NEO News: Week in Review – October 29th to November 4th

NEO

NEO Global Development (NGD) released its October monthly report. Highlights included the addition of KPN as a consensus node on MainNet, MainNet and TestNet upgrades to v2.9, the addition of a new community group (AmazoNeo), meetups hosted, events attended, and key interviews held.

NEO News Today published a transcript of a Da Hongfei interview from October 11th with Maeil Business Newspaper, Korea’s largest business newspaper. In the interview, Hongfei and Maeil discussed the possibilities of blockchain-based smart economies, Onchain, Ontology, decentralized digital identities, technology stocks, future mass adoption of blockchain, and fundraising.

NEO was added to Delta Direct, a function of Delta portfolio tracking application v1.4. Delta aims to provide its users the most recent coin prices and market charts via alerts. Other NEO ecosystem projects have been added to the platform, including Moonlight, Bridge Protocol, Effect.AI, Ontology, Loopring, Switcheo, and APEX Network.

NGD and Swisscom AG held a hackathon in Zürich, Switzerland, where teams were given 32 hours to innovate, design and develop projects on NEO. 500 NEO and 1,350 GAS was up for grabs for winning teams.

Developer Groups

NewEconoLabs (NEL) provided its bi-monthly progress update, outlining developer incentive rewards, browser updates, tool development, NEL lab research, ZoroChain progress, and CryptoGladiator progress. NEL_CLI was upgraded to v2.8, and the v2.9 upgrade is approximately 30% complete. NEL also reported that NEL Lab researchers have begun studying Bancor contracts, which provide tokens with built-in convertibility directly through their smart contracts.

City of Zion (CoZ) released v0.8.2 of neo-python, a Python-based node and SDK for the NEO blockchain. The project aims to become a full port of the NEO project. New features include the addition of getblockheader RPC method, VM sanity checks for operations on BigInteger’s, ExtendedJsonRpcApi, getnodestate RPC extended method, getxhistory RPC extended method, and allowing wallets to sync past corrupt blocks.

Bug fixes in v0.8.2 include preventing max recursion depth exceeding when network data inflow exceeds processing speed, fixing a discrepancy between getpeers RPC call and the maxpeers setting, fixing return types of claimGas function, fixing ExtendedJsonRpcApi, and cleaning up tasks for disconnected peers.

General changes include an update to the Readme, improvement to CreateWallet tests, and updating the compiler to v0.5.6.

Ecosystem

NEO News Today covered AmazoNeo, a social-led blockchain community that aims to develop and consolidate the NEO Smart Economy in Latin America. The group was established by Igor and Vitor Coelho, founders of NeoResearch, and co-founder Alexandre Barbosa. AmazoNeo seeks to use blockchain technology to positively impact the industrial sector, public sector, academia, and broader society. In an effort to enhance socio-economic opportunities for development in the regions of Latin America and the Caribbean, AmazoNeo will take an interdisciplinary approach to its membership. Looking forward, AmazoNeo will attend events and host meetups, as well as establish a group of ambassadors.

For the Win (FTWCoin) announced a trading competition in partnership with Switcheo. The competition is scheduled to take place from November 5th to November 18th, with 1 million FTWX tokens available in rewards. Additionally, FTWCoin clarified its ticker symbol will read as “FTWX” on exchanges, but will read as “FTX” on block explorers.

Switcheo announced the soft date rollout of its new trading platform, Callisto, along with new token offerings, trading changes, an updated fee structure, and roadmap for the rest of Q4. Once Callisto is live, Switcheo stated it will offer Dai (DAI), OmiseGO (OMG), and Maker (MKR) ERC-20 token offerings paired with Ethereum (ETH). Upon the launch of its new trading platform, Switcheo will manually purchase and burn 70% of fees associated with trading non-NEO tokens.

Business Data Network (BDN) held an art contest, from October 22nd through October 31st, to conclude its NEO Community Reward Program. Contestants were asked to Photoshop the BDN logo into a piece of creative artwork, and upload it to Twitter. Voting on submissions began on November 1st and will end on November 11th.

APEX Network was included on Red Herring’s Top 100 Global Companies list, comprised of leading private technology companies from North America, Europe, and Asia. It is claimed that “Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work.”

