NEO

Neo Global Development (NGD) announced the release of Preview3, the latest milestone build in the road to the Neo3 MainNet launch. The Preview3 release focused on protocol improvements and bug fixes, intended to help community teams currently updating existing development tools and infrastructure by providing a more stable platform to work on. The update also included a new and improved block synchronization mechanism, the addition of voting capabilities, and improvements to the smart contract system.

Neo founder, Da Hongfei, delivered a keynote speech at Coin Telegraph’s Great Bay Area Blockchain Week conference in Shenzhen, China. Da also participated in an interview with Coin Telegraph, where he discussed Neo3, the current challenges of blockchain mainstream adoption, and missing elements necessary for DeFi in the Neo ecosystem.

NGD Seattle released updates to Neo Express and the Smart Contract Debugger which included support for Neo3 Preview3.

Neo and ChainNews announced the Neo Summer Challenge, a three-month question-and-answer challenge that will reward participants with NEO and other merchandise. The event will exclusively take place in Chinese on the WeChat platform via a mini-program called the “Knowledge Fighter.” Anyone who uses the WeChat communication application is eligible to participate in the event.

NNT Catch Up

NNT hosted COZ and Moonlight co-founder, Tyler Adams, on Byzant, a new series that provides insider perspectives from knowledgeable individuals in the Neo ecosystem and broader blockchain industry. The following week, after a guest has shared their insight, they will be encouraged to participate in the Neo subreddit by answering relevant questions from the community.

Adams was asked to introduce the role and importance of decentralized digital identity solutions.

NNT published an addendum to an article recently released on the involvement of Neo ecosystem members within the world of academia. Alongside outreach to institutions, members of these communities have also had numerous works in various academic and technical publications. The article provided an overview of recently or soon to be published works by Neo developer communities.

nOS announced it is rebranding to Compendia and plans to conduct a token swap from the NEP-5 NOS token to a new native COMP token. In its previous iteration, nOS aimed to serve as a full-stack solution to facilitate the deployment of websites and applications in a decentralized and open-source environment. Moving forward, Compendia seeks to become a decentralized directory that allows any user to share data collections of all kinds via the new network.

Developer Groups

neow3j released version 3.1.0 of its Java, Kotlin, and Android development toolkit for the Neo blockchain. Moving forward, the developer community will provide pertinent updates for both the current iteration of the Neo 2.x blockchain, as well as Neo3.

Ecosystem

August 4th, Switcheo integrated support for the Fortmatic Wallet, allowing users to trade on the non-custodial exchange from the third party wallet.

August 4th, TranslateMe released version 4.0 of its English-to-French API, allowing users to submit sentences and translate from English-to-French and vice versa.

August 4th, O3 Labs joined the Holdex community and announced its plans to release v2.0 of the O3 Wallet. New features are claimed to include a fully improved UI, increased asset support, multi-coin staking, crypto-to-crypto atomic swaps, an improved fiat on-ramp, and payment processing for Visa, Mastercard, ApplePay, plus more.

August 5th, Nash sponsored Open Limits, a new industry standard API implementation for secure, correct, and high-performance cryptocurrency trading. The core of the code is written in Rust but will have future wrappers in Java, Python, JS and C# languages.

August 6th, Nash announced the launch of a paid market makers program to “help connect small-to-medium-sized market makers to the non-custodial future of markets and trading.” Benefits for joining the program include a monthly payment structure, one-on-one onboarding assistance, and extensive documentation.

August 6th, Nash released the first episode of its podcast, Beyond the Chain, which featured cryptographer, Robert Annessi. Topics of conversation included revealing tips and tricks to using API, multi-party computation in a non-custodial environment, and more.