On Thursday, August 29th, NEO Colorado co-hosted a meetup with Rocky Mountain Blockchain and Denver Blockchain. Dylan Grabowski, founder of NEO Colorado, delivered an “in-depth 101-level” presentation outlining the basics of the NEO blockchain.

In the presentation, Grabowski highlighted his background in the NEO ecosystem, and initial reasons for getting involved in the public blockchain project. Afterward, the audience learned about the basic history of NEO (beginning with AntShares), delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) as a consensus mechanism, the multiple developer languages supported by NEO, NEO’s dual token model, and the breadth of global community.

Following a brief overview of the ecosystem, Grabowski offered insight into NEO’s current level decentralization. First, he discussed consensus nodes on the NEO TestNet, managed by COZ, Swisscom Blockchain, MatPool, KPN, NEO Foundation, and NEO Global Development (NGD). Grabowski followed by the geographic decentralization of MainNet nodes, operated by COZ, KPN, and the NEO Foundation. He then went on to outline NEO’s current token distribution, with the NEO Foundation managing around 43% of the token supply.

After, he provided reasons why developers and projects might choose to build with NEO versus another blockchain project, as well as NGD’s investment into the ecosystem through the NEO EcoBoost program. Additionally, Grabowski enumerated the number of community developer groups across the globe, and gave a glimpse into fourteen of the nearly 100 projects building with NEO.

A portion of the presentation was dedicated to describing NEO3, and its changes from the current 2.x blockchain. Specifically, Grabowski outlined NEO3’s update to dBFT 2.0, architectural changes, layering, functionality, security, and expected migration process.

The presentation concluded with an overview of NEO Colorado and its efforts in the Colorado region since November of 2018.

After the presentation, event attendees participated in a question and answer session. The community asked the following questions:

  • As five out of the seven nodes are operated by the NEO Foundation, is there a roadmap for decentralizing the consensus nodes?
  • What is the application process for becoming a consensus node?
  • Is there surveillance or metrics to witness consensus node operational status?
  • What the long-term role of the NEO Foundation?
  • How does the NEO Foundation plan to distribute the funds they maintain?
  • Could you share a little more information on the two stable coins in the NEO ecosystem?
  • What is the incentive to operate a NEO consensus node?
  • What happens to the GAS after it’s used for smart contracts and other ecosystem functions?
  • Who is NEO’s biggest competitor and what will make it survive for another four years?
  • Which projects have left other ecosystems to join NEO, and vice versa?

The full presentation can be found at the link below:

There were technical difficulties with the audio on the recording, which greatly improved for the question and answer session (around 28:16).

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