2020 was a year like no other, for Neo, for blockchain, and for the entire world. As 2020 draws to a close, Neo News Today reached out to representatives from across the Neo ecosystem to collect their personal reflections on the year that was.

Their comments can be found below:

John Wang – NGD Eco Growth director

The most important concept for blockchain in 2020 is “DeFi”. DeFi is a new financial service industry. It is a new financial service network composed of many blockchain-based financial projects. Compared with the traditional financial industry, DeFi’s advantages are more transparency, convenience and composability. Although DeFi has also exposed many problems, as the best scenario for blockchain at present, I believe that DeFi will have greater development in 2021 and will be paid attention to by more traditional financial institutions.

At the same time, digital assets and blockchain technology have entered the public’s field of vision more widely, and more and more people have begun to hold Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has been widely mentioned by media like other traditional assets. Whether in the United States, Europe or China, the government is encouraging innovation in blockchain technology. I believe that with the gradual improvement of blockchain infrastructure, there will be many new innovations in 2021.

Neo has not stopped its pace in 2020. We have joined IWA, BSN and IEEE to more closely carry out the construction of blockchain technology standards and service platforms; we have initiated the cross-chain project Poly Network to accelerate the flow of assets in different chains; we have built a Neo-based full-stack DeFi infrastructure – Flamingo, so that developers can develop DeFi projects on Neo more conveniently. We are working hard to improve the various infrastructure of NGI. If 2020 is the year of preparation, 2021 will be the year of harvest. With the launch of Neo3 and the widespread use of Poly Network and Flamingo, Neo will has significant progress in digital asset.

John deVadoss – NGD Enterprise director

Purpose. If there is one thing and one word that I take away from 2020 – it is Purpose. A sense of purpose for what we work on, and what we build for tomorrow and beyond. With the Neo architecture, tools, and stack, our purpose is to digitize assets and to empower developers to realize the Smart Economy.

Grace Gui – Neo Foundation

2020 was an extraordinary year for people all over the world. We have experienced COVID-19, the U.S. election, the huge fluctuations in financial markets, etc. In these events, we have never felt so deeply about globalization as well as regionalization. People are seeking hope and new directions.

Looking back to our industry, this year’s crisis has also brought opportunities and challenges to the blockchain. With the devaluation of the U.S. dollar, traditional financial institutions have gradually switched to BTC and other cryptocurrencies as reserves. We have witnessed the continuous appreciation of the token market, which has brought more traffic and attention to the industry. With the popularity of DeFi projects and the surge in traffic brought about by the application of financial derivatives concepts, we have seen another industry outlet after ICO and the possibility of large-scale use scenarios in the future. In short, the blockchain industry is accumulating energy and developing steadily against the gloomy environment.

As all new things will go through a long period of dormancy before they become mainstream, 2020 is a year Neo actively prepared for the outbreak. We have released 4 Neo3 previews so far with the next milestone to the TestNet launch. We have incubated a DeFi project with its highest TVL reaching US $1.8 billion. We have reorganized our grants system to better attract and motivate developers and groups to participate in Neo’s development. We’ve also made many other achievements and we still have a lot to do. Despite the intensified market competition, our determination has never changed. We are on the way to become mainstream. Neo will be the One.

Caroline – O3 Labs operation manager

2020 has been a tough year for everyone, but we still have many reasons to be thankful. Everything does not come easy – I feel deeply that the unity of community is an invisible force that drives us forward in the Neo ecosystem and blockchain industry.

This was a year of great significance for O3 Labs. Looking back the whole year, there are so many precious moments that come to my mind: The O3 brand was reshaped, we established a community Telegram group, the O3 Wallet desktop version supported Flamingo Finance, we supported multi-chain, etc. I am proud of the increasing trust from users in every improvement and optimization of our wallet.

The O3 team has always been user-centric with providing a secure and professional wallet service. With the arrival of Neo3, I am even more looking forward to 2021!

Vincent Geneste – Neo Economy & Ghost Market founder

While many will define 2020 as a year to be forgotten, plenty others will also define it as the year of building. With Neo3 around the corner, a flourishing ecosystem, and a global blockchain landscape growing more than ever has over the last decade, I can’t wait to look back and say, “here look, despite everything Neo kept building and is now stronger than ever.”

