The final phase of the Token Migration Incentive Program concluded

The final phase of the Token Migration Incentive Program began on October 1st. During this time, bonus NEO incentives for migration decreased from 0.75% to 0.5%. Migration bonus rewards concluded on October 31st.

The Neo Legacy network will continue to operate at least through the end of July of 2022 (a year after Neo N3’s launch), but token holders who have not yet migrated their assets to N3 should do so. This will be necessary so holders can get the most out of the Neo ecosystem, use the latest Neo dApps, participate in governance, and receive increased GAS rewards by voting for Neo Council members to manage and decentralize the Neo network.

Neo N3 exchange support and payment options expanded

Custodial exchange support for Neo N3 continues to grow. In October, joining CEX.IO, Gate.io, and OKEx, Huobi and BigONE Exchange each announced full support for N3 NEO and GAS deposits and withdrawals. In November, Binance also added support for NEO and GAS deposits and withdrawals on N3. Other large custodial exchanges, Bittrex and Bitfinex, have indicated their intent to support N3 assets in the near future.

Payment options also are expanding: In November, Neo and crypto-fiat hybrid payment solutions provider Alchemy Pay unveiled a new partnership that will enable global payment acceptance of NEO tokens. Integration into Alchemy Pay’s payment systems will allow NEO tokens to be transacted across Alchemy Pay’s merchant networks, including major eCommerce platforms such as Shopify and Arcadier. As part of the collaboration, Neo and Alchemy Pay also became two of the founding members of the new Blockchain Infrastructure Alliance (BIA), a group composed of blockchain industry leaders, service providers, and regulators with a mission to drive growth of blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Neo Council reduced GAS fees for N3 oracle requests by 80%

In November, in its second on-chain action, the Neo Council voted to cut the N3 oracle request fee from 0.5 to 0.1 GAS. The Council took this action with the intent to make oracle functionality (one of several new features natively supported in the Neo N3 platform) more cost-effective for developers making regular requests.

NeoBurger N3 governance dApp introduced a new way to vote and earn GAS rewards on Neo N3

The Neo community also gained a new way to vote and earn GAS rewards on Neo N3 as of October: NeoBurger, a Neo N3 governance dApp, debuted its automated voting tool and NEO token wrapper. The NeoBurger project seeks to address the usability issues of indivisible NEO in applications such as DeFi and to help holders maximize their GAS rewards.

COZ enabled voting on Neon Wallet

In October, COZ released a preview version of Neon Wallet v2.10.0, with WalletConnect support and a compatible N3 voting frontend, allowing users to participate in governance before the formal release. Following this, COZ formally released Neon Wallet v2.10.0, the first formal release to include WalletConnect support and governance voting capability, as well as support for NFT assets following the NEP-11 standard. COZ also published the first formal version of Neon Wallet mobile for Android and iOS devices.

NGD handed off Flamingo Finance project to community control

In an exciting milestone in October, the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, Flamingo Finance, advanced from a Neo Global Development (NGD) project to a fully community-driven project led by an independent team. MyMingo Finance has now assumed ownership for Flamingo’s go-forward development, maintenance, and marketing.

Fueled by new development, projects, and partnerships focused on Neo N3, engagement across NGD leadership, partners, and community members continued to accelerate. Highlights included an abundance of AMAs; new media engagements and event sponsorships; a new NGD-hosted event series for Neo developers; and a celebration of the Neo MainNet fifth anniversary.

AMAs

NGD hosted 13 NeoLive sessions. Sessions featured Neo project leaders from:

• GhostMarket
• Defina Finance
• Rentfuse
• O3Labs
• MyMingo Finance
• TranslateMe
• NeoBurger
• Saffron Finance
• NekoHit
• Alchemy Pay
• Everstake
• Polychain Monsters
• iME Smart Platform

John Wang, head of Neo Eco Growth, was the featured guest at AMAs hosted by CryptoMUTANT, Cryptstalkers, and BigONE Exchange.

