October is an important month to NEO. We have had plenty of events during this month, marking important milestones.

Below is the NGD month report for October, 2018.

Highlight

NEO MainNet 2 Year Anniversary

We celebrated the two year anniversary of NEO MainNet release on October 17. NEO ecosystem wouldn’t have prospered as it has without the support from the community members and partners over the past two years. (https://neo.org/blog/details/4112)

NEO Decentralization Progress

KPN was voted in as a consensus node on NEO MainNet in the latest consensus node election on October 20, indicating a further step towards decentralization. (https://neo.org/blog/details/4117)

NEO Creative Design Competition

The first NEO Creative Design Competition was attended by 100+ designers from 30+ countries over the past month, whose contributions have laid a solid foundation for building NEO designer ecosystem. The competition concluded this month with the completion of prizewinner selection process. (Link)

Community Expansion

We are pleased to see the growing presence of NEO global community, enriched by Keymakers, a Japan-based NEO Developer Community that is playing an active role and AmazoNEO, a newly established organization. NGD also brought meetup to Russia for the first time with the purpose of exploiting local community resources.

Core updates

• NEO Mainnet & Testnet has been upgraded to 2.9 and they runs quite stably now.
• Released NEO-CLI 2.9.1（https://github.com/neo-project/neo-cli/releases/tag/v2.9.1）
• Added：

Add constant storage for NeoContract

New smart contract API: System.Runtime.Platform

New smart contract API: Neo.Account.IsStandard

New smart contract API: Neo.Transaction.GetWitnesses

Allow the RPC server to bind to local address

Allow client certificate to be checked on the RPC server

Allow setting additional gas to be used in RPC commands invoke* for RPC server

New CLI command: claim gas [all]

• Fixed：

Fix a bug in the RPC server

Fix denial of service with bad UPnP responses

Other updates

• “How to become a Consensus Node” technical docs was released (Docs link).
• NEO consensus node page (https://neo.org/consensus) was updated to give a comprehensive view of NEO node status with the purpose of facilitating NEO governance. The new page contains a portal for consensus node application where NEO holders may file applications as per instructions given in the “How to become a consensus node” docs recently released by NGD.
• KPN was officially elected a consensus node running on NEO MainNet at 6:13:12 on October 20, 2018 (GMT+8). The number of consensus nodes controlled by NEO Foundation now decreased from 7 to 5.
• 10 seed notes were deployed on the TestNet and updated to the current height for the community to quickly access the TestNet.
• “Community Tutorials” contributed by NEO community covering the topics of NEO basics, nodes and smart contracts were added to the repository for quick access by developers. (http://docs.neo.org/communitydoc.html)

Community

The community continues to expand steadily this month with an increment of new followers in various social media platforms, proving its growth potential. NEO Discord also opened a new channel – Keymaker this month. Keymaker is a Japan-based developer community led by Miki Hayama, Director of Ecosystem Growth and founded in May, 2018.

Social Media

• Twitter: 317,844
• Facebook: 30,300
• Reddit: 97,058
• Discord: 22,882
• Medium: 2,030
• Youtube: 3,223
• WeChat: 16,850
• Weibo: 8,350

New Community

New AmazoNEO community is taking shape. Its purpose is to extend NEO’s reach to Latin America and enhance NEO’s presence in the local industry, public sector, academia and the massive public. This blockchain community grows by drawing resources from the society.

Events

NGD kicked start the Hackathon Tour in October. We have seen the marvelous skills demonstrated by talented developers in the Delft & Rotterdam and Berlin hackathons that already finished. The 5^th session of NEO Blockchain Open Course released this month was greeted by participants with unabated enthusiasm . NGD core members also participated in many events held around the globe.

Workshops

• October 20: NEO Blockchain Open Course (5^th session): NNS system design and implementation was held in Shanghai. http://www.itdks.com/eventlist/detail/2720
• October 23: NGD held a workshop in Moscow, Russia, an event convened and lectured by Peter Lin, NGD R&D Director.
• October 25: NGD held a workshop in St. Petersburg, Russia, an event convened and lectured by Peter Lin, NGD R&D Director.
• October 26: NGD held a workshop in Berlin, Germany, an event convened and lectured by Peter Lin, NGD R&D Director.

