Neo Global Development (NGD) Seattle lead, John deVadoss, envisions attracting over half a million developers to Neo by building a blockchain toolset that “piggybacks” on the popularity of Visual Studio Code (VS Code). deVadoss made his comments during episode 32 of the Neo News Today podcast.

Claiming that more than 60% of developers across the globe are using VS Code, deVadoss and his team are going to where the developers are building. It was this thought process that was the genesis for the Neo Blockchain Toolkit for VS Code in late 2018.

For us, the starting point is very simple… how do we take blockchain development mainstream? Across the globe [there are] about 20 – 21 million developers. That was the goal. It was not [converting] the Ethereum [community of] 50,000 or 100,000 [developers]. No, it was 21 million developers.

Neo Blockchain Toolkit allows developers to easily run private network instances, create and debug C# smart contracts, and simplifies deployment and invocation to the blockchain. deVadoss notes that with approximately six to seven million developers using VS Code every month, capturing even 10% of the market would mean Neo would have amassed over half a million developers.

Already, the ex-Microsoft veteran believes that Neo is making progress towards this goal. “Go to the VS Code marketplace. Don’t search for ‘Neo,’ just search for ‘blockchain.’ You will find the Neo Toolkit is in the Top 3, [alongside] IBM and Microsoft [blockchain developer tools].”

One of the priorities for the Seattle-based team is developer productivity. The Neo Blockchain Toolkit focuses on providing a mainstream-ready industry toolset for developers and architects to design digital assets.

NGD Seattle strives to build tools that have a sense of credibility to the “mainstream professional developer,” by delivering an experience that is far superior to what they can find on other blockchain platforms, and even competes with a conventional development experience.

I will not name names, but when we were demoing [the Visual Token Designer] to our friends from the industry, and certainly at Microsoft… their jaw dropped…They didn’t expect that we could take what was seen as a very complex, abstruse [process of] designing tokens and token template definitions, [and make it] so elegant and so visually simple.

By developing a suite of tools that exhibit maturity and professionalism in an industry still in its infancy, NGD Seattle strives to raise the bar of development standards, not just for the Neo ecosystem, but also for the whole blockchain space.

Looking forward, deVadoss wants to make Neo’s vision of the smart economy real. He is emboldened by his belief that Neo has “an architecture that is superior to any other architecture out there,” and that NGD Seattle can help provide Neo the most productive developer experience in the industry.

In the near future, deVadoss notes Neo ecosystem members can expect to see more releases and announcements from NGD Seattle. One such recent announcement was Neo joining the InterWork Alliance (IWA) as a founding sponsor member alongside Microsoft, Accenture, SDX, and Digital Asset. deVadoss sits on the board of the new organisation, of which Neo hopes will help it realize its vision of the “Next-gen Internet.”

The full NNT podcast interview can be found below:

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