There have been a few community members asking where the monthly report for February went. To put it shortly; January report was released late because of DevCon (released Feb 6th), and shortly thereafter we entered the Chinese New Year with close to two weeks holidays. While I am sure that the NEO community would love to see a report of each team member's holiday, we will give them the freedom to post that through their own channels. Instead of writing a report for roughly 10 days' work (which also were an option), we summarize February and March in a longer report now instead.

First of all, we proudly announce the end of the first NEO Dev Competition, co-organized with Microsoft China. The competition ran for 5 months, with close to 500 project sign-ups. Around 50 projects passed the initial quality check and were all worthy of a prize. We are now testing the final 16 projects. You can expect a separate announcement with the winners.

CoZ and KPN has now been running consensus nodes on TestNet for two full months, managing 100% uptime and smooth node upgrades on short term notifications. Fenbushi Capital is at an earlier stage; they had their initial node set up but need to relocate it because of decentralization aspect. The MainNet experienced delayed blocks during beginning of March due to P2P issues; optimizations have been implemented in v2.7.3 and v2.7.4, and MainNet block times are now stable again. It is worth to repeat that NEO has 100% finality, so any occasional slow block does not affect the integrity of the network. Running statistics, we have also found significant latency increase to some of the consensus nodes during Internet traffic peak hours in China, and we have traced the root cause to the ISP servers. As this may affect consensus messages, we now plan to move affected consensus nodes to faster ISP's. To mitigate risk for future consensus message latencies, CoZ and KPN are scheduled to be voted in on MainNet after the move of these consensus nodes is complete.

With more and more NEP-5 tokens released, we have gotten an increasing number of technical support requests from exchanges. Thus, much of our development time in February still went to technical support, as well as releasing new documentation for exchange developers using CLI v2.7.1 and above. The documentation can be found on http://docs.neo.org/en-us/exchange/v2.7.1.html.

In February, we also participated in the first two hackathons for NEO; START Hack and HackCU. Polychain ended up winning the NEO challenge at START Hack, with a smart contract on NEO to make charity donations more trustworthy and reliable with stable release of funds. Not only did they win the NEO challenge, but they also ended up winning the overall prize among all challenges at START Hack. A big thank you to Charlie Revett for representing NEO and CoZ at START Hack. The project can be found here:
https://github.com/louismerlin/neo-caritas

Another charity project won the HackCU challenge: NeoCharity, which can earmark all received tokens and query to see who has transacted with a tagged account. FixItChain won the HackCU 1^st Prize and Best Beginner Hack Prize. Their solution aim to reduce waste by storing part IDs and their repair histories, so that replacement parts with trustworthy usage history can be found to repair devices instead of throwing them away. Another big thank you to Tyler B. Adams for representing NEO and CoZ at HackCU. All the HackCU submissions can be found here:
https://hackcu4.devpost.com/submissions/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&prize_filter%5Bprizes%5D%5B%5D=21104

The winners of both Hackathons received 500 GAS as prize, which would allow them to either deploy their project on MainNet or to continue fund the development of their projects.

NEO also held our first ever solo Hackathon in Taipei on March 11^th, in collaboration with Blockcamp. The hackathon was running from the morning until late evening, with developers coding while NEO projects had meetup at the same venue. NEOspace ended up claiming the first prize with a Smart Contract to lease office space on per time basis. Second prize was won by Medchain, a project to manage patient data. Neogenesis and Oblip won third and fourth prize. Again, a big thank you to all the CoZ developers who were on site to make this an event to remember.

We would also like to introduce two new full-time team members joining NEO operations; Miki Hayama and Sun FengDa.

Miki Hayama has joined as Head of Japan Operations. Spending a decade in London and being in charge of overseas Marketing in the automobile industry with experience from 15 countries, Miki has been engaged in bridging the parties across the countries which naturally brought her to be an interpreter for top managers within the blockchain industry. She became the first full time team member out of China for NEO covering Japan Operations including community building and all activities for the Japanese market. Miki is based in Tokyo.

