Neo Global Development (NGD) has announced the release of Preview3, the latest milestone build in the road to the Neo3 MainNet launch. The Preview3 release focuses 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 includes the new and improved block synchronization mechanism, alongside the addition of voting capabilities which allow governance committee election and modification of protocol settings such as the maximum block size or system fee. This may also facilitate the creation of community infrastructure related to the voting user experience, required to simplify participation in the network’s decentralization.

Further, improvements to the smart contract system such as the new try-catch mechanism for exception handling and contract callbacks are hoped to improve functionality, reliability, and general developer friendliness. Additions such as CLI commands for NEP-5 methods and listing native contract hashes will simplify the process of invoking deployed contracts, accessing the native NEO or GAS assets, or calling the policy contract for participating in governance.

For developers looking to begin experimenting with application development for Neo3, NGD Seattle released Preview3 versions of Neo Express and the Smart Contract Debugger.

The latest version can be downloaded at the following link:
https://github.com/neo-project/neo-node/releases/tag/v3.0.0-preview3