1^st NEO Dev Competition

Hosted together with Microsoft, the 1^st NEO Dev Competition ended in March. With close to 500 participants, there were around 50 projects left after the initial filtering that were worthy of a prize. These projects were judged independently across four judges with different metrics, with higher weightage on technical level and business value. The winners have already been announced, and can be found on our website for those who missed it:
https://neo.org/awards.html

Please note that all winners have open sourced Smart Contracts linked at the website above (Github link). We hope that developers across the globe can use these examples of NEO dApps to implement their own ideas. Most of the developers are active in our Discord channel and very helpful with answering questions. To connect with the NEO development community, join the NEO Discord:
https://discord.gg/EVqPBqg

Decentralization and Consensus nodes

In April, Fenbushi Capital have prepared their consensus node and is now also up and running on TestNet. Current nodes running on TestNet are NEO Foundation, CoZ, KPN, and Fenbushi Capital. We are now preparing to stress test the TestNet with all these nodes voted in as Consensus nodes to ensure stability and performance.

In parallel, we are now developing an application form for Consensus nodes. We have received many interested parties through various channels, so we are building a portal to collect all the information we need through a single source. We have also started to build a website to display nominee information. The intention with these two sites are to make it easier for NEO holders to get information about the nominees, to be able to decide which Consensus nodes to vote for. Furthermore, we are expanding the NEO-GUI with an interface to vote. Once complete, community developed wallets can use the NEO-GUI template to implement voting support in their own wallets. More information about the voting process will be released soon.

Documentation

We have done significant changes to docs.neo.org. The menu structure has been changed to make it easier to find the information that visitors are looking for, including improvement of search function. There are also a number of new pages added, and English and Chinese version have been completely reviewed to ensure that they contain exactly the same information. We cannot ensure the proper information in all the other languages, so we encourage the community to review changes and make pull requests to align documentation content in other languages: https://github.com/neo-project/docs

NEO Events

• April 2^nd-3^rd: Malcolm Lerider keynote speaker at TÜBİTAK BİLGEM 1^st National Blockchain Workshop 2018 – Ankara
• April 4^th: NEOnight with Nathan Chen and Kris Zeng – Shanghai.
• April 11^th: NEL Developer Night – Shanghai
• April 12^th: NEO Tokyo Meetup & Workshop
• April 13^th-15^th: NEOxQRC Global Hackathon – Tokyo
• April 14^th: Feng Da Sun presenting at Blockchain Insurance Innovation Contest, Fudan University – Shanghai
• April 14^th -15^th: Gopher China Conference – Shanghai
• April 14^th -15^th: NEO Amsterdam Summit & Hackathon
• April 17^th: NEO Lisbon Meetup & Workshop
• April 18^th: NEO attended Berkeley Blockchain Career Fair
• April 19^th NEO San Francisco Meetup
• April 20^th: NEO Madrid Meetup & Workshop
• April 20^th-22^nd: NEO sponsoring Startup Salad Hackathon, Feng Da Sun participated as judge
• April 21th: Nathan Chen presenting at 2018 China Developer Relations Conference – Suzhou
• April 22^nd: NEO Paris Meetup & Workshop
• April 24^th: NEO Vienna Meetup & Workshop
• April 26^th: NEO Zurich Meetup & Workshop

NEO Development

• NEO Trigger documentation (http://docs.neo.org/en-us/sc/trigger.html)
• Added support for more seed nodes
• Added Runtime.Serialize/Deserialize Support for MAP
• Improved SHL and SHR performance
• Changed multiplication for Fixed8
• Extracted hardcoded seconds per block to protocol.json file
• Added new opcode ‘VERIFY’ to neo-vm
• Optimized config.json for NEO-CLI and NEO-GUI
• Implemented ‘getbalance’ support for NEP-5
• Website development: Site for coming events, form for Consensus node application, site for nominee display

April has been a month with many events, with a large part of the team being on the road or in the air. Our European tour is coming to an end; the team has already started to regroup in Shanghai to focus fully on decentralization. Malcolm and Tamar will start off May by going to South America and help grow the development community there. Stay updated on Twitter @NEO_Blockchain and on #announcements channel in Discord: https://discord.gg/R2uyk9H