS. In each of the webpage and icon design categories, winners were comprised of a first place, two second place winners, and a three-way tie for third place.

General Progress

Interviews and Livestreaming

• October 1st: Johnson Zhao discussed “The potential power of blockchain technology to change the world” in an interview with Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest media outlet. (http://public-share.me/p/23-10-18/79c6bce2.html)
• October 2nd: Johnson Zhao participated in an interview with EAK TV, a blockchain media outlet in the Republic of Malta. (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGA1bOTYO4x-x3oedSx39qA)
• October 11th: Da Hongfei participated in an interview with MK Maeil, the largest Korean media outlet, at the 19th World Knowledge Conference. (http://m.mk.co.kr/news/headline/2018/667900 — mkmain)

New team members

Steven Liu, NEO Software Developer

Steven has a bachelor’s degree in System Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University. After graduation, he sought post-graduate education at the Delft University of Technology, studying within the Electrical Engineering (EWI) tract of the Embedded System group. Additionally, since 2016, Steven has been involved in enterprise resource planning (ERP) service system development. In programming languages, Steven has proficiency in Java, springMVC, Python, Django, Flask, front end, React, and Redux. Additionally, he has participated in EOS node election and the EOS MainNet launch test.

If you have any valuable suggestions for NEO or NGD, please feel free to join our discussion in NEO Discord channel or send an email to suggestion@neo.org.

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