Media engagement

• John deVadoss, president of NGD Enterprise, spoke to Forkast’s Word on the Block about blockchain standards and the future of blockchain interoperability.
• At the WebSummit 2021 conference in Lisbon, Portugal, BeinCrypto interviewed Lili Zhao, director of Eco Growth at NGD (Europe), discussing the Neo N3 migration, factors that make the feature-rich Neo N3 so developer friendly, women in the crypto industry, and more.
• Erik Zhang, a founder and core developer of Neo, participated in an interview with NNT about the Neo N3 release, next steps to bring more applications to the Neo N3 blockchain, and details about his latest projects.

Event sponsorships

In October, Neo leaders and the Flamingo Finance team joined the Epicenter: Web 3.0 and Cryptocurrency conference where Neo and Alchemy Pay were title sponsors in Lisbon, Portugal. The leadership teams discussed topics such as Web 3.0, the Metaverse, Neo N3’s journey to build the smart economy, and adoption of crypto in Europe and Asia. Videos of event sessions and an event recap are available.

In November, Neo announced a partnership with the Metaverse Alliance, in which, initially, Neo will serve as one of the sponsors for the online Metaverse Hackathon (Metathon) that is live now and runs through late January 2022. Look for more hackathon-related announcements from NGD in the coming weeks.

New Neo DevLog series

As part of Neo’s drive to foster the success of developers building dApps on Neo N3, NGD introduced DevLog, a series of live events on the Neo Discord channel to connect the broader blockchain community with subject matter experts in the Neo ecosystem. Inaugural episodes in November featured explorations of the new NeoTrace tool with Harry Pierson (NGD Enterprise chief architect) and NeoFS and Oracle with Alexey Vanin from Neo SPCC.

Ongoing DevLog episodes will feature development updates on Neo N3 tooling and infrastructure.

The Neo MainNet turned five

In another significant milestone, the Neo MainNet turned five years old on October 17th. NGD celebrated Neo’s journey with a retrospective video and a message from Neo founder Da Hongfei.

Adding to the celebration, Neo News Today released a podcast featuring thoughts from prominent Neo community members on Neo’s achievements and future. NNT also commemorated the anniversary with the launch of an immediately popular r/NEO GasBot on the Neo N3 MainNet. The new GasBot allows users to send and receive GAS tips on the Neo subreddit.

NGD leadership unveiled a growing cadence of new partnerships during October and November, and projects across the ecosystem amassed a range of new accomplishments and milestones.

Six new projects joined the N3 Early Adoption Program

NGD welcomed six additional promising projects into the N3 Early Adoption Program. This $10 million USD initiative is designed to foster development of new dApps on the Neo N3 blockchain. The program is part of Neo’s broader $200 million investments dedicated to supporting Neo ecosystem projects ranging from those of grassroots developers to those of established businesses and institutions.

New projects accepted into the N3 Early Adoption Program in October and November included:

• Defina Finance, a blockchain game that innovates at the intersection of decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFTs
• Saffron Finance, a peer-to-peer risk management platform that uses a tranche-based yield aggregation to divide earnings into senior, junior, and fee tranches
• NekoHit, an early-stage, Patreon-like project that takes a decentralized, blockchain-based approach to crowdfunding
• GhostMarket, a cross-chain NFT marketplace
• Polychain Monsters, creator of a cross-blockchain game based on NFT collectibles
• iME Smart Platform Project, a native-messaging smart platform powered by the Telegram API, with built-in artificial intelligence and crypto wallet functionalities

Neo partnered with vEmpire

In November, Neo announced a strategic partnership with vEmpire, a Metaverse investment project, to enable greater and more decentralized community investment and governance for Neo’s GameFi- and Metaverse-based projects.

Ecosystem projects announced their latest plans and accomplishments
Developers across the Neo ecosystem lost no time in expanding their projects on the foundation of the new Neo N3 blockchain. Their progress has been rapid, and their accomplishments continue to rack up. While not every new initiative, release, and achievement can be included here, some highlights included:

