Over the past few weeks, we have listened closely as the community has voiced its opinions on how NEO Global Development can improve its marketing and communications. As part of our commitment to making positive changes, we have revised our monthly report format. Starting from August, 2018, the monthly report will have a modular format featuring the following sections: Highlights, Development Progress, Community, Events and General Progress. We will also release an infographic summary for quick reference and sharing.

Below is the NGD monthly report for August, 2018.

Highlights

The NEO Blockchain Game Development Competition, which was hosted by the Chinese developer community NewEconoLabs (NEL) and supported by NGD, came to an end in August. The competition lasted three months, with over 200 developers registering globally and 39 entries submitted and shortlisted for prizes.

The award ceremony was held in Shanghai on August 31st where all winning teams were present. The judging committee was comprised of NEO founder, Erik Zhang, NEL founder, Yongxin Liu, and NGC co-founder, Wayne Zhu. Based on fair and transparent criteria, the judges gave the highest score to CardMaker, which was awarded the Best Game and a prize of RMB 800,000 in GAS.

CardMaker combines elements of card games, RPG, and user-generated content with blockchain. Players are required to solve puzzles and create their own cards to advance through the game.

The NEO Blockchain Game Development Competition was the first NEO competition focused on game development, and aimed to foster a gaming ecosystem on the NEO platform.

NEO.Game Competition Awarding Ceremony Pic.

Development Progress

Core updates

• Released NEO and NEO-CLI 2.8
• Tested NEO-CLI 2.8 and added documentation for exchange developers
• Implemented NEP-8 - “NEOVM Stack Isolation”
• Released 10 NGD MainNet seed nodes: seed1.ngd.network - seed10.ngd.network
• Added sync.ngd.network
• Tested NEO-CLI 3.0 preview
• Developed, tested and deployed SGAS smart contract to TestNet

General updates

• Website maintenance - Careers page
• Revision and maintenance of NEO Developer Documents Repository (doc.neo.org)

Solutions to “malicious” attack

The NEO network was faced with “malicious” spam attacks in August and was flooded with meaningless transactions. NGD and the global development community worked diligently to minimize the effect of the network attacks, and to ensure that existing safeguards functioned correctly. We have prepared two further solutions in response to the “malicious” attacks which are still under discussion:

• Raise the minimum transaction fee to 0.001 GAS. If this fee is still not high enough to deter attacks, we may raise it further to 0.01 GAS. Please note that these are preliminary plans which we have not yet implemented. NGD needs to negotiate with exchange wallets and other ecosystem infrastructures before setting higher transaction barriers. An issue regarding transaction priority has been addressed and is functioning properly (https://github.com/neo-project/neo-plugins/pull/3). Transactions are processed in order of the amount of fees paid.
• 3.0 preview avoids repeated validation of transactions in the memory pool. We are testing NEO-CLI 3.0 preview. If successful, we will merge them into master branch and release NEO-CLI v2.9.

Except for possible delays in block generation, spam attacks won’t have any other negative side effects on the NEO network. However, addressing the issueis still important and urgent. We appreciate the community’s patience and technical support, and we are steadfast in our commitment to deploying solutions as soon as possible.

Community

In August, we took steps to strengthen the communication channels between NEO Global Development and the community. NEO’s founders, Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang, conducted a joint AMA on the NEO subreddit for the first time in 2018, addressing many questions from the community. In addition, we have decided to create the suggestion@neo.org mailbox. The community is welcome to use this email to send us recommendations and feedback.

Social media

• Twitter: 316,600
• Facebook: 29,954
• Reddit: 96,487
• Discord: 21,161
• Medium: 1,768
• YouTube: 3,153
• WeChat Official Page: 16,685
• Weibo: 8,177

 AMA

• Da Hongfeiand Erik Zhang, founders of NEO, addressed community concerns in an AMA held on the NEO subreddit on August 3rd. (Link)

Suggestions

• NGD has recently received many valuable suggestions from the community, and we believe an active community provides a strong backbone for the growth of NEO. Therefore, additional channels have been created to encourage interaction between the community and NGD. These are:
  • The suggestion@neo.org dedicated mailbox for community suggestions and
  • The“#suggestion” channel in the NEO Discord for general collection of feedback and ideas.

Each month, NGD will take selected suggestions from the above channels and address them in our monthly report. Other communication solutions are under discussion and we intend to provide updates on our progress in future monthly reports. Should you have any suggestions, you may contact us via the two channels above.

• We are designing a careers page for the neo.org site to help recruit new team members. The page is expected to go live in September, but in the meantime, talented individuals are welcome to contact us via join@neo.org.

