NEO News: Week in Review – March 11th – March 17th

NEO

On March 13th, NEO founder Da Hongfei participated on a smart contracts discussion panel at the Token 2049 event held in Hong Hong. The panel was moderated by Piers Ridyard from Radix DLT, and consisted of Xinshu Dong, CEO of Zilliqa, Yanislav Malahov, founder of æternity, and Zhuling Chen, COO of ælf.

On March 15th, NEO Global Development released neo-cli version 2.10.0, which is due to be rolled out to TestNet consensus nodes on March 18th. The update includes numerous changes designed to increase the stability and performance of the NEO blockchain.

The most noteworthy changes are the inclusion of dBFT 2.0, an updated version of NEO’s consensus mechanism, and a set of memory pool performance improvements.

NNT Catch Up

TranslateMe recently released a report which highlights progress made in the months leading up to March 2019. TranslateMe reported positive feedback on its proof-of-concept Telegram web application. Additional support now includes the French, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, German, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic languages.

TranslateMe claims that in February 2019 it received sufficient funds to set up its GPU machine learning facility. The machines perform the tasks required to offer translations and API endpoints for both internal and commercial uses.

The For the Win (FTW) decentralized gaming platform is now available via the O3 Wallet. The FTW dApp allows users to create and participate in NEP-5 lotteries and raffles. By using the latest version of the O3 Wallet, users don’t have to log into the FTW dApp with private keys or browser extension software.

Developer Groups

COZ officially announced an update to the developer community’s organizational and operational structure. These changes include a newly defined project focus, an update to the rewards system, and transition from a council to board members. The reorganization took form following a three-day summit held in December 2018 in Amsterdam, NL. The summit focused on the vision and direction for COZ in 2019 and beyond.

NEO News Today interviewed NEXT, a China-based developer community that seeks to become the largest NEO community for dApp incubation. To promote the innovation of blockchain applications, NEXT is also running a NEO dApp competition. The total prize pool exceeds CN¥300,000 and will be split across various awards.

NEXT developers are also responsible for several projects in the NEO ecosystem, including the ExChain “intelligent identity network,” the Endorsit decentralized content ecosystem, the Blolys block explorer, and the wallet application iWallic. Alongside iWallic and Blolys, NEXT is currently developing a Chrome extension known as NEO Line. Although the team does work as a typical NEO development community by providing tooling, resources, and utilities, NEXT predominantly intends to function as a NEO dApp incubator.

Ecosystem

March 11th, New Kind of Network (NKN) announced the deadline of its token swap is 11:59 pm (UTC) on Thursday, March 28th. Any remaining NEP-5 NKN tokens after March 28th will be permanently locked and kept out of circulation. As of March 11th, NKN reported 127 million NEP-5 NKN tokens (out of a total of 350 million circulating tokens) have yet to undergo the ERC-20 token swapping process.

March 11th, Moonlight announced the addition of Chris Croft to its advisory board. Croft is a 17-year veteran of the labor staffing and recruitment industry, with experience leading the world’s largest privately owned staffing and recruitment business.

March 11th, nOS announced two weekly poker tournaments as a follow-up to its inaugural Texas hold ‘em poker tournament. The previous Sunday’s nOS Poker tournament was a success with “roughly 80 players” signing up. Both weekly tournaments feature a prize pool of 2,500 NOS tokens, with the winner awarded 800 NOS. The first-come, first-serve registration starts 15 minutes before the competitions.

March 12th, Switcheo over-the-counter (OTC) trading service went live on its primary exchange platform. The OTC service is designed to “securely execute peer-to-peer trades of digital tokens that Switcheo cannot form a market for.” Between March 12th and April 11th, 2019, trades made on Switcheo OTC will not going incur any fees.

March 13th, Conjure and TranslateMe announced a partnership that is meant to “provide a barrier-free platform for content creators and consumers.” Through the partnership, TranslateMe will provide translation services for the Conjure whitepaper, website, and marketing materials. In the future, the parties expect to integrate TranslateMe with the Conjure video platform itself through an API.

March 13th, Phantasma Chain announced the design, tokenomics, and feature set of its upcoming standalone blockchain. Phantasma Chain is slated to launch in April 2019 with a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and a dual-token model. The upcoming blockchain will be feature-rich, with support planned for side chains, “Ghost Mode” anonymous transactions, a built-in decentralized exchange, a native “Phantasma Gold” dollar-pegged stablecoin, voting rights, distributed file storage, a staking model with a rewards pool, Phantasma Name Service, and an “NFT Marketplace” for non-fungible tokens.

March 13th, Endorsit released its 44th weekly report, which highlighted updates to its mobile dApp and new testing channel for community involvement.

March 14th, O3 Labs released a new UTXO manager feature, which is designed to address the “Transaction is too big to sign” error that may occur when trying to sign a NEO or GAS transaction with a Ledger device.

March 15th, Switcheo announced the conclusion of the Alchemint SDUSD trading competition, as well as the winning traders. The first place winner recieved 150 NEO, 150,000 SWTH, and 200,000 SDS.

March 15th, Bridge Protocol completed the TOLL to BRDG token swap. Bridge Protocol engineers took a snapshot of the block height at 4:00 pm (UTC) and conducted an airdrop of BRDG tokens at a 1:1 ratio with TOLL. In preparation for the token swap, Bridge coordinated with HitBTC Exchange, Switcheo DEX, and Aphelion DEX.

March 15th, Trinity released its early March bi-weekly report, which focuses on the team’s efforts in gearing up for the development of trinity-neo-gui, which will feature state channel integration.

March 16th, imusify announced it had been accepted into FasterCapital’s accelerator program, “a global virtual incubator and accelerator targeted at high-profile startups working on disruption.”

Events

March 27th: NEO Colorado meetup – Denver

April 8th – 10th: NEO developer workshop – Zürich