Highlights

Hackathon Tour

The three week long NEO Europe Hackathon Tour has officially concluded. The last event of the series was held in Zurich, Switzerland on November 3rd and 4th, and featured participation around 40 developers. Overall, the tour attracted over 200 participants with more than 20 works submitted. The successful conclusion of the Hackathon Tour indicates that NEO has established a larger presence in Europe.

NEO Wallpaper Design Competition

As part of the event series designed to celebrate the NEO MainNet two-year anniversary, the NEO Wallpaper Design Competition was held with over 100 works submitted by designers from over 10 different countries. The final results were released on November 9th. Please find the prize winners here (link) and feel free to download the designs.

Development progress

Core progress

• Released NEO-CLI 2.9.2（Details）

Added

• New plugin type: IPersistencePlugin.
• Allow listing loaded plugins and showing help messages for plugins.

Changed

• Allow opening wallet for RPC server after startup.
• Allow creating iterator from array in API: Neo.Iterator.Create.
• Improve the performance of P2P network.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue that caused the NeoVM execution state to be inconsistent.
• Fixed "too many open files" error.
• Fixed an issue in MerkleTree.

Removed

• Remove Neo.Witness.GetInvocationScript.(smart contract)

Other updates

• Optimized the consensus mechanism to eliminate forking risk and enhance the stability of the consensus mechanism (now in test phase). The security and vitality of the consensus mechanism is guaranteed by adding the commit phase and offering a regeneration strategy (to recover lost/failed consensus nodes). The optimization is a major step towards NEO decentralization. Find more information at: https://github.com/neo-project/neo/pull/426.
• Built a consensus node monitoring system for logging purpose. The system is composed of three parts:
• LogPlugin is for sending NEO-CLI’s logs to LogServer. (https://github.com/neo-ngd/LogPlugin)
• LogServer is for persisting logs into files and sending to partners. (https://github.com/neo-ngd/LogServer)
• LogMonitor is the website to view realtime logs. (https://github.com/neo-ngd/LogMonitor)

• Updated “How to Become NEO Consensus Node” docs by adding a new segment introducing the consensus node selection cycle. (Link)
• Chinese version of the “Community Tutorials” page was improved by adding a section that covers NEO basics, such as node and smart contract tutorials to the navigation for developers to quickly find what they need. (http://docs.neo.org/communitydoc_cn.html)

Community

Social analytics data suggests that NEO community was more active in November with considerably more discussions taking place on Discord. The number of community members on some social platforms slightly increased, while others remained consistent with last month.

Social media stats

Twitter: 316,854

Facebook: 30,416

Reddit: 97,771

Discord: 23,622

Medium: 2,096

Youtube: 3,256

WeChat: 16,896

Weibo: 8,350

Local communities

A new Colorado-based community initiative called NEO Denver launched this month, holding its first meetup on November 6th. Discussions revolved around a basic introduction to the NEO platform with representatives from ecosystem projects in attendance.（Link）

Events

One of the most important events hosted by NGD in November was the Hackathon Tour, which concluded successfully at the beginning of the month. With experience gained from the first two stops, the last hackathon of the series was held in Zurich, which achieved desirable outcomes.

The 6th session of NEO Open Class was held this month in Shanghai. After this session, we will conduct a new plan for the open class to provide a better experience. And the NEO Open Class program will resume in Q1 of 2019.

November closed with the launch of the NSPCC in at a meetup in Saint Petersburg on November 30th. The NSPCC will focus on the development of distributed file storage system on NEO, along with ecosystem growth and blockchain incubation in Russia.（Link）

Workshops

• November 3rd: NGD hosted a workshop as part of the Hackathon Tour in Zurich, Switzerland.
• November 17th: A special blockchain game session - “NEO Blockchain Open Course (6): Blockchain Game Design and Development” was held in Shanghai, China.

Meetups

• November 10th: A “dBFT Consensus Mechanism and Commercial dApp Development Meeting” was co-hosted by NGD and, NEXT (NEO Hangzhou community) in Hangzhou, China. Jiachao Wang, NEO Ecosystem Growth (EG) Manager, delivered a keynote speech on the NEO Smart Economy.
• November 30th: The NEO Saint Petersburg Competency Center（NSPCC） hosted a meetup in Saint Petersburg, Russia. NSPCC officially launched along with details on distributed file storage system on NEO initiative.

Hackathons

• November 3rd – 4th: The NEO Hackathon Tour concluded with the last event held in Zurich, Switzerland. The hackathon theme was “Build Identity-related dApps on NEO”.（Link）
• November 23rd – 25th: NEO hosted a Blockchain Track at the Hack Junction 2018 hackathon in Espoo, Finland. The development theme was “NEO DAO Voting” and NGD EG senior manager Jiaying Li along with Insomnia and Yasenm from the developer community were appointed as judges.（Link）

Conferences

• November 4th: NGD EG manager Jiachao Wang delivered a keynote speech on the NEO Smart Economy at the 26th Indocomtech in Jakarta, Indonesia, organized by Indodax and Tokenomy. (Link)
• November 9th -10th: NEO was featured at the China dApp Developer Conference in Beijing, China. (Link).
• November 6th – 8th: Da Hongfei and Jiaying Li attended the Web Summit Conference 2018, held by Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. Da joined a fireside chat with a Wall Street Journal reporter on the CryptoConf stage and spoke about developing blockchain on a global scale and regulations. (Link)
• November 13th - 15th: NGD general manager Johnson Zhao and Jiachao Wang attended the Global Digital Entertainment Summit 2018, hosted by Sina Game, in Macau, China. Johnson gave a keynote speech on “The development of blockchain games: game data and digital assets.” (Link)
• November 14th: Kris Zeng from NGD Overseas Community Operations attended the “Bitrun Beijing Academies Blockchain Technology Week – Central University of Finance and Economics Blockchain Workshop” in Beijing, China and delivered a speech on “NEO Overseas Community Development”.
• November 24th: NGD EG director Lili Zhao attended the Blockchain Leadership Summit held in Basel, Switzerland, and participated in two panel discussions on blockchain-driven smart economy and blockchain technology. (Link)
• November 27th: Lili Zhao delivered a keynote speech on “Building a Smart Economy” at Moontec 18 held in Tallinn, Estonia. (Link)

Other progress

Interviews

• November 7th: Johnson Zhao shared NEO’s plan on security tokens when interviewed by LetKnow, a Ukrainian media outlet. (Link)
• November 14th: Johnson Zhao shared his insights about how “Blockchain will play a role in social paradigm building in the future,” when interviewed by Sina Game during the Global Digital Entertainment Summit 2018 in Macau.(Link)

New team members

Songping Que - Marketing specialist

Graduated from Kiel University with a Master`s degree in International Law, Songping has bountiful overseas work experience. She joins NGD Shanghai Office as a marketing specialist.

Zhuo Qian - Software developer

Graduated as a Master of Science in Electronic Systems Engineering from Arizona State University in 2015. Then he focused on building ERP/CRM systems based on Microsoft Dynamics GP/AX at Tridea Partners (Columbus Global) in San Diego, CA. He has joined NEO R&D department as a software developer.

Others

We would like to acknowledge the delay on the financial reports we had aimed to release in Q3. We are aware that this is something the community is eager to see and is disappointed we did not deliver. The NEO Foundation is actively hiring a financial controller to improve financial transparency through the routine issuance of financial reports. Da Hongfei recently responded to a Reddit thread regarding the delay and issued an apology.