Hackathons

• October 17-18: NGD funded the prize pool for the hackathon held under Blockchain Summit LATAM in Columbia.
• October 20-21: NEO Hackathon was held in partnership with Delft University of Technology in Rotterdam, the first stop of NEO Hackathon Tour around the theme “Build dApps of NEO with golang”. (Link)
• October 27-28: NEO Hackathon was held in Berlin, the second stop of Hackathon Tour around the theme “ Build NFT dApps on NEO”. (Link)
• October 27: NGD and DoraHacks co-organized a hackathon around the theme “NEO Blockchain and AI”.

Conferences

• October 1: Zhao Chen, NGD General Manager Johnson Zhao gave a speech at “HEL Tech Conference” in Helsinki, Finland, Introduce NEO to people of Tech and Law.（Introduction link）
• October 5: Zhao Chen, NGD General Manager Johnson Zhao, EG Director Lili Zhao , EG Manager Tamar Salant attend Delta Summit, Johnson Zhao deliverd a speech titled “Building the Smart Economy: Digital Assets, Digital Identity & Smart contracts” at Delta Summit. NGD delegation was invited to the banquet at the presidential palace of Malta.
  (https://www.delta-summit.com)
• October 11: Da Hongfei, NEO Founder delivered a keynote speech at The 19^th World Knowledge Forum in Soeul, Korea. (https://medium.com/@parallel38/eab33e3624e7)
• October 17-18: Tamar Salant, NGD EG Manager delivered a keynote speech at Blockchain Summit Latam in Columbia. (http://blockchainsummit.la/）
• October 17:Zhao Chen, NGD General Manager shared how NEO sees STO  (Security Token Offering) from the perspective of a public chain focused on underlying technology and NEO’s compliance-readiness in the protocol layer at “Token Alliance Roundtable Tokyo” held by Chamber of Digital Commerce in Tokyo, Japan.
• Oct 22, Zhao Chen delivered a keynote speech titled "Build a compliance ready blockchain" at East West CryptoBridge Conference in Frankfurt. (https://ewcc.io)
• October 31: Steven Liu, NGD Software Developer gave a speech at Blockchain Technology Seminar held in Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and convened a Workshop.

Meetups

• October 2: NEO Meetup was held at Microsoftflux in Helsinki, Netherlands by NGD, attended by Li Jiaying, NGD EG Senior Manager and Zhao Chen, NGD General Manager, who also gave a speech.
• October 23: NEO Meetup was held by NGD in Moscow, Russia.
• October 25: NEO Meetup was held by NGD in St. Petersburg in Moscow, Russia.
• October 26: NEO Meetup was held by NGD in Berlin, Germany.

Competitions

The first NEO Creative Design Competition successfully concluded with over 100 pieces of webpages and icon design submitted. The prize pool is worth $30,000 GAS amount.

Other Progress

Interview and Livestreaming

• October 1: Zhao Chen, NGD General Manager gave insightful comments about “The Potential Power of Blockchain Technology to Change the World” in an interview with Helsingin Sanaoma, the biggest media in Finland. (Link)
• October 1: Zhao Chen, NGD General Manager revealed that "Gaming industry will be one of the two focuses of NEO" in the interview with CryptoPotato.（Link）
• October 5: Zhao Chen, NGD General Manager took an interview with EAK TV, a blockchain media in Republic of Malta. (Link)
• October 11: Da hongfei, NEO Founder took an interview with MK Maeil，a biggest media of Korea during19TH world knowledge conference. （Link）
• October 31: Da Hongfei, NEO Founder talked about "NEO MainNet 2 year anniversary and its decentralization process, competition among public blockchains and stable coin" in an interview with 8BTC.（Link）

New Joiner

Steven Liu, NEO Software Developer

Liu has a bachelor’s degree in System Science and Engineering in Zhejiang University. After graduation, he sought post-graduate education in Delft University of Technology majoring in ewi embedded system group. He was involved in ERP service system development since 2016 with proficiency in Java, springMVC, Python, Django, Flask, front end, React and Redux. He participated in EOS node election and EOS mainnet launch test.

If you have any valuable suggestions for NEO or NGD, please feel free to join our discussion in NEO Discord channel or send an email to suggestion@neo.org.