The NEO Foundation and the Ontology Foundation have released a statement announcing a Joint Task Force comprised of members from Ontology and NEO Global Development. The Joint Task Force will receive ¥4,000,000 in funding (approx. USD $630,000), and over the next six months will work on API standardization, a shared smart contract ecosystem, building open standards for smart contracts, and cross-chain technology innovation.

NEO and Ontology share many technical similarities. Both platforms use NeoContract and the NeoVM, as well as utilizing a dual token economic model to fuel and govern their networks. Ontology was founded by Onchain, of which NEO co-founders, Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang are also co-founders.

The tasks outlined in the announcement are as follows:

1. API standardization

  • To standardize data APIs and network protocols on the Ontology and NEO protocol layer, the cornerstone of a co-built shared mega ecosystem;
  • To provide uniform APIs and share some SDK parts and development tools on both networks to make the development environment more user-friendly for app developers;
  • To explore and realize multiple use cases of crypto-algorithms on blockchain;
  • To standardize address encoding and make Ontology and NEO networks friendlier to end users.

2. Shared smart contract ecosystem

  • To adopt NeoVM as the sole platform to run smart contracts;
  • To propose a standardized SYSCALL rule for namespace, enabling cross-chain deployment of smart contracts;
  • To conduct R&D on high-efficient native contract mechanisms;
  • To develop a Go compiler and development environment applicable to NeoVM.

The announcement can be found at the link below:
https://neo.org/blog/Details/3084