• Flamingo Finance was added to Coin Market League cryptocurrency data aggregation, released plans to allocate Flamingo’s GAS rewards earned from bNEO used for staking and providing liquidity on its platform, released several guides and updates regarding its upcoming migration from Neo Legacy to Neo N3, and, on November 30, began its migration.
• GhostMarket announced support for OneGate integration and released a tutorial on setting up and connecting a Neo wallet to GhostMarket’s NFT platform.
• Humswap announced the upcoming launch (now live) of BOWL NFTs–Neo’s first algorithmically generated NFTs–and announced plans to airdrop tokens for BOWL NFT holders.
• InfStones, a blockchain infrastructure service provider, partnered with Neo to launch Neo N3 public API services on the InfStones platform. InfStones enables users to create their own Neo APIs on the InfStone platform at no cost to more easily access Neo N3 on-chain data faster or use the service to develop and deploy applications on Neo N3.
• Following its initial product release, NeoBurger had surpassed 65,536 NEO wrapped into bNEO as of November 26. NeoBurger also released an overview of the NoBug token for the upcoming launch of the BurgerDAO.
• NeoDashboard released a VIP page allowing Neo community members access if they have a unique NFT and also released the GAS Reward Calculator, a simulator allowing users to calculate their GAS earnings based on which Neo Council candidate they would vote for.
• NekoHit announced the first release candidate of its Patreon-like platform and invited community members to participate as beta testers on Neo TestNet with CAT tokens sent by the project developers.
• O3Labs noted in its monthly report that its latest version supports N3 NFT storage.
• OneGate announced the release of OneGate Explorer, a Neo N3 block explorer.
• Poly Network exceeded $14.1 billion USD in total trade volume.
• Rentfuse released its NEO wallet adopter, an open-source library to help Neo N3 developers connect with different wallets in the ecosystem.
• TOTHEMOON UNIVERSE released its new roadmap and announced the pending launch of the Market, the project’s first airdrop, and the process to mint its first four Character types (now live).
• TranslateMe Network celebrated its third anniversary and reached the milestone of 8,000 translators on its platform. TranslateMe Network also established strategic partnerships with other members of the Neo ecosystem, including a collaboration with TOTHEMOON UNIVERSE in which TOTHEMOON UNIVERSE will implement and test TranslateMe’s translation services, and a collaboration with COZ in which COZ will help TranslateMe migrate to Neo N3.

Detailed updates about recent development progress on Neo N3 by the core developers and developer communities are available in the most recent monthly report. We also have rounded up a high-level look at development news from October and November here.

Core developers completed the Neo v3.0.3 release

In October, NGD released Neo-CLI 3.03, which fixed a variety of bugs and optimized the user experience. Following a period of stable operations on the N3 TestNet, the latest version was upgraded on the N3 MainNet.

Developer communities released new tools and continued to advance Neo’s multi-language infrastructure for dApp developers

Neo’s global development community continued to make advancements on multiple projects on Neo N3. Some updates of note included:

• NGD Enterprise released the NeoTrace tool, a new tool for the Neo toolkit that makes it possible to capture individual transactions or blocks from the Neo N3 MainNet or TestNet and store traces of the executions for debugging. Preparations also began for the release of Test Runner, a new component for the Neo Blockchain Toolkit.
• AxLabs updated Neow3j to v3.13.1, achieving full compatibility with Neo v3.0.3 and bringing extensions to the test framework included in the previous release. The update enables deployments to be configured programmatically and supports compilation, deployment, and testing of any number of contracts.
• COZ solidified the WalletConnect integration in the desktop version of Neon wallet to enable connection with dApps and launched the initial version of Neon mobile. Based on the BIP-39 mnemonic backup standard, Neon mobile supports both Neo Legacy and N3. The team also pushed updates to Boa, which received formal Python 3.9 support, new builtin methods, and defect mitigations, in addition to Mamba, which gained a new RPC client interface.
• Neo SPCC published a new version of NeoGo, featuring the new Rules witness scope, NEP-11 tracker, initial support for the Windows platform and a new automated contract testing framework. NeoFS also received a plethora of upgrades across the storage node, inner ring, and service components, including the start of development on site manager, analytics, and billing apps for the CDN.
• Red4Sec addressed critical vulnerabilities in the NeoFS C# implementation and began the study of another issue found in the neo-devpack and neo-vm for N3. Auditing for community projects was also completed, including HumswapBowlsContract and the Flamingo stack. Issues that could affect funds were found and resolved in the latter.