February 2019 saw the entire NGD being busy and fulfilled. China’s Spring Festival also took place in February, but we kept focused on the preparations for NEO DevCon2019. After intensive and full preparations, we are pleased that NEO DevCon 2019 held in Seattle on February 16 and February 17 was a success in the end.

The following is the NGD monthly report for February 2019:

Highlight

NEO DevCon

As the largest annual developer meet-up in NEO ecology, NEO DevCon attracted nearly 400 attendees and over 50 speakers to share high-quality. Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang, NEO’s two founders, respectively made plans and interpretations for the realization of NEO Smart Economy.

NGD Seattle office

NEO DevCon announced the creation of the Seattle office of NGD, which will be headed by John deVadoss.John has been with Microsoft for more than 15 years. He served as general manager in the early stage of the.net project.NEO will support NEO at the developer experience level and help NEO become the most developer-friendly and popular decentralized application platform at an early date.

Development progress

Core progress

At the DEVCON held in the middle of this month, Erik proposed the general design idea of ​​NEO3.0. The most important goal in developing NEO 3.0 is to enable NEO to support large-scale commercial applications. There are three basic requirements to improve, and some improvements have been implemented.

Improve reliability

dBFT2.0: Optimizing the consensus mechanism dBFT to improve consensus stability and applicability for large-scale application scenarios. Mainly by adding a commit phase to the consensus protocol (avoiding accidental forks), adding two new state recovery mechanisms--Recovery Log and Recovery Message to state synchronization protocol (so that offline consensus nodes can recover from abnormal conditions more quickly, and the network can always generate blocks and process transactions even under extreme network load). These improvements enable dBFT to truly make transactions irreversible and support large-scale commercial applications. See https://github.com/neo-project/neo/pull/547 for specific changes. The development and testing of this part has been nearly completed and will be merged into the next version of Release.

Streamline the architecture and improve performance

a) Increase TPS for Layer 2, Layer 2 expansion can effectively increase TPS, but the improvement is limited due to the disputes, there is a proportional relationship between the TPS of Layer 2 and the TPS of the main chain. The TPS of Layer2 increases in multiples corresponding to the TPS of the main chain. In order to increase the TPS of Layer 2 to attract more applications running on it, we will move the business verification to the application layer in NEO 3.0. In the process of transaction verification, we will only allow state independent verifications. In this case, the verification efficiency of the transaction will be greatly improved. For consensus nodes, they may not even need to sync blocks for transaction verification, and TPS will be greatly increased therefore.

b) Remove all global assets. Currently, there are two ways to create assets on NEO. The first is a global asset created by RegisterTransaction, and the second is a contract asset created by a smart contract. Contract assets are more flexible and has more functions. While global assets are not integrated with smart contracts, managing global assets in smart contracts is very difficult. Therefore, we do not need to continue to support global assets in NEO 3.0. And if the global assets are removed, NEO's architecture will be further simplified and system performance will be improved.

c) Unify all transaction types. Currently there are 9 different transaction types in NEO 2.x. Since the global assets no longer exist, the related transactions do not need to exist. Other transactions will also be removed and replaced with interop services in smart contracts. Therefore, in NEO 3.0, there is only one type of transaction, that is Transaction. The role of this unique type of transaction is to run smart contracts.

d) Enhance smart contract functionality. In NEO 3.0, we will add native smart contracts, manifest and permission system, Internet resource access and other features to make NEO smart contracts more convenient for more scenarios. In addition, with the improvement of NEO 3.0 performance, the cost of smart contracts will be significantly reduced to attract more users to develop based on NEO.

Distributed storage

NeoFS is a distributed storage network built on NEO 3.0. This storage network has its own economic model. First of all, it is inexpensive and can store large amounts of data. The users can use its space to store data by paying gas. And everyone can earn gas by sharing their unused hard disk space. In addition, NeoFS offers some additional features. You can encrypt the data to protect privacy. And, NeoFS will be integrated with smart contracts, and contracts can directly read data from or write data to NeoFS

Community

Thanks to DevCon, we are honored to see the expansion of NEO ecological extension. Many individual developers and teams who are interested in dApp development and deployment based on NEO came to talk with colleagues from NGD EG department and R&D department.On the media side, more than 50 media organizations have reported on NEO DevCon, and they will all be the new force in the NEO media ecosystem.NEO's social media reach is also expanding.

Social media

Twitter: 316475

Facebook: 30602

Reddit: 97910

Discord: 24308

Medium: 2219

Youtube: 3520

Wechat: 16845

Weibo: 8935

This month's event

NEO DevCon

-On February 16 and February 17, NEO DevCon 2019 was held in Seattle, USA. A reply of the full livestream of the DevCon can be found on the official YouTube channel of NEO Smart Economy:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl1AwEDN0w5lTmfJEMsY5Vw

For English coverage on NEO DevCon, please follow Medium’s homepage of NEO DevCon.

（https://medium.com/neo-smart-economy）

- On February 23, NEO founder Da Hongfei attended 2019 Blockchain Conference held by Harvard Business School BlockChain Club. There he delivered the keynote speech of The Promise of Smart Economy and shared the vision of Smart Economy.

Other Progress

Media interview

We have compiled a summary of the media interview links, welcome to click to view

https://www.reddit.com/r/NEO/comments/axhneq/neo_devcon_press_release/ 

New Employees

Li Shuai, graduated from East China University of Science and Technology with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, has been engaged in.NET development since 2012. He ever worked in eHI and aiHuiShou, and is familiar with the architecture design of B/S system. He is now in NEO R&D department.

Cheng Wei, a CPA certified by the Chinese Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and joining the NEO Foundation in February 2019 as Financial Controller, he is mainly responsible for the financial management and disclosure of the Foundation. Prior to joining the NEO Foundation, he was a senior auditor of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, a financial manager of Allyes Media Group, an assistant financial controller of Red Star Macalline, and CFO of several startups (Kick9, Chinapex, Mytoken).