I’m fully convinced that 2021 will be a year with drastic changes, where the “traditional” world will finally realize how powerful blockchain is, and once it does, Neo will be one of the best positioned projects out there, strategically oriented towards a growing amount of developers of all kind, interested in taking part of tomorrow’s smart economy.

Catherine Bohr – NEO Tracker and NEO•ONE team

As we all know 2020 brought an unexpected situation globally. With all the cancelled events it gave the Neo community a great opportunity to put our heads down and focus on the development towards Neo3 and the projects in the ecosystem.

Here at NEO Tracker and NEO•ONE we made significant progress on both projects. NEO Tracker gained new functionality, reliability and stability in order to improve user experience.

NEO•ONE has been the main focus in the second half of 2020. We worked to fix bugs and add debugging to the current Neo2.x version before switching gears to upgrading for Neo3.

We are looking forward to what 2021 will bring for the Neo Ecosystem.

Yuan Gao – NGD Marketing director

2020 was surreal. COVID-19 has brought profound impact to our way of life, as well as the politico-economic dynamics worldwide. Despite the chaos, it was a great run for the blockchain space: we witnessed a tremendous growth in DeFi, demonstrating great potential to become a strong alternative for traditional finance; Bitcoin reached its all time high recently, attracting more and more institutional investors and public awareness.

Neo did not slow down its pace in this difficult situation: Neo3 is almost ready, with the joint effort of the whole community. I am quite confident that it will be one of the most competitive and future-proof one-stop blockchain solutions on the market. Also, I am very happy with the inception of Project Flamingo, which I am personally involved. It is a testimonial of Neo’s capacity to host a DeFi application, and the single biggest DeFi project launch in many metrics, showing the strong cohesion of the Neo community.

Going forward, I think 2021 would be an important and exciting year for Neo with MainNet Launch of Neo3 on the horizon. I am very excited about all the upcoming events and campaigns revolving around Neo3. Outside Neo, I am most curious about the play out of the scalability development, how will sharding, side chain and roll-up technologies work together to create a stratified system for different use cases.

Igor & Vitor Coelho – NeoResearch founders

These 2020 reflections come at an inflexion point, not just for members of blockchain technology communities, but for all humankind. We have faced several hard challenges this year, and Brazil has been one of the most affected countries in the world. It is also important to recognize that some of these changes are very welcome, as digital technologies have never been so necessary. Smart economy has become a goal not only desirable to achieve, but necessary for all of us to endure. Work relations have quickly changed and accelerated decisions that would take at least five or more than 10 years for society to embrace. The question of “why digital?” has been replaced by “why not digital?”, and blockchain technology is certain to have even more space in this newborn world. The Neo ecosystem has also endured and will come with great advances for 2021, a timely delivery to a world in need of groundbreaking technology. We can say that 2020 is coming to an end, at great costs, but also with great promises for 2021.

Guil. Sperb Machado – AxLabs & neow3j

We, from the Neo community, are like marathonists.

Sometimes, we work hard for months without being broadly noticed or hyped. Or, sometimes, we endure the day-to-day pain to be ready for the moments where the marathon requires our last sweatdrop. However, after the challenging moments we’ve passed through in 2020 we’re absolutely prepared for the final sprint in the upcoming year: Neo3.

Now it’s time to reflect and thank everyone. I feel extremely proud of what the whole Neo community developed during 2020, in special our team at AxLabs — with the neow3j compiler, devpack, and SDK. We all collaborated more with each other (more than previous years!), showing that we’re united on achieving a common goal.

The marathon is not over, it’s just about to start in 2021. Then it’ll be time to show off the strength and endurance built over 2020, providing a great developer experience that anyone would be able to build unimaginable things on Neo.

Tyler Adams – COZ and Moonlight founder

When the community met last year in Shanghai for the NCA, a detailed vision and execution plan for Neo3 was defined. 2020 was a year which, despite the many peripheral obstacles, has been about delivering on that vision and I am immensely proud of the progress that has been made.

Internally, COZ has been delivering against our own vision. We have formalized, restructured, rebranded, and delivered a new series of products (with a few more in the pipeline) which will become the reference for blockchain ecosystem tools in 2021.

Through these interesting times, we have expanded many of our existing relationships within the blockchain ecosystem and are excited to incubate some new relationships which have developed as well. I am very optimistic for 2021 and look forward to (hopefully) sharing a pint with everyone at a meetup in the near future.

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