NEO Global Development has released its monthly report for July 2018. The reports are a collection of news, events, and development from within the NEO community within the previous month.

Decentralization

One of NEO’s most significant developments this year happened on July 4th, when the NEO Foundation voted a City of Zion consensus node onto the NEO MainNet. City of Zion is an independent group of software developers for the NEO blockchain, so although their interests are closely aligned with the core NEO team in Shanghai, the election marks the official start of NEO’s era of decentralization.

Chinese blockchain-focused venture capital firm, Fenbushi Capital, and Dutch telecom company, KPN, are expected to be the next external consensus nodes elected to the network by the NEO Foundation at the end of 2018. The two groups are currently running consensus nodes on the NEO TestNet. NEO’s consensus nodes can be viewed here.

NEO 3.0

Meanwhile, NEO’s future — NEO 3.0 — was also opened for community discussion in July when NEO founder and core developer Erik Zhang wrote about plans for a more stable and scalable enterprise-focused version of the NEO platform. With regards to timeline, Zhang has stated that “NEO 3.0 development is a long-term process that takes at least 1-2 years to develop and test”. He further commented that upgrades planned for NEO 3.0 which can be added to NEO’s current blockchain will be developed first.

Neo-sharp

A group of seven City of Zion developers also spent two weeks in NEO’s new Shanghai office working on their neo-sharp project alongside Neo Global Development’s R&D team. Neo-sharp is a project that is not focused on adding new features to NEO, but instead is a new C# node implementation that is more independent, flexible, testable, and modular that the current version. A video summary of the developers’ visit can be seen here.

Certik

Finally, NEO announced a strategic cooperation with Certik on July 31st. Certik is a USA-based company providing formal verification of smart contract and blockchain code to enhance security. Certik is expected to provide verification of NEO’s digital assets.

To read the full July report, visit https://neo.org/blog/details/4098