Red Pulse released its bi-weekly update, which details the opening of its Phoenix platform to the public, development updates, and events attended. Red Pulse purports they’ve had a positive response with regards to the Phoenix platform and have been able to attract “many top China analysts from [its] community and within the finance world.” Looking forward, Red Pulse aims to deploy a content and rating rewards script.

nOS released Client v0.4.5, in an effort to improve user network connectivity and provide updates. Other updates included account holdings to sort tokens, block polling frequency to reduce the number of RPC requests, and an added ability to perform multiple test invokes in nOS API.

NEO Name Service (NNS) released its bi-monthly development report. Highlights include a smart contract upgrade, distribution of NNC rewards from domain name mining, as well as product and code development. Domain name mining activity ended on October 23rd, and domain name auctions will be offline for a week, in preparation for a NNS contract update. The contract upgrade is expected to be complete in the first week of November. Afterward, NNS domain name bidding will resume. Rewards for NNS domain name service mining began to be distributed on October 30th, which had an unfortunate side effect of clogging the NEO blockchain.

Neon Exchange (NEX) published its quarterly report for Quarter 3 of 2018. Funds raised during the recent public token sale will be used to fuel the platform’s personnel growth and operational expansion, a process which is due to conclude in Q1 2019. The NEX team has added seven new employees to four different company divisions. The back-end team finalized NEX’s system architecture and claims to have developed the “majority of its components.” Some considerable work was also made on the NEX front-end, specifically on its simplified exchange interface. Looking forward NEX seeks to on-board fiat integration partners and add support for additional smart contract–capable chains.

BlaCat published its bi-weekly progress report with updates its team has made towards its main application and ZoroChain. The team has updated the logo design of its BlaCat BCP tokens, the exchange user interface, mapping of the wallet recharge function, design of the ‘Find’ web page, and the wallet token purchase functionality. Additionally, numerous tests were completed on ZoroChain, along with the completion of cross-chain functionality and the addition of BlaCat’s Android SDK implementation.

Trinity released its monthly report for October, as well as an in-depth refresher on its state channel technology. NEO-based development included an updated light version NEO state channel protocol and a function scalability enhancement. The Trinity wallet is now available on the Google Play app store.

Travala released its October monthly report, which highlights partnerships, relocation of its main office, testing, product updates, and platform payment updates. In October, Travala partnered with nOS, expanded its team and relocated to Hanoi, Vietnam, and made UX and security updates to the platform.

Moonlight published an updated roadmap for the development of the workforce platform. The first phase is meant to allow for digital identity verification and the creation of digital resumes. The second phase will focus on hiring through the use of properties such as “trustless resumes” certified by blockchain, multiple payment options, and a matchmaking engine. Phase three will focus on project management, with support for collaboration between multiple teams, smart contract, and web APIs. Lastly, Moonlight announced a new community-driven “universal blockchain identity initiative,” a decentralized identity and reputation to “streamline development in blockchain and make dApps more secure and simple to use in the near future.”

Ontology announced a partnership with Ubitus, and that 99.32% of its MainNet ONT tokens have been swapped from NEP-5 ONT. For users who did not complete the swap prior to October 1st, there is a fallback plan in place to allow users to complete the swap by 12:00 am (UTC -12) on Monday, December 31st.

Narrative announced an update to the alpha version of its content network. Narrative reports that the site’s architecture has “an entirely new front-end.” Changes to the alpha’s update include site restructuring, rebuilt user profile pages, 72-hour countdowns for auctions and voting activity, and an improved search function. The next step for the Narrative team is a public beta release that will aim to include content posting, reputation scoring, and rewards program settlement.

QLC Chain released its bi-weekly report for the second half of October, which highlights progress achieved, goals for November, events attended, and media coverage. Following the launch of its multidimensional block lattice structure, QLC has received and incorporated input from its community-member feedback. Looking forward, the team aims to implement more protocols, continue testing, and incorporate a VM smart contract API debugger.

Token Listings

FTX listed on Switcheo.

Upcoming Events

November 6: NEO Colorado Meetup – Denver.

November 10: NEXT/NEOFANS Meetup – Hangzhou.

November 17: NEO Blockchain Open Course in Shanghai, China.