Despite the adverse weather conditions, around 100 attendees were present at the first-ever NEO meetup in Singapore, on December 7th. Speakers for this event included Tony Tao, Susan Zhou, Li Chuanfeng and Zhu Fei.

NEO Secretary General, Tony Tao started off the meetup with a speech on NEO. He began by thanking the NEO community for their support and reiterated that NEO will always be a community driven project. Tony encouraged anyone who is interested in NEO to view the NEO Slack, Reddit and read up on technical documents that are available online.

After a quick introduction to NEO, Tony unveiled a project called X-Token, revealing that the website was launched earlier that day. Quoting Ray Dalio, “I hope there is a model that the best ideas win,” and the model through which these ideas can be evaluated upon is radical honesty, radical transparency, and algorithmic decision making. Tony believes that the general blockchain community exemplifies swarm intelligence, and he use an individual’s investment decision to demonstrate this point. The positives of swarm intelligence are encapsulated within this quote from Tony, referencing Ray Dalio’s quote, “I hope there is a model that the best ideas always win by swarm intelligence.”

Tony gave a quick introduction into the technical details of swarm intelligence, citing the vast amount of research work done by research teams worldwide. He noted that the three core tenets of swarm intelligence, separation, alignment and cohesion are replicated within any successful blockchain community, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Moving on, he revisited TheDao project on Ethereum, and asserted that the TheDao failed due to its failure in addressing the underlying issue of trust and decision making processes within decentralized organizations.

Tony proposed a DAO 2.0 that combines holacracy and blockchain. Holacracy provides an avenue for distributed authority and organizational self-management, whilst blockchain provides a distributed ledger and economic incentive to the organization. Based on this, the decision-making process within a DAO 2.0 organization will neither be one of centralized management, nor one of absolute democracy. Evolving trust circles framework can be used to explain community involvement within a DAO 2.0 organization. Key trust circles include the peripheral supporter circle, core contribution circle (core team), and the challenging circle that possesses a contrarian opinion.

Tony asserted that as a contributor moves from the supporter circle to the contribution circle, this person would require increasing amounts of time and contribution. In return, this contributor will continue to deepen his understanding of the core values that drive this core team, and the value they seek to create for the world. He also gave a very strong warning to avoid any project that lacks the presence of a challenging circle, citing the group-think behavior that is prevalent in pump & dump alt-coins. In closing, X-Token aims to create true value for the world through the NEO smart economy, “Finding Value Together”.

With that, Tony handed the floor to the next speaker, Susan Zhou, COO of Qlink. Susan started by introducing the full Qlink team that was present at the meetup. Qlink aims to create the world’s first decentralized mobile network, that will allow people to contribute their resources to the Qlink network, strengthening the telecom infrastructure. In addition, Qlink will launch basestation hardware that expands the existing network and covers network black spots in a decentralized manner.

Susan elaborated on the sharing of assets on Qlink that can take the form of Wi-Fi sharing, content distribution, mobile data and E2P SMS services. Before closing, Susan updated that the Qlink pre-sale officially ended that morning, two weeks after it began on 28 November. The total amount raised in the strategic and pre-sale investments totaled 350k NEO, and Qlink is looking to launch their main crowd-sale in 2-3 weeks’ time.

The next speaker was Li Chuanfeng, CMO of DeepBrain Chain. DeepBrain Chain is an AI company that has substantial experience in the AI industry, having created China’s first domestic voice assistant (similar to Apple Siri), first speech interaction facilities in the far field of speech interaction (6 months earlier than Amazon Echo), and built the first robot Software-as-a-Service platform in China (similar to Amazon Alexa). These technologies are protected by patents and software copyrights which DeepBrain Chain owns.

Chuanfeng introduced the enterprise AI pain points, which are high computing costs and the lack of data privacy. As a result, data-driven AI enterprises are unable to harness the full potential of AI algorithms due the fragmentation and silo-ed nature of the ecosystem. DeepBrain’s solution is the use of blockchain technology to provide miner incentive for Proof-of-Work GPU miners to train their computing power for AI calculations and be rewarded in DBC tokens. The problem of data privacy can also be solved using smart contracts on the blockchain, which returns the ownership of this data to the individual. AI enterprises that wish to obtain this data can pay individuals in DBC tokens.

Currently, DeepBrain Chain has built a voice skills platform that leverages these AI technologies on the blockchain, and this is the first of many core capabilities that will be built on the world’s first decentralized AI operating system. Chuanfeng closed his presentation by reiterating that the DeepBrain Chain presale ended a month ago, and they are looking to host their main crowd sale very shortly.

The last speaker of the day was Zhu Fei, CEO of Zeepin, which aims to build a distributed creative new economy. Zhu Fei contrasted Zeepin to the previous few speeches that were technical in nature, in that Zeepin is a network that is hugely relevant to everyone, as it involves everyday products. The core markets that Zeepin is focused on are the cultural and creative industries. These industries have clearly defined stages, where each stage has its own unique characteristics, ranging from ideas, to team formation, prototyping, and production. A common thread within these stages is the fact that every stage is a highly lucrative market, and Zhu Fei brought up the example of patent and IP rights that is critical within the ideation stage.

Current issues within the cultural and creative industries are the lack of trust, the struggle for copyright protection and centralization of key institutions. These three issues ultimately lead to a lack of investment and financing within the market. To solve this, Zeepin aims to work closely with NEO and OnChain on the underlying technology used in Zeepin. Blockchain technology allows for the digitization of assets, decentralized security assurance and global transfer of value on a decentralized marketplace.

Zhu Fei used one-liners to help the audience grasp the idea of Zeepin, such as ZeeCreate “Decentralized Design Interconnection Platform”, ZeeFund “Decentralized Kickstarter”, ZeeCrew or ZeeTalent “Borderless Design Team”, and ZeeRights “Copyright office on the Blockchain”. A high-level overview consists of three layers; The infrastructure layer of the blockchain built on NEO and Zeepin Chain, general-purpose utility modules, and the consumer facing dApps, akin to the Apple Store.

ZPT tokens have three core functions. Firstly, the Zeepin team will use up to 20% of the ZPT token supply to incentivize existing creative industry personnel to adopt Zeepin. Secondly, this inflow of talent will lead to an increasing amount of settlement applications to be built on Zeepin, and ultimately allow for a clear, auditable record that will attract external investment in promising ideas. The Zeepin chain will be released by end of Q1 2018, along with their wallet. Various dApps will released over the course of the next few months, and development of these dApps is expected to conclude by mid-2019. Zhu Fei announced the Zeepin token sale plan, which is expected to start on the 18th of January 2018, with a soft cap of 240k NEO. The sale will end within 2 weeks, and the Zeepin team has structured an attractive token sale bonus to increase the distribution of ZPT within the community.

This event report was written by Jeremy Lin, who organised the Singapore meet up and acted as translator for the presenters. You can follow Jeremy on Twitter @jlqe_

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