Neo News: Week in Review – March 16th – March 22nd

Neo

Neo Global Development (NGD) released an article in its newly established Neo Column, an initiative that intends to offer a voice to technical members of the Neo community. The first article, The Role of Blockchain in the Digital Economy, discussed how blockchain will disrupt governance models, big data monopolization, and integrate with the “internet of everything.”

NGD also released a Neo Column article, Neo3 Exception Handling Mechanism, which offered an overview of what exceptions are, exception handling features in blockchain platforms, and how the Neo3 virtual machine will handle exceptions.

Road to Neo3

As part of its Road to Neo3 series, Neo News Today (NNT) released part one of a new feature that focuses on block sync optimization. The article examined past discussions on network optimization with a particular focus on improving the block synchronization process, followed by the exploration of a new block synchronization method for Neo3.

NNT Catch Up

NNT released episode 26 of its podcast, which featured NNT editor and r/Neo moderator, Brett Rhodes, better known as “Edge” within the Neo community. Discussion topics include Edge’s background, how he discovered blockchain, his thoughts on consensus, making technical information accessible to everyday readers, and much more.

NeoLogin released a publish-subscribe system based on WebSockets for the Neo blockchain. The PubSub system allows easy access to useful information such as smart contract events or other messages sent through the P2P network. According to the team, the solution was designed to circumvent the need for developers to run full nodes to make off-chain applications aware of events happening on Neo.

pubNooks announced a logo design contest in preparation for the launch of its new platform. The leadership team has opened logo submissions as well as an accompanying social media reward campaign. Submissions are open until Wednesday, April 8th, with the winning logo receiving 15,000 NRVE tokens. In addition to the contest, pubNooks has announced its intent to launch a “swag store,” as well as use submissions from the community logo contest on items available for sale.

NEXT co-founder, Edison, recently participated in NGD’s Chinese-version of Neo Live. Neo Live began with a sharing session from Edison before opening for a Q&A. The sharing session was broken down into four topics: How to choose a cryptocurrency wallet, product selection and operation, how to solve the problem of trust, and how to improve Neo’s ecological participation. Throughout these topics, Edison outlined some of the issues users face with current cryptocurrency institutions, why he believes NeoLine is a trusted solution, how NeoLine aims to improve the Neo ecosystem, and next steps for the NEXT community.

Ecosystem

March 16th, Nash posted an announcement noting that API keys generated by secure multi-party computation (MPC) are now open for public testing. The announcement was accompanied by an updated version of the TypeScript SDK with MPC support.

March 16th, 0xGames celebrated its second anniversary and announced a giveaway for various in-game non-fungible token (NFT) assets in its 0xUniverse, 0xRacers, and 0xWarriors games.

March 17th, the NeoLogin team released the SmartBNB protocol, which is intended to allow tokens on Binance Chain to use Neo smart contracts through the use of a cross-chain bridge. The protocol aims to leverage cross-chain interoperability to increase addressable markets for applications and tokens on both networks.

March 18th, Nash announced its fiat on-ramp partner, Carbon Money, will suspend its fiat on-ramp services until the end of Q2 2020. Further, Nash intends to launch their fiat on-ramp “soon.”

March 18th, Jarvis+ released an article that highlighted how its AI chat robot can help assist with social media marketing campaigns.

March 19th, Alchemint released its monthly report for February 2020, which acknowledged “[an] inconvenience during this period, caused by the adjustment of the website server.”

March 20th, Jarvis+ announced a new quiz game on its Telegram channel in which the game registrants and scorecard are managed by a bot. Users will receive 3 JAR for each question answered correctly and 1 JAR for incorrect answers. The game runs through April 3rd, 2020.

March 20th, Switcheo announced the launch of the Switcheo Foundation, a non-profit organization with a mission  “to champion the growth of a radically decentralized financial system that is truly open, in terms of being able to construct financial markets (i.e., construction), as well as in terms of participation (i.e., access).”

March 22nd, Guardian Circle released v3.1 of its mobile application which includes improved performance, updated notification settings, improved onboarding process, and an affiliate program. Additionally, the team warned of a dwindling runway amid the recent market downturn.