Founders of NeoResearch, Igor and Vitor Coelho, have published two articles outlining some of the new capabilities of NEO3. The topics of the articles concern Scoped Witness and Oracles.

Scoped Witnesses

The first article, “Scoped Witnesses: How to Securely Transfer Assets on Neo 3,” written by Igor, outlines the new Scoped Witness function that was recently merged into the master branch of NEO3.

NEO3 has removed UTXO assets in favor of NEP-5 assets, meaning that NEO and GAS exist as Native Contracts. This change brings several benefits, including simplification of transaction types and the ability for smart contracts to interact directly with native assets – a task that was not possible under the previous UTXO model.

To facilitate these improvements, the core execution engine, known as the ApplicationEngine, underwent several modifications. One of the crucial tasks of the ApplicationEngine is to verify that transactions are correct, checking credentials and ensuring that asset owners are allowed to make transfers.

Scoped Witnesses plays a role in allowing secure asset transfers. Igor’s article outlines the basics of this new feature and the various forms of scopes used in NEO3.

The article can be read in full below:
https://medium.com/neo-smart-economy/scoped-witnesses-how-to-securely-transfer-assets-on-neo-3-6ac012221188

Oracles & dBFT

The second article, written by Vitor, is titled “On the importance of Oracles: NEO 3.0 and dBFT” and details how NEO’s dBFT consensus mechanism plays a key role in the development of oracles on NEO3.

Oracles is a feature that would allow smart contracts to retrieve data from sources external to the blockchain, such as the internet. A simple example of a use case is using an oracle to gather up-to-date pricing information for an asset. Native oracle implementation is a planned feature for NEO3 and was a hot topic at the recent NEO Community Assembly held in Shanghai earlier this month.

In his article, Vitor posits that NEO’s infrastructure design is inherently conducive to oracle implementation due to the flexibility and block finality afforded by dBFT. An outline is provided for how an oracle transaction would enter the memory pool layer of the NEO blockchain and proceed through the node system until a consensus is reached.

The article can be read in full below:
https://medium.com/neoresearch/on-the-importance-of-oracles-neo-3-0-and-dbft-17c37ee35f32

About NeoResearch

NeoReseach was founded by Igor and Vitor in 2018 and is an open-source community focused on developing cutting-edge technologies for the NEO blockchain. Igor earned a Computing Ph.D. and works as a Professor at the University of the State of Rio De Janeiro. Vitor has a Ph.D. is in Electrical Engineering, though he also holds two postdocs in computing.

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