A big thank you to all community members who followed us through 2017. It was a big year for NEO, including our rebrand, Smart Contract 2.0 release, NEO VM release, and completion of NEP-1 to NEP-6, just to name a few of our milestones. 

In 2017, we also saw our community support increase rapidly, and we are ever so grateful for the support behind this project. NEO is an open source project after all, and the direction we move is decided by the community developers. We now have over 100 000 followers on Facebook, more than 50 000 subscribers on Reddit, more than 300 000 followers on Twitter, and more than 50 000 followers on WeChat. The overseas community development has been led by NEO community development group City of Zion (cityofzion.io / https://github.com/CityOfZion), at the time of writing with around 50 developers. CoZ write weekly reports, their latest report can be found here:
https://medium.com/proof-of-working/weekly-report-23-2017-12-31-e02aae674aed.

Furthermore, the Chinese community development group NewEconoLab (https://github.com/NewEconoLab/) was established a few months ago, their monthly report can be found here:
https://medium.com/neweconolab/nel-december-monthly-report-7750b3a7a612

As an open source project, consistent NEO contributors will of course get their profiles added to the NEO team page (https://neo.org/team).

The team in Shanghai is also growing, faster and faster. We moved in to our current office in August, and we are already out of seats and preparing a new office to move again. This month we would like to welcome Wayne Zhu to our team in Shanghai. Wayne worked as a senior equity analyst with Guotai Junan Securities, a financial services company with RMB 37 billion revenue, and will be responsible for NEO-affiliated investments

2017 was also the year where our events picked up speed, with bi-weekly INNOxNEO nights in Shanghai, NEO JOY and Smart Contract workshops across main cities in China, and meetups in Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Cambridge and Seoul. In December, we held a conference in Tokyo, where we released announcement on partnership with Okwave to use Wowoo platform to expand the reach for both parties, and partnership with QRC Group to jointly host global hackathon events. We ended the year with a big technology conference at Microsoft offices in Beijing, with presentations by NEO, Microsoft, and associated projects (https://neo.org/blog/details/3052).

We will continue ramp up the events during 2018, with bigger focus on meetups, workshops, and hackathons abroad. We start 2018 with a European tour (https://neo.org/blog/details/3054) and our first ever DevCon on January 30^th- 31^st in San Francisco. Agenda for DevCon is already released and ticket sale has opened, find more information on devcon.neo.org. We are looking forward to meet as many NEO supporters as possible!

December NEO Events

December 1^st – 3^rd: " NEO Blockchain Technical Training Camp" - Shanghai
December 2^nd: NEO Blockchain Workshop – Guangzhou
December 4^th: Da Hongfei presenting at Blockchain World Conference in Bangkok
December 7^th: NEO Meetup in Singapore
December 8^th - December 11^th: Gold College Session III "Blockchain and Blockchain Thinking", speech by Peter Lin
December 8^th: Open the First NEO Developer Contest Application for participating in NEO DevCon @ Silicon Valley
December 10^th: NEO Blockchain Contest Kick-Off Event in Tokyo with QRC, Okwave and Coinfirm
December 10^th - 15^th: NEO Developer Contest Q&A (AMA)
December 11^th: NEO Meetup in Tokyo
December 13^th: University of Science and Technology of China, Blockchain Technology Use Cases”, speech by Li Jiangying
December 16^th: Fudan University Blockchain event, speech by Fred Huang and Nathan Chen
December 19^th: Tongji University “Financial Technology Salon”, speech by Peter Lin
December 21^st: NEL sharing session: NEO dApp development, speech by Liu Yongxin and Li Jianying
December 23^rd: Beijing NEO Technology Conference

December Development Progress

Update NEP-5 technical implementation documentation for exchanges (http://docs.neo.org/en-us/exchange.html)
NEP-5 Technical support for exchanges
P2P optimizations
Consensus node server upgrades
Preparations for decentralization
TestNet testing, including asset distribution and voting
Two NEP drafts related to voting and governance
Proofread community additions to technical documentation
DevCon organizing + website (devcon.neo.org)
Maintain and analyze developer page statistics
Implementation of Giveback program (neo.org/giveback)
Resolved a large number of ICO1 users who forgot login password, new phone number, and similar issues
Implemented NEO Contributors page: https://neo.org/team
Improvement of monitoring
Added API getversion\invoke\invokefunction\invokescript documentation
Added neo-python tutorial (http://docs.neo.org/en-us/sc/getting-started-python.html)
Updated neo-gui and neo-cli to v.2.5.2 (main features: manually set transaction fee and manually set change address)
Update client documentation based on the new version of neo-gui (v2.5.2).
neo-devpack-dotnet upgrade to v.2.5.2
Added VM OpCodes APPEND and REVERSE
Implemented NEP-6 Wallet Standard
Accepted NEP-7 Triggers for NeoContract
NEP-6 testing
RPC command testing
Added Smart Contract API: Neo.Runtime.GetTime 

With more and more developers learning about NEO, we have split up our Discord developer channels by programming language (join here: https://discord.gg/GmT2Z29). You can now easily discuss with community developers in the following channels:|
#develop-general
#develop-python
#develop-jvm
#develop-sharp
#develop-js 

There are 4 months left in our big development competition with USD 490 000 in prizes (https://neo.org/competition.html). There is still time for new developers to learn and take one of the 16 awarded spots. We recommend to join Discord (link above) and read our tutorials at docs.neo.org.

We have an exciting 2018 ahead of us; the year when Smart Economy starts to take shape. The vision will be presented at DevCon.

Neo Council
2018-01-03