NEO Global Development (NGD) has released its December monthly report, which highlights the upcoming NEO DevCon, development progress, events, and more. The monthly reports are released in an effort to inform the community about NGD’s efforts to grow the NEO ecosystem.

Announcements

In December, NGD announced its second DevCon, which will take place in Seattle, Washington, US on February 16th and 17th. DevCon aims to be a “top-level developer conference for the NEO community,” with confirmed speakers from Accenture and Microsoft, among other NEO ecosystem projects. NEO News Today covered the announcement.

Additionally, NGD released an updated version of the “How to Become a Consensus Node” document. The document outlines requirements, application information, and the voting process for hosting NEO consensus nodes. NEO News Today also provided coverage on this topic.

Development Progress

NEO’s full node program, NEO-CLI, was updated to version 2.9.3. The update included changes to peer-to-peer (P2P) connections and P2P network performance, bug fixes to the consensus algorithm, and a minor bug fix in the smart contract cost calculation.

Further, NeoVM was upgraded from v2.3.1.1 to v2.3.3, which included a “minor fix on encoding and a hash dictionary added for interop services.” NGD states the improvements will make the execution more secure and reliable.

Events and Interviews

Throughout Quarters 3 and 4, NGD hosted, sponsored, and participated in technical workshops, industry meetings, and community meetups around the globe. NEO News Today editor, Brett Rhodes, compiled a list of events hosted or supported by NGD in 2018. However, throughout December NGD chose to focus its efforts on the planning of DevCon 2019.

On December 8th and 9th, the NEO St Petersburg Competency Center (NEO SPCC) hosted a hackathon. A write up of the event highlighting the top 3 teams was published by NEO News Today. The hackathon sought to train participants in NEO blockchain technologies, develop the NEO community in St Petersburg, locate potential NEO SPCC employees, and identify projects to continue developing at the NEO SPCC.

Additionally, NGD Ecosystem Growth director, Lili Zhao, attended the Blockchain Symposium held by the Universität Freiburg in Freiburg, Germany.

With regards to interviews, on December 17th, EG manager, Wang Jiachao, conducted an interview with Hufu Blockchain. On December 20th, NEO founder, Da Hongfei, provided an interview to Forbes.

New NGD Hire

NGD hired Gao Yuan to serve as senior international marketing manager. Yuan graduated from Columbia University with a master’s degree in international economics and financial policy. His professional experience comes from China UnionPay International, Qdaily, and The Beast.

2018 Annual Report

To finish out the year, NGD released its 2018 Annual Report. In the annual report, NGD discussed its 2018 efforts in community development, research and development, dApp ecosystem development, global activities, team building efforts, and milestones.

NEO Global Development’s full monthly report for December can be found at the following link:
https://neo.org/blog/details/4127