After signing the MoU, NEO Foundation and Ontology Foundation soon announced to co-fund a Joint Task Force with a total capital contribution of RMB 4 million. The Joint Task Force will press ahead with the development of API standardization, a sharing ecosystem of smart contract, building open standards for smart contract, and cross-chain technology innovation.

The Joint Task Force is made up of over 10 people, most of whom are core developers from NEO Global Development (NGD) and Ontology, along with some selected community members. Senior blockchain developers like Weng Junjie, Tan Yuan and Peter Lin will be joining.

In the following six months, the Joint Task Force will be dedicated to the following tasks:

1. API Standardization

• To standardize the data APIs and network protocols on the NEO & Ontology protocol layers, in order to build the cornerstone of a shared mega ecosystem;
• To provide standardizedAPIs and to share some part of SDKs 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 to make Neo & Ontology networks more friendly to end-users.

2. A Shared Ecosystem of Smart Contract

• To adopt NeoVM as the only platform to run smart contract;
• To propose a standardized SYSCALL rule for namespace, enabling the cross-chain deployment of smart contracts;
• R&D on highly-efficient Native contract mechanism;
• To develop a GO compiler and its development environment applicable to NeoVM.

In future, the Joint Task Force will run on a regular basis to explore and seek more cooperation on the development of blockchain protocol layer and application layer.