Neo continues to invest in building out the Neo ecosystem and bringing value to holders. Polaris Launchpad is Neo’s latest event focused on identifying talented new developers and prospective projects for the ecosystem. Neo Global Development (NGD) has dedicated $500K in prizes for projects demonstrating excellence in any of five competition tracks: DeFi, NFT and Metaverse, Infrastructure, DAO, and General (open innovation category). This event attracted nearly 600 Hackathon participants and is in the event’s final phase, community voting now. 

Polaris Launchpad kicked off on March 7 and will conclude on July 19. The event has been run in three phases: Planathon and Hackathon phases are now completed. The event’s final phase, Polaris Plus, is in progress now. Polaris Plus is a bonus funding round in which the Neo community uses their own GAS to vote for their favorite projects, and Neo will match the winning votes by quadratic means. 

Event highlights have included:

• • The Polaris Launchpad Planathon phase kicked off on March 7th and offered several virtual sessions to help participants plan for successful project entries:
    • Community kick off call
    • Panel – The Revolution of Traditional Commerce
    • Panel – Metaverse & NFT: Future or Illusion
    • Panel – One more step to Smart Economy
    • Panel – Meet the Decentralized Internet
    • Panel – How Will DAOs Change Your Life?

• The Polaris Launchpad Hackathon Phase began on April 12. 
  • Among other resources, Neo offered a series of virtual technical sessions to help participants build their projects:
    • Technical Quick Start Series: Preparing the Contract Development Environment
    • Technical Quick Start Series: Python Smart Contract
    • Technical Quick Start Series: Go Smart Contract
    • Technical Quick Start Series: Java Smart Contract
    • Technical Quick Start Series: C# Smart Contract Tutorial
    • Technical Quick Start Series: Wallet Integration with NWA
    • Advanced Technical Tutorial: Smart Contract with NeoFS & Oracle
    • Advanced Technical Tutorial: Props Deep Dive
    • Advanced Technical Workshop: How to design Excellent UI/UX
    • Technical Quick Start Series: NFT Development
    • Advanced Technical Workshop: An adventure using NeoFS
  • Hackathon judging and demos were completed, culminating in the announcement of five grand prize winners and 15 additional award winners.

• The Polaris Plus bonus funding round phase opened for community voting on June 8 and concludes on July 19: 
  • Here, Neo community members use their own GAS to vote to choose the winners. Neo has allocated USD $101,300 to match community votes through quadratic means.  
  • The Neo team encourages GAS holders to join the voting on DoraHacks https://dorahacks.io/grant/neo/ to support the next projects that they want to see in the Neo N3 ecosystem.
  • In the spirit of a better and more fair community voting environment that supports Neo’s vision of hoping that behind every vote is a real user, the Polaris Plus voting rules were updated to include two voting cycles, each with awards to be distributed. The first voting cycle of Polaris Plus concluded on June 28th, as originally scheduled. The added second voting cycle runs from July 5 to July 19.

Neo N3 platform news

• Neo Neo CLI v3.1.01.1 was released and deployed to the Neo T4 TestNet and MainNet. 
• Neo-CLI v3.2.1 was released and deployed to the Neo T5 TestNet.
• A block generation issue was detected and addressed on the Neo MainNet. 

Migration and exchange news

• The BigONE custodial exchange launched a liquidity mining campaign for the GAS/USDT pool.
• Neo Global Development partnered with the SocialFi application Bit.Store to make NEO more accessible in Europe and Southeast Asia.
• Bitfinex announced and implemented support for migration from Neo Legacy to Neo N3. 
• Crypto.com announced the availability of new trading pairs, including $ETH with $NEO.
• The Inst.Money fiat on- and off-ramp launched support for N3 NEO, enabling users to buy and sell USDT and NEO directly through the platform using USD or EURO.

Governance news

• Binance Staking secured two positions on the 21-member Neo Council. 
• Decentralized staking provider Everstake published a Spanish-language translation of its new OneGate voting guide and released a user guide on how to participate in Neo’s governance process by using bNEO and swapping NEO for bNEO on the Neo Bruger website. 
• AxLabs announced GrantShares, a DAO designed to distribute funding to grassroots developers and beneficial ecosystem projects (including marketing, documentation, tutorials, research, development, and more). GrantShares has since opened for applications. 

First EcoBoost partnership of 2022

• Neo welcomed Hacash.Diamonds, a platform that provides professional collecting and trading services for a specialized type of NFT, as the first new partner to join the expanded $200 million EcoBoost partner program in 2022. The program is taking further applications now.

AMAs

• Bit.Store hosted an AMA with John Wang, Neo head of Eco Growth.
• Hacash.Diamonds participated in a Neo Live AMA.

Neospective Creation Contest: Round 2

• NGD opened the Neospective Creation Contest Round 2: Neo Hackathon Mascot on May 6. Community members are submitting entries now. Judging begins on July 5th.

