Keymakers is an open-source, Japan-based community that aims to provide an easier on-ramp for developers that wish to get involved with blockchain and the NEO ecosystem. The group currently has 12 members and was founded by third year University of Tokyo student Shizuka Eguchi.

In an interview with Asian Market Entry, Shizuka noted his first introduction to the NEO ecosystem, where he attended a NEO workshop in Shanghai: “In Shanghai, I was able to communicate with a lot of NEO developers there. It was a fantastic environment for developers.”

After his experience in Shanghai, Shizuka felt that a NEO community in Japan could provide great support for future blockchain developers. He noted that the number of developers, particularly blockchain developers, is quite low in Japan. With NEO yet to become a widely known blockchain technology in Japan, he found it difficult to learn the tech due to a lack of documentation in Japanese.

As a result, Shizuka created the Keymakers community, with an initial goal of publishing Japanese NEO documentation for budding blockchain developers. By making it easier for developers to learn how NEO works and how dApps may be built, Shizuka hopes to make NEO a more accessible blockchain for Japanese developers.

Keymakers will be responsible for publishing comprehensive NEO documentation, starting with an initial release of 40 pages in 2018. The full version, estimated to be 300 pages, is aimed for release in 6 months under a mutual agreement between Keymakers and the NEO Global Development R&D/EG departments.

Instead of directly translating from existing documentation, Keymakers intends to create new documentation by referring to the NEO whitepaper. The table of contents for the first edition is planned as follows:

  • Introduction
  • Overview of NEO
  • Keys and Addresses
  • Wallets
  • Transactions
  • Network Structure
  • Consensus Algorithm
  • Software Development Kits
  • Smart Contracts
  • NEO Applications
  • How to Start dApps on NEO
  • NEO Enhancement Proposals

On October 8th, Keymakers attended the fifth Technical Book Exhibition, an enterprise-sponsored event where groups of attendees from fields within IT or engineering can exhibit their works. Two attendees from Keymakers, Shizuka Eguchi and Taisei Imada, presented a book called ‘Introduction to Blockchain Development with NEO.’ The pair sold all 100 copies that had been prepared for the event, along with thirty e-books.

Alongside the release of NEO documentation, the Keymakers team has begun fostering a NEO developer community in Japan by hosting tutorials sessions. The team has conducted multiple NEO workshops in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka, and hopes to organize a Japanese NEO hackathon in March 2019. The hackathon will be hosted by NGD, with the Keymakers team providing tutoring.

The tutorial sessions are used as hands-on coding opportunities, typically using Python on Mac, with topics such as how to setup a NEO development environment and creating a token. Keymakers intends to expand NEO workshops to other Japanese cities such as Kanazawa and Iizuka.

Keymakers has also expressed an interest in dApps and developing using the Go programming language. There is no focus on marketing at this stage, with the team instead looking to foster a NEO community in Japan through better documentation and by hosting workshops more frequently.

NEO development articles in Japanese that are published by Keymakers can be found on its Medium page here.