NEO News: Week in Review – August 20th – August 26th

NEO

NEO’s senior R&D manager, Malcolm Lerider, participated in an extended video conference with Australian YouTuber, Brad Laurie, also known as “Blockchain Brad”. The interview lasted nearly 100 minutes and covered questions posed by Tyler Swope, a.k.a. “Chico Crypto”, and “Blue Collar Crypto”, as well as other lingering concerns raised by the community following the recent AMA with NEO founders, Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang.

The NEO network was targeted by spam attacks, motivating a rapid response from core and community developers alike. Fixes were quickly deployed to enable blocks to properly fill to capacity and cause priority fees to work as intended, which should also help avoid issues such as long block times.

On August 24th to 26th, NGD held a NEO blockchain challenge event in Tokyo, Japan. The competition was designed to encourage community development involvement in the NEO ecosystem. Entry to the event was free, and a total prize pool of ‎JP¥2,000,000 in GAS equivalent was up for grabs. There were three challenge tiers available for community developers to complete, each with its own reward pool and difficulty level.

On August 24th, the second NEO blockchain open class event jointly hosted by NGD and NewEconoLab was held at InnoSpace Innovation Institute. The classes are designed to introduce developers to NEO technology and advance blockchain development skills.

Community development

City of Zion released a new full stack Golang smart contract framework called neo-storm. It is the latest addition to NEO’s growing list of compilers and allows dApp developers to write their smart contracts in Golang. These Go smart contracts are then compiled to NEO Virtual Machine (NeoVM) bytecode, ready for deployment to the NEO blockchain.

City of Zion released Neon Wallet v0.2.7 with various bug fixes and updates.

NewEconoLabs (NEL) released its first bi-weekly report for August, featuring news and updates on its development community bounty program, the NEL explorer, the NEODUN wallet, CryptoGladiator and the NEO.game competition.

O3

O3 Labs introduced the O3 Alliance, a new framework designed to improve the reach of dApps in the NEO ecosystem. The O3 Alliance framework allows users to access dApps through the O3 wallet and intends to remove the need for users to trust applications or other external services with their private keys.

O3 Labs released a desktop version of its O3 wallet on the Mac App and Windows stores. Due to O3’s support of both the NEO and Ontology MainNets, Ledger users will be able to perform the ONT NEP-5 to ONT MainNet token swap with O3’s single click conversion feature.

NEO Gaming

The NEO Blockchain Game Development Competition, hosted by NewEconoLabs (NEL) with support from NEO Global Development, announced a strategic cooperation with Cocos to build the BlaCat game platform and developer ecosystem. The Cocos mobile game development platform boasts 1.1 million game developers worldwide, with 300,000 developers active on a monthly basis, hailing from over 200 countries.

NEO News Today released a video introduction to CryptoGladiator. CryptoGladiator is a NEO blockchain based game where players collect gladiators with unique appearances and abilities through market transactions and cloning. Gladiators can be taken into the arena to participate in competitions to win prizes.

Ontology

Ontology released OWallet v0.8.4 which now includes the ability for users to conduct the NEP-5 to MainNet ONT token swap. It also highlighted its MainNet launch event in Tokyo and announced its hiring a developer advocate in San Francisco, California.

Ontology announced partnerships with NCC Group, a vulnerability auditing firm, and ALLIVE, a healthcare-based public chain. NCC Group was hired to review the Ontology codebase for vulnerabilities, with a particular focus on its cryptography. ALLIVE and Ontology will co-develop a decentralized healthcare ecosystem, smart blockchain network, and decentralized applications (dApps).

Ontology announced that its “Decentralized Identifier (DID) has been formally added to the W3C-CCG DID Method Registry as a new Decentralized Identifier Method.”

Tokens and Exchanges

WandX, a decentralized exchange (DEX) currently operating on the Ethereum blockchain, announced the launch of a NEO counterpart. The NEO DEX began development in February, and the WandX team released a functional beta on the NEO TestNet on August 26th.

Guardian Circle’s Guardium (GUARD) token began trading on the Switcheo decentralized exchange on August 24th, in GUARD/NEO, GUARD/GAS, and GUARD/SWTH trading pairs. Switcheo was Guardian Circle’s first exchange listing.

Red Pulse announced that it planned to delay the launch of token staking, deposits, and withdrawals on its PHOENIX platform until August 27th. PHX token staking was originally planned to begin August 20th.

Zeepin published an explanation of the role of its native GALA token in preparation for the launch of the Zeepin Chain MainNet on August 31st. Zeepin previously announced a switch from a dual-blockchain model to a single-blockchain business model, and sought to clarify the use cases of the native GALA asset on the Zeepin Chain.

Ecosystem Updates

Following the announcement of over 60 dApps being deployed to nOSNet, project founder, Dean van Dugteren, presented a roundup of the nOS team’s Top 15 community-developed dApps.

QLC Chain, a decentralized network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform, released a summary of an AMA session it held on the 21st of August. Participants of the AMA asked the team various questions about the platform’s future, how its consensus algorithms (Shannon consensus and Multidimensional Block lattice structure) work and more.

NKN released a monthly update covering July and August 2018. NKN, which stands for a “New Kind of Network”, seeks to create a “network connectivity protocol and ecosystem powered by blockchain for an open, decentralized, and shared Internet.” The update covers progress in research and development, GitHub repositories, community events, and marketing.

DeepBrain Chain, an AI computing platform, has published a guide on its chain wallet verification service. The service will let users register to become part of the DeepBrain Chain community and to receive airdrops from the platform’s ecosystem partners.

New Projects

A new security service called Goldiock is launching on the NEO blockchain, which aims to provide individuals and institutions with an alternative to conventional data storage solutions such as online/cloud storage, personal hardware or digital wallets. Goldilock aims to invent a “new class” of secure digital asset storage and private crypto key management services, and revolutionize the way digital assets are handled over the internet.