On November 9th a new community development group called NewEconoLab (NEL) was officially founded in China by Liu Yongxin, a former product manager of Lawchain, and Li Jianying, a NEO core developer. NEL was created to attract community development talent and accelerate the growth of the NEO ecosystem. There are currently five core members of the NEL team who are responsible for development and operations, as well as additional volunteers and part time members.

The first project that will be completed by NEL, NEODUN, actually began development five months ago. NEODUN is a virtual currency hardware wallet that can store private keys and isolate itself from attacks.

Li Jianying is largely responsible for the development of NEODUN. Li Jianying has experience in both software and hardware development, having previously led a smart home research and development team that produced smart speakers. Later he participated in the technical development of NEO and became very familiar with the underlying technology. Other contributing members to NEODUN were also a part of the smart speaker development team, and the electrical engineer responsible for security is a senior developer in the smartphone space with over a decade of R&D experience.


NEODUN is compatible with a variety of digital assets including NEO, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin and more. As NEODUN is open source and under the care of NEL, developers can add support for additional digital assets as well as various smart contracts.

NEODUN supports USB and Bluetooth connectivity and can be used with both PC and mobile devices. To ensure data security, the device has built-in chip encryption to prevent data being stolen directly from the flash memory. In addition, the design of NEODUN can support fingerprint authentication. NEL have communicated with suppliers, and as long as the demand is high enough, the fingerprint module can be added to the wallet.

NEODUN is already in the hardware and software integration phase. Production of the prototype will be complete by mid December, which will have basic key management and transaction signing functionality. Following this, NEL will release test versions to developers and users interested in the product. They will also contact exchanges and investors who may be interested in customised versions to sell to customers.

Another project being developed by NEL is the NEO Name Service which will allow users to use a .NEO domain in place of wallet or smart contract addresses. .NEO domain names will be distributed through a bidding process, and NEP-5 tokens tentatively named NNSV (NNS value) will be used to quantify the value of the names.

NEL have also forked a version of the NEO-GUI, allowing developers to extend functionality through plugins. An example of a simple plugin called ‘SeeStorage’ that can query storage values in storage areas can be found on the NEL GitHub.

In the future, NEL will set up an independent community fund, aiming to attract external investors that will fund the incubation and development of community projects and promote the sustainable development of communities in the long run.

You can view the NEL GitHub here – https://github.com/NewEconoLab

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