Neo in the news

• Neo News Today interviewed NGD Enterprise Chief Architect Harry Pierson about the latest version of the Neo Blockchain Toolkit’s debugger experience.
• Neo joined the BlockDown Festival Croatia as a Diamond Sponsor, where NGD Zurich Lead Lili Zhao delivered a presentation on value creation in the smart economy and Guil. Sperb Machado, co-founder of AxLabs, served as a panelist in a session on DAOs.
• Zhao also moderated a panel at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit and spoke to CryptoSlate about the future of Neo and of NFTs.
• NGD Enterprise lead John deVadoss joined an episode of the Untold Stories podcast hosted by Charlie Shrem, and discussed the shift from Web2 to Web3 on the Telusko YouTube channel. deVadoss also participated in a panel entitled “Innovation, Standards, and Regulation: Enabling Digital Assets at Scale” at the Blockchain Hub in Davos 2022, participated in an Q&A session with Magazine by Cointelegraph, and led a workshop on the InterWork Alliance’s Token Taxonomy Framework.
• Neo announced a sponsorship for the June KaratDAO Elysium event.
• Neo also announced a 3 Block level sponsorship for Consensus 2022, the world’s biggest and longest-running crypto festival, which took place in June.

• Token listings and staking news within the Neo ecosystem included:
  • Flamingo Finance launched ReStake and PoolSwap that simplify moving assets between and contributing rewards back into liquidity pools and listed CANDY and NUDES NEP-17 tokens. Flamingo also launched the Flamingo Fund, a single staking feature that receives portions of daily mininting rewards and fees accrued on the DeFi platform, and released an overview of the FLM token economic model.
  • Forthewin Network released FTW Swap, an AMM service allowing users to provide liquidity, perform token swaps, and create their own pools of NEP-17 token pairs on the N3 TestNet.
  • Lyrebird Finance launched its algorithmic stablecoin protocol on Neo N3, including a USDL (a dollar-pegged token) and LRB (a stabilization utility token). With Flamingo Finance, Lyrebird then launched the FRP-FLM-USDL pool, a USDL stablecoin reverse liquidity pool on Flamingo Finance, and distributed its first locked airdrop to wallets that had staked LRB.
  • Custodial exchange MEXC listed the NUDES token with a trading pair against USDT.
  • Humswap launched its NFT staking feature.
• Other ecosystem news highlights included:
  • Dogerift sold out of its Bored Doge Club NFT mint in just over six hours.
  • Steven Liu, head of development at NGD and a technologist in the Neo Foundation, released Gleeder, a beta dApp that functions as a gas station to allow users to get GAS tokens without already having them in their wallet.
  • Hacash Diamonds announced intentions to launch a cross-chain NFT project and release its second batch of NFTs on Neo.
  • Lyrebird released an article proposing a fractional reserve method for the USDL stablecoin and a new incentive structure to combat an algorithmic protocol collapse.
  • Mega Oasis auctioned its second series, MetaPanacea II, selling out the two new and highest-priced categories.
  • Mercurial Apps released the N3 NFT Tracker, an all-in-one data aggregator for NFT projects and marketplaces in the Neo ecosystem. Mercurial Apps also released a TOTHEMOON NFT token trader that lets users trustlessly trade for TTM NNTs.
  • Neo Candy released an alpha version of Candy Clash, a game allowing users to mint character NFTs on Neo N3 TestNet.
  • Neo News Today launched the Smart Economy Podcast, designed to deliver insights from subject matter experts from all facets of the blockchain space.
  • NudesToken launched a “meme-to-earn” website and two NFT collections; conducted a snapshot of one of its NFT series, burnt 50 trillion NUDES tokens worth more than US $100,00 at time of burning, and conducted an airdrop of NEP-17 NUDES tokens to Save the Flamingos and Neoverse NFTs.
  • TOTHEMOON completed the first airdrop of Item NFTs to wallets containing Character type NFTs, airdropping more than 43,000 Item NFTs. TOTHEMOON also took a snapshot of the Neo blockchain for its second Generation Moon Create airdrop.
  • TranslateMe added Swahili and Korean to its API.
  • Wexford began minting its first full-length studio album on the Sky Hut NFT marketplace. The album is stored on NeoFS and is the first album to be released as an NFT on Neo N3.

Highlighted developer community activities included

• COZ
  • Unveiled PROPS, an initiative to enhance the Neo N3 contract developer experience and help bootstrap applications in the ecosystem. Coordinated with the launch, COZ airdropped Puppet tokens (general purpose NFTs) to all Neo users voting for consensus nodes on Neo N3 and to voters for COZ, AxLabs, Neo SPCC, and Neo News Today.
  • Released Neon Wallet v2.12.8 and released neo-maba v0.11.0
• AxLabs released neow3j v3.17, supporting new features of the recent Neo release 3.2.1 and making other updates.

More detail on developer community activities during this time are available in the March, April, and May technical development reports.