Sun Fengda is a senior researcher at NEO. She has been conducting research on interchain technologies for NEO Council since June 2017 and has now officially joined NEO's Shanghai team full-time. She holds a PhD degree in Microelectronics and Microsystems from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and a Master degree in Finance from HEC Lausanne. Sun Fengda has been a successful R&D engineer in the semiconductor industry and has worked with foreign exchange risk management in Geneva before joining NEO. She is also an FRM holder.

NEO Events February – March:

• February 8^th: Xi'an NEO and NEL meetup
• February 26^th: Peter Lin speaker at Shanghai Blockchain Innovation
• March 3^rd: Singapore NEO meetup
• March 5^th: Tokyo NEO meetup and development workshop
• March 8^th: Malcolm Lerider speaker at Vietnam Blockchain Week in Ho Chi Minh City
• March 8^th: Ho Chi Minh City NEO development workshop
• March 11^th: Tokyo coding day
• March 11^th: Taipei NEO meetup
• March 11^th: Taipei NEO hackathon
• March 12^th: Melbourne NEO meetup and development workshop
• March 13^th-14^th: Da Hongfei speaker at APAC Blockchain Conference 2018 in Melbourne
• March 15^th: Da Hongfei speaker at TokenSky in Seoul
• March 16^th: Sydney NEO meetup
• March 17^th: Malcolm Lerider speaker at Blockchain Innovation Convention in Tokyo
• March 18^th: Tokyo coding day
• March 18^th: Seoul NEO meetup
• March 20^th: Da Hongfei speaker at Token2049 in Hong Kong
• March 24^th: Shenzhen NEO meetup
• March 28^th: Da Hongfei speaker at 36Kr WISE2018 in Shenzhen

Development February – March

• NEO dApp list given to third party for management: http://ndapp.org/
• NEO SDK documentation: http://docs.neo.org/en-us/node/sdk/introduction.html
• NeoBlockchain2MongoDB: https://github.com/chenzhitong/NeoBlockchain2MongoDB
• Lock contract verify: https://github.com/chenzhitong/LockVerify
• Website updates (not yet live)
• Improved monitoring
• Added documentation for Smart Contract Common Issues (Chinese): http://docs.neo.org/zh-cn/sc/faq.html
• Added documentation for Exchange Developers using CLI v2.7.1 and above: http://docs.neo.org/en-us/exchange/v2.7.1.html
• Added documentation for getting TestNet GAS and TestNet NEO: http://docs.neo.org/en-us/node/testnet.html
• Updated documentation for Verify contract (Chinese): http://docs.neo.org/zh-cn/sc/tutorial/verify.html
• Updated documentation for NEO-GUI: http://docs.neo.org/en-us/node/gui.html
• Updated documentation for NEO-CLI: http://docs.neo.org/en-us/node/cli.html
• Completed new documentation structure (not yet live)
• Updated documentation on System Fees: http://docs.neo.org/en-us/sc/systemfees.html
• Updated documentation on sendmany: http://docs.neo.org/en-us/node/api/sendmany.html
• Added documentation on Getting Sharted with C# using Ubuntu (Chinese): http://docs.neo.org/zh-cn/sc/getting-started-csharp-ubuntu.html (Contributor: hunjixin)
• Added documentation for Mac OS on Getting Started (Java): http://docs.neo.org/en-us/sc/getting-started-java.html (Contributor: cwitchger)
• Added Iterator API's and 'StorageIterator'
• Fixed resource leaks of 'InteropService'
• Fixed bug neo-gui#186
• Added TransactionInvocation.GetScript to StateReader
• Added error checks on WalletIndexer
• Updated ConsensusService.cs
• Fixed bug in 'ChangeView'
• Optimized consensus
• Optimized importing of blocks
• Reduced 'mem_pool' lock time
• Added expiration to 'KnownHashes'
• Changed 'Payload' to public
• Added expiration to 'missions_global'
• Equaled time out as receive
• Optimized CheckMemPool
• Added GzipCompression over RPC
• Added port forwarding
• Added fix for Storage.Find
• Added requirement to have .Net Fx 4.7 DevPack installed to compile NEO project

To learn more about NEO, new projects, and how to develop Smart Contracts, join one or more of our meetups in April: NEO Europe Tour. Follow @Neo_Blockchain on Twitter for more details.