Neo News: Week in Review – December 19 – December 25

General Updates

Neo Global Development concluded a holiday gifting competition that distributed 192 NFT gifts to the Neo community based on a Discord GasBot tipping campaign. Neo community members gave one another more than 400 tips that each served as an entry ticket, and the winners were drawn using COZ’s PROPS contract. Gifts were donated by Blockchain Cuties, DogeRift, COZ, Flamingo Finance, Forthewin Network, GhostMarket, ILEX, Meme2Earn, NeoCandy, Neo Global Development, NeoLine, Neo News Today, Quirky Soul College, and Supernova. NGD included a user walkthrough to claim the NFT awards in the announcement.

Neo MainNet was upgraded to Neo-CLI v3.5 on Dec. 26. One of the most notable improvements in this version is the ability to load dynamic scripts at contract runtime. This opens new doors for contract developers by enabling new use cases where users can provide logic to be executed.

Neo News Today distributed two student grants offered as a part of Neo’s October Decoding Web3 US Campus Tour. Two US $4,000 grants were given to four-person teams FanGarde from the University of Colorado – Boulder, and Brownie.gg from the University of Victoria. FanGarde is an events ticketing platform aimed at eliminating issues associated with inauthentic tickets, non-transparent systems, relentless scalping, and untraceable tickets within the secondary market. Brownie.gg is a platform that will support eSport players and host eSport events. The grant allocations were generated through rewards earned by NNT’s position on the Neo Council.

Flamingo Finance launched the FUSD stablecoin on Neo N3 TestNet ahead of its tentative MainNet launch in early 2023. The FUSD stablecoin will be modeled after MakerDAO’s DAI token, which uses over-collateralization of digital assets to help maintain its peg to US $1. To mint FUSD, a user must open a Vault with FLUND, bNEO, or fWBTC as collateral to back the stablecoin. In parallel, the team is also working on a margin maintenance bot to help an FUSD loan maintain a healthy loan-to-value ratio.

Demex integrated bNEO lending and borrowing into Nitron, the non-custodial exchange’s multi-chain permissionless money market. Nitron launched in Nov. 2022 and is a decentralized money market that allows users to lend digital assets and earn interest if the asset is borrowed. Additionally, when users borrow digital assets from Nitron or deposit whitelisted assets, they can use those funds as collateral to mint the USC stablecoin. The USC stablecoin will also be modeled after MakerDAO’s DAI token to help maintain the peg’s stability. Each of the lend and borrow pools will have $2,250 in bNEO incentives, which will be distributed as rewards over the next four weeks.

Neo Soccer season three kicked off with new features added to the soccer management game. Seasons run for 38 days, with matches played daily at 6:00 p.m. (UTC). To join a season, the user pays a flat fee upfront (currently 5 bNEO), which is then distributed into the prize pool shared between game players. Users can earn “bits” for performing in-game activities, contributing to Neo Soccer, or owning a NEO-BITS NFT. Bits can be used to purchase “consumables,” which can improve player, manager, or stadium attributes. Bits are also used to earn revenue from the new “bits pool,” which is filled by diverting 4% of all transaction fees in the game toward the pool. A user’s revenue from the bits pool is proportional to their bits holdings. Lastly, cup matches that end in a draw are now settled by penalties instead of a default win given to the away team.

TOTHEMOON announced Resource Token staking will take effect on Friday, Dec. 30, which will yield Resource Deed NFTs to stakers. Resource Deed NFTs allow users to randomly mint Resource NFTs, which will be distributed to users that stake tokens for at least 30 consecutive days. Five types of NEP-17 resource tokens (MAG, HIST, LITH, WATT, and TGAS) and their associated Resource NFTs can boost staking rewards and decrease the staking requirements for building corresponding Moon Infrastructure. Additionally, the TOTHEMOON team conducted three holiday giveaways, where six entrants were each awarded a First Quarter (Phase Three) Cryptonaut NFT.

GrantShares proposals Credential and scoring data network for Neo developers, College DAO: Bringing the NEO Blockchain to College Campuses, and Early-stage startups incubator to attract, incubate, and help launch early-stage startups building on NEO Blockchain were put forth for discussion.

Unlocking the Chain released a video overview of the GrantShares DAO, which showcased the proposal process, the types of funding categories, where the DAO’s funding comes from, smart contract security, and a walkthrough of an entire application.

DogeRift released two patch updates. The first update included the addition of regions to improve player-versus-player latencies, the integration of a leaderboard on the Main Menu, fixes to various bugs in Adventure Mode, and improvements to Football Mode. The second update included a new Christmas theme and Energy bonuses for the holiday season.

Developer Updates

COZ released neon-js v5.3.0, which added new properties to the StackItem type, changed InvokeResult types, and integrated support to traverseIterator.

NNT Catch Up

NNT released episode 23 of the Smart Economy Podcast with Graven Prest, a co-founder of GeoWeb. Discussion topics included non-technical roles in tech-oriented startups, how local blockchain communities can empower new industry entrants, GitCoin grants rounds, the melding of information sharing and open geospatial networks, how GeoWeb intends to evolve over time, and use cases for the platform.

Events

Dec. 27: Flamingo Finance hosting a Live AMA in the Community Lagoon voice chat channel on the official Discord server.
Dec. 28: NeoNS joining a Poly Network community rewards campaign on Twitter and Telegram.