NEO News: Week in Review – November 26th – December 2nd

NEO

NEO Global Development (NGD) released its monthly report for November. Highlights include core and consensus development, the conclusion of the European hackathon tour, new communities, recruitment, and an acknowledgement of the delay in releasing financial reports.

NEO co-founder and core developer Erik Zhang responded to claims by Tencent Security Labs that the NEO-CLI had an existing security flaw. Tencent claimed that tokens could be stolen via a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) attack vector whilst using the NEO-CLI under the default program settings.

However, Erik corrected the report by stating that the RPC function is not enabled by default upon launching the NEO-CLI program, and can only be activated with “an additional command line parameter.” Furthermore, the RPC address is also bound to “127.0.0.1” localhost by default, and can only be changed by manually updating the configuration file.

In addition the NEO-CLI is only used by developers and node runners, who rarely need to open a wallet or hold funds on the program.

Developer Groups

The NEO St Petersburg Competence Center (NSPCC) was officially revealed along with details of a forthcoming distributed file storage system,. The NSPCC is a research and development company that has been formed to support the NEO core and wider ecosystem. The formation of the NSPCC was largely driven by City of Zion and Neon Exchange co-founder, Fabian Wahle, along with engineers Sergei Liubich and Anatoly Bogatyrev, and Maksim Vinter.

The team working on the storage system are comprised of former employees of companies such as Dell, Samsung, WhatsApp, and Yandex. As a platform, the system aims to allow users to utilize distributed storage for dApps in both a public and private capacity. The architecture will maintain properties such as anonymity and security, independent from the data itself, and allows compatibility with popular infrastructure such as Amazon S3 or Dropbox.

In addition to the development of the distributed storage system, the NSPCC will also be driving NEO ecosystem growth in Russia and acting as an incubator for Russian blockchain projects. It has garnered support from multiple Saint Petersburg universities and the government backed Russian Association of Cryptoindustry and Blockchain (RACIB). 

NNT Catch Up

NEO News Today interviewed founder of TranslateMe, Ryan Lloyd, to discuss its forthcoming decentralized translation services. Lloyd claims high costs and a lack of available translation services outside the world’s most frequently used languages present problems with datasets for machine learning. TranslateMe aims to resource data through human contributions, incentivized via the TranslateMe token, as a way to “incentivize human data contributions for more obscure languages.” TranslateMe is currently in a private token sale to raise funding to build an infrastructure network of machines to feed data and handle translation requests.

Ecosystem

November 26th, MyWish released its own public version of the NEO TestNet, which makes it easier to receive TestNet system assets (NEO and GAS) as users do not have to submit an application to NGD.

November 26th, QLC Chain adjusted its development plan, stating plans to launch its MainNet blockchain are tentatively set for March of 2019. It is expected that by June of 2019, the QLC Chain network will be ready to add more enterprise users. Lastly, QLC Chain’s blockchain-based virtual private network (VPN) routers are tentatively planned to be introduced in December of 2018.

November 26th, Senno published its login module, which is a key component of its platform that allows users to permit the sharing of selected data with Senno. Senno has decided to promote the launch of its login module with a competition for 5,000,000 SENNO tokens. Eligibility ends on December 6th at 8:00 AM GMT. Winning users will be selected on December 11th, 2018.

November 26th, following the launch of Callisto, Switcheo Exchange listed 19 more ERC-20 tokens on its decentralized exchange (DEX).

November 27th, Travala announced a partnership with Hotelbeds, the world’s largest lodging wholesaler, selling access to 170,000 hotels in 185 countries worldwide. Travala claims the new partnership will provide worldwide coverage of 1.5 million properties for its upcoming beta launch in the first quarter of 2019.

November 28th, Coupit announced it will be selecting candidates to participate in the closed alpha of the Coupit marketplace. Participants in Coupit’s closed alpha will be expected to aid the development of the Coupit app and marketplace by testing its features. The application process is currently open, and participants will be selected on December 14th, 2018.

November 28, O3 Labs announced the addition of account management features for its iOS and Android mobile wallets. The latest version of the O3 mobile wallet supports infinite wallets, meaning that its users can control multiple NEO addresses from their phone’s O3 mobile wallet app. 

November 28th, Aphelion released an update noting what had occurred in the following week after taking its decentralized exchange (DEX) off MainNet. The team also released a demo of its mobile DEX, which launched earlier in the week. The DEX is immediately available to all mobile wallets and can be accessed by toggling to TestNet in the wallet settings. Lastly, Aphelion developers contributed to two pull requests on the NEO GithHub.

November 29th, APEX Technologies attended the 2018 Future Mobility Innovation conference in Shanghai and was selected as one of the Top 10 “Outstanding Vehicle Big Data Service Provider[’s]” of 2018. To be placed on the list, companies were judged on “performance of auto customer data analysis, personalized marketing and refined operation in recent years.”

November 29th, O3 Labs announced it will apply to host a consensus node on NEO MainNet. The application follows NEO Global Development’s recently published guidelines on the process of becoming a consensus node. O3 Labs state that its node “has been running on TestNet for a month already without any issues,” which has voting implications to become a MainNet node as early as May of 2019.

November 30th, APEX Technologies released the first phase of its TestNet, which will enable different engineering teams within APEX Technologies (who aren’t core developers) and community-based developers to run test nodes of the APEX Network. APEX stated the first phase of TestNet is “geared towards testing transactions, performance, and DPOS-based consensus, the building blocks of the network.”

November 30th, THEKEY launched its MainNet one month ahead of schedule and provided an update covering progress made since June of 2018. Though, this is the preliminary release of MainNet and THEKEY’s CEO Catherine Li believes the team has “a long way to go before the Mainnet can be implemented into real-world applications.”

November 30th, Narrative released a monthly overview of November, as well as the addition of a moderator center for each niche or topic, hosted on the site. Moderators are expected to “curate content, moderate comments, and maintain a high standard of behavior” in their topic. Moderators will have the ability to ban members, ‘bury’ unwanted comments, and reject content for a niche.

November 30th, Trinity released its bi-monthly report for the second half of November, which highlights development progress on Ethereum, NEO, and community growth. The Trinity wallet SPV version was released onto Google Play.

November 30th, Spotcoin named Dennis Spencer as its new CEO, whose appointment comes “in accordance to Spotcoin’s development strategy.” Spencer replaces outgoing CEO Tim Gick, who Spotcoin says will continue to “cultivate and sustain professional relationships” for the project.

December 1st, Ontology released its monthly report for November, highlights included development progress, community growth, bounty applications, plus more. In November, Ontology celebrated its one year anniversary, opened its research institute, and introduced its dApp development framework, amongst others. Ontology is hiring nearly 20 positions in a wide variety of roles.

December 2nd, Bridge Protocol provided an update on the first weeks of its Bridge Passport Chrome extension public testing. Included in the update were common issues users have experienced testing the Passport and how to resolve them.