General Updates

Neo opened voting for the Community Voter’s Choice awards as part of the Neo X Grind Hackathon. The voting period, which began on Jan. 13, will remain open until Jan. 20, allowing members of Neo’s ambassador program, NeoPod, to select their favorite projects from the competition. The results of both the Community Voter’s Choice awards and the judges’ selections will be announced on Jan. 21.

Neo announced a strategic collaboration with PumpBTC to help bolster Bitcoin’s DeFi ecosystem using the Neo X EVM sidechain. The cooperative agreement is aimed at leveraging Neo X as a host for assets and liquidity for the PumpBTC platform, expanding opportunities for bitcoin holders in DeFi.

Neo’s Escape the Matrix adversarial AI agent game concluded without being solved, while reaching approximately 9,819 GAS, US $52,335 in value at the time. Since it was unsolved, all participants will share from the prize pool based on the proportion of GAS they paid to play the game. Eighty percent of the pool was returned to participants, and 20% was donated to Freysa.eth’s wallet to contribute to the team’s continual development of AI agents.

Nichome announced support for bridging and staking USDT. Users can now move USDT to Neo X from various EVM networks and stake it with Nichome to earn X Credits. USDT can be bridged to Neo X from Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism, or Mantle. However, the reverse operation is not currently possible. The bridge is maintained by Meson Finance.

Nextmate.AI announced planned support for Neo X, which will enable users to bet on real-world outcomes, create custom markets, and engage with memecoin AI agents.

StealthEX launched a Zealy rewards campaign in collaboration with Neo. The initiative, which began on Jan. 16 and will run through Feb. 18, invites participants to complete various tasks for a chance to win a share of a 600 USDT prize pool.

DeXFun concluded season one of its “To Da Moon Race” trading competition. 10 winners shared in a 2,000 USDT prize pool.

NNT Catch Up

NNT released Episode 81 of The Smart Economy Podcast featuring Fisher Yu, co-founder and CTO of Babylon Labs, a non-custodial staking protocol that uses the underlying value of Bitcoin to secure a variety of proof-of-stake networks. Topics of discussion included how Bitcoin can secure PoS chains trustlessly, the chain’s journey from 1,000 BTC to more than $3.3 billion TVL, building truly decentralized security markets, the future of cross-chain security sharing, and much more.

NNT editors co-hosted Crypto Coffee and Blockchain Beer Spaces #47, with special guest Config Wizard, co-founder of Cassette, on the official The Smart Economy Podcast X account. Topics of discussion included building on a shoestring budget, the low cost to host all of Wikipedia on NeoFS, the pros and cons of building a dApp native to a blockchain ecosystem, the potential to expand to the Ethereum ecosystem via the Neo X EVM sidechain, how anyone can build immutable websites via Cassette, and a call to action to spread the word regarding recent developments.

Events

Jan. 24: NNT editors hosting CC & BB #48 on The Smart Economy Podcast official X account.
Jan. 28: Meme2Earn hosting Community Fireplace on the official Discord server.
Jan. 28: Flamingo Finance hosting Community Lagoon on the official Discord server.

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