NEO News: Week in Review – February 18th – February 24th

NEO

NEO DevCon 2019 took place February 16th and 17th in Seattle, US. 600 tickets were distributed for the event, which attracted developers and community members from the Seattle metro region and broader global community. NEO News Today conducted 27 interviews with NEO leadership, projects, and developers, all of which can be found here.

In addition to a two-day agenda packed with presentations, a full day developer workshop took place on Sunday the 17th.

A reply of the full livestream of both days can be found on the NEO DevCon page.

NEO Global Development’s (NGD) manager of ecosystem growth, Tamar Salant, announced the launch of a new initiative entitled NEO Friends. The initiative aims to offer a variety of resources to NEO community members who contribute to the ecosystem. Such contributions might include document translation, original content creation, hosting local meetups or regional events, or other ways applicants feel they may offer value to the community.

The NEO Friends initiative will be open to all – developers and non-developers alike – who wish to participate. Salant said, “we’re creating this program to help foster, and to strengthen these local communities.”

NNT Catch Up

NGD announced the launch of a new branch, NGD Seattle, as well as the two leaders of the office, former Microsoft executives John deVadoss and Peng Huang. Combined, the two have more than 25 years experience with Microsoft and will seek to hire developers local to the Seattle area immediately.

The NGD Seattle office will focus on developing “tools” and “building blocks” (libraries and frameworks) to enable productive, high-quality development with reusable code on the NEO blockchain.

“We have a unique advantage with NEO, which is the global communities,” deVadoss said in his interview with NEO News Today, mentioning NEO-ONE, NewEconoLabs, City of Zion. “We look to them” to dictate the priority and focus of the NGD Seattle development queue.

Swisscom Blockchain announced its decentralized digital identity solution NeoID candidate, SERAPH ID. Swisscom Blockchain’s co-founder and head of enterprise, Waldemer Scherer, discussed a self-sovereign data model designed to protect personal information.

The project aims to first, give each user the possibility to access and manage their own identity within the NEO blockchain. Also, second, to enable dApps, smart contracts, or third parties to verify the identity of a user and the validity of their claims. Swisscom Blockchain tentatively plans to perform the first dApp live demo producing SSI on NEO in June of 2019.

Community Groups

NEO St Petersburg Competency Center (NEO SPCC) recently published a proof-of-concept video demo for its NeoFS candidate, alongside the research plan for its distributed decentralization storage platform (DDSP). The POC demo demonstrated how the platform creates a network map that it can use to store data according to the placement rule. The research plan highlights how NEO SPCC intends for its DDSP to be used by dApps for data storage in addition to acting as a content delivery network (CDN).

The storage platform will use GAS as its base currency and aims for a beta release in Q3 2019.

NEO Colorado will be hosting its third meetup, which is to include a presentation recapping highlights of NEO DevCon 2019. For those unable to attend, a video and audio stream will be made available following the event.

Ecosystem

February 17th, Trinity Protocol announced direct Layer-2 integration with neo-gui. Trinity’s state channel solution aims to vastly increase the scaling of NEO’s bottom layer by shifting a large amount of transaction volume off-chain, only using the consensus layer for settlement. With a relationship with NEO dating back to 2017, Trinity is claimed to have the necessary experience to integrate its scaling solution directly into neo-gui. Trinity states that the neo-trinity implementation marks the first time such a solution has ever been integrated directly into a public blockchain platform.

February 17th, Nash Exchange announced the March 31st launch of the platform’s public beta launch. Fabio Canesin, Nash co founder, said “we will invite every member of our community to use our products to trade, pay, invest.” Further, Canesin went on to highlight the acquisition of money transmitter licenses for several US states, which they will pursue to offer US residents access to the decentralized exchange.

February 17th, Bridge Protocol announced Project Aver, launch details for its Bridge Passport, the open sourcing of Bridge products, and a token burn. Project Aver incorporates the latest AI, machine learning and computer vision into its digital identity verification processes. Bridge also announced that Bridge Protocol V1.1 would be launching in March 2019. Lastly, Bridge will burn 60% of the company held tokens, leaving the company with approximately 220 million tokens. The community will then hold the majority share of 240 million tokens.

February 18th, BlaCat released an overview of the gaming industry at NEO DevCon. In his presentation, founder Sean Chen discussed benefits gamers are afforded with blockchain, such as trading game assets. Chen went on to say some games that won awards at last years NEO Blockchain Game Development Competition will be included on the BlaCat platform at its launch.

February 18th, Endorsit began internal testing of the iOS dApp, improved the messaging system, and plans for a major UI overhaul. Registration for the NEO dApp global blockchain application development challenge will end on Saturday, March 9th, 2019.

February 19th, Alchemint released an overview of its NEO DevCon experience. Highlights include CTO Chris Qi’s presentation on stablecoins, which discussed SDUSD’s transparency via smart contract.

February 19th, Jarvis made research and development progress on push notifications functionality and began a discussion about the “Grouplus community economy’s intelligence solution.”

February 21st, Effect.AI announced its intentions to migrate from the NEO blockchain to EOS sometime in April of 2019. Effect.AI joined the NEO ecosystem early 2018, and concluded its token sale on March 24th. In total, 650,000,000 EFX (NEP-5) tokens were minted as part of the event. Recently, CEO Chris Dawe expressed a desire not to “stick around and wait” for NEO 3.0 or to migrate to the new platform if a new genesis block is required.

February 21st, Narrative announced the official public beta launch of its content economy platform to take place on Tuesday, April 2nd. In the announcement, the Narrative team also noted the rollout of its certification process, onboarding enhancements, a significant reputation formula update, and a niche slot limit increase. Before the launch of the public beta, there will be one more upgrade in March of 2019.

February 22nd, Moonlight released a recap of its NEO DevCon experience. Moonlight co-founder, Tyler Adams, participated in a panel entitled How to Expand Developer Communities, took part in an interview with NEO News Today, and hosted a developer workshop. On the second day of the event, co-founder, Alan Fong, presented on the Moonlight project and its future where he discussed Copernicus, the first iteration of Moonlight.

February 22nd, Conjure announced it will update its token sale model. The project recently delayed its token sale and shifted to a Security Token Offering, rather than an Initial Coin Offering. The soft cap for the public token sale is US $1.5 million.

Events

February 25th: NEO Colorado meetup (Denver, US)