The NEO Council have released their March 2018 monthly report. The monthly reports are a round up of all the developments, news and events from within NEO during the previous month.

This report looks back on a combination of February and March, as the January report was released late (Jan 6th) and the NEO team was on holidays for Chinese New Year throughout much of February.

One of the highlights for NEO is the closing of the NEO development competition, co-organized with Microsoft. Nearly 500 projects were entered, with almost 50 passing the initial quality check. The winners are to be announced today (March 31st), and judges Fabio Canesin, Chen Rong, Jun Li, Erik Zhang and Da Hongfei are said to be having a tough time trying to pick winners from many quality submissions.

Further updates were provided on the consensus nodes. KPN and City of Zion have been running stable nodes on TestNet for over two months, whilst Fenbushi Capital is required to relocate their node for decentralisation purposes, and thus is at an earlier stage.

NEO also identified an issue where slower ISP providers were causing a latency issue to some of the consensus nodes during peak traffic times in China. NEO are making plans to move to a faster service to resolve the issue.

A P2P bug that caused slow block times early in the month has also been resolved with the release of v2.7.3 and v2.7.4 of NEO-CLI. New documentation for NEO-CLI v2.7.1 and above has also been released to support the increasing number of exchanges seeking to implement NEP-5 tokens.

The report also highlighted the success of hackathons being held around the world. NEO participated in START Hack in Switzerland and HackCU in Colorado, as well as holding their first ever solo hackathon in Taipei in partnership with Blockcamp. Impressive submissions were made at all events and more information on the winning projects can be found in the report.

NEO also finalized two new hires – Miki Hayama as Head of Japan Operations, and Sun Fengda, as senior researcher.

To read the complete monthly report you can visit the following link –

https://neo.org/blog/Details/3072