Community Development

• Release of neo-storm - Smart contract framework for NEO written in Golang (GitHub)
• City of Zion tutorial competition launch (Link)
• Smart contract workshop held by NeoResearch at BSL Hackathon 2018 in Santiago, Chile on August 3^rd

Events

NEO left footprints all over the world in August, hosting and participating in workshops and hackathons in South America, Japan, and China. In addition, NGD launched online NEO development courses in Chinese. Community members are welcome to make suggestions on future lesson topics and contribute more course videos.

Workshops

• August 4^th: NEOblockchain development workshop in Fukuoka, Japan
• August 4^th& 18^th：NEO blockchain development workshop at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan
• August 10^th: NEO Blockchain Open Course (1^st session): NEO Blockchain development for beginners in Shanghai, China
• August 24^th: NEO BlockchainOpen Course (2^nd session): NEO Blockchain development for advanced learners in Shanghai, China

Online courses

• August 3^rd: bCamp onlinelive course (1): Use Python to compile smart contract
• August 10^th: bCamp online live course (2): Use BlaCat to access the NEO blockchain
• August 29^th: NEO Tutorial Class (1^st session): How to use neo-python development environment

Hackathons

• August 3^rd – 4^th: NEO sponsored and mentored the BSL Hackathon 2018 in Santiago, Chile
• August 24^th – 26^th: NEO Blockchain Challenge - Tokyo was held in Tokyo, Japan (Link)

Conferences

• August 3^rd–5^th: NGD was invited to attend the International Blockchain Conference 2018, India’s biggest blockchain conference, in Hyderabad, India
• August 31^st: The first NEO Blockchain Game Competition awards ceremony was held in Shanghai, China

General Progress

This month, NEO founders and NGD team members conducted a number of interviews with media to address community concerns, both at home and abroad. The Global Blockchain Compliance Hub has also been updated to include regulatory policies of ten new countries and regions.

Interviews & Livestreams

• August 1^st: Erik Zhang was interviewed by Zhiqin Xiong, co-founder of Chain View (Video, English Transcript).
• August 3^rd: Erik Zhang participated in a TokenClub livestream, detailing the story behind NEO (Video with English subtitles).
• August 8^th: Da Hongfei participated in an interview with Honeycomb Finance, addressing recent concerns about NEO (Link) .
• August 14^th: NGD general manager, Johnson Zhao, participated in a livestream with Honeycomb Finance about NEO and its global community. (Link)
• August 23^rd: NGD senior R&D manager, Malcolm Lerider, shared his insights about several community concerns in an interview with Brad Laurie, an Australian Youtuber (Video, Summary).

External Relations

In August, NEO founder, Da Hongfei, and NGD general manager, Johnson Zhao, visited Japan where they met several politicians and industry leaders. These meetings included:

• Japan’s state minister for financial services, who received the NEO delegation and praised the non-mining-based dBFT consensus mechanism. The Ministry of Finance of Japan indicated they would be interested in exploring future cooperation between NEO and local authorities.
• Nobuyuki Idei, former president of Sony, who foresaw a promising future for game development on the NEO blockchain.
• Naohito Yoshida, chair of Eole and developer of the Sony Playstation 1, who also showed an interest in game development on the NEO blockchain.
• Hongfei and Johnson also visited companies such as: Anypay - a mobile payment solution provider, Layerx - a blockchain company, Monex Group, CTIA and bitARG. Each meeting facilitated an exchange of insights on industrial and technological trends, and representatives of these companies demonstrated a willingness to learn more about NEO’s underlying technology. Many of them expressed plans to become more familiar through interaction with the NEO ecosystem and community, and to support the development of the Japanese NEO development community and NEO-based games.

Picture of NEO Founder Da Hongfei and Nobuyuki Idei, former president of Sony

New team members

• This month Stacey Li joined our marketing & community department as PR & media manager. Stacey was a co-founder of “ZKChainNews” and has rich media resources and PR experience. She will be responsible for PR and media management of NGD.

Others

• August 30^th: A media briefing was held on the first NEO Blockchain Game Competition, attended by dozens of Chinese blockchain media in Shanghai, China.
• 10 new jurisdictions were added to the Global Blockchain Compliance Hub: Indonesia, Nigeria, Chile, Mexico, Thailand, Venezuela, Bolivia, Malaysia, Ukraine and Sweden. (Link)

Should you have any suggestions about the content of this report, you may contact us via Discord or Reddit channels, or email suggestion@neo.org.