The first quarter of 2019 has come and gone right before our eyes. There is an old saying in China that "a year's plan starts with spring." We set and achieved many goals in Q1 2019, and laid a solid foundation for the rest of the year.

The following is the NGD monthly report for March 2019

Highlights

NEO GameCon 2019

On March 9th & 10th, NEO GameCon 2019 took place in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan. NEO GameCon was NEO’s first gaming conference and it attracted many companies from within the industry, including game publishers such as Sina Game, NetEase Game, iQIYI Game, and DMM.com.

During the event NGD ecosystem growth director, Wang Jiachao, said that 10 games based on NEO will be released in Q2 2019.

NEO will become a one-stop solution for blockchain games, which are an important part of realizing the vision of a Smart Economy.

Neo-cli 2.10 Release

NEO Global Development released the latest version of neo-cli, 2.10.0, which included the newly optimized dBFT 2.0. NEO founder Erik Zhang said that dBFT has now become the optimal consensus mechanism. Neo-cli 2.10.0 is currently running on the NEO TestNet and will be officially deployed to the MainNet in early April. (Notice Link)

NEO.Game Development Guide Release

NGD released the NEO.Game Developer Guide, which is technical documentation designed to help developers speed up the development of blockchain games and dApps on NEO. It includes many useful resources, including coverage of all the tools that developers will need to easily build, test, and deploy NEO. （Link）

Development Progress

Core Progress

Added

• Added dBFT 2.0
• Added support for deploying and invoking contracts
• Allow setting MinDesiredConnections and MaxConnections in config.json
• New plugin type: IMemoryPoolTxObserverPlugin
• New smart contract API: Neo.Iterator.Concat
• New RPC command: gettransactionheight

Changed

• Improved performance of NeoVM
• Improved large memory pool performance

Fixed

• Fixed startup issue on non-windows platforms
• Fixed console flicker with show state command
• Fixed a dead lock in WalletIndexer
• Fixed an error when exiting

Removed

• Refactored RpcServer and moved wallet related commands to a plugin.

Other Progress

Released neowish, which can distribute TestNet coins in real-time, enabling developers to gain quick and easy access to NEO TestNet resources.(http://neowish.ngd.network/)

Community

NEO DevCon delivered an injection of new enthusiasm into the NEO community. Following the announcement of the NEO Friends program, NGD received over 100 applications from around the world - A big step towards expanding the NEO community across the globe.  In the near future, we will begin to further discuss the development of NEO’s global community with applicants. Registrations can still be made through this link.

As China is the birthplace of the NEO community, we plan to test incentive plans for attracting new developers locally and gradually expand them out to the global community.

Social Media

Twitter: 319,013

Facebook: 30,565

Reddit: 97,773

Discord: 24,577

Medium: 2,281

YouTube: 3,599

Wechat: 16,777

Weibo: 8,879

Events

• On March 9th and 10th, NEO GameCon 2019 was held in Akihabara, Tokyo, attracting over 1,500 attendees. Several blockchain games based on NEO gave presentations and received dozens of media reports around the world. Da Hongfei & Erik Zhang, founders of NEO, and Johnson Zhao, NGD general manager, attended the conference. (Link)
• On March 13th and 14th, Da Hongfei attended the Token2049 Conference held in Hong Kong. He delivered a keynote speech with the theme “Promise of Smart Economy,” and participated in a panel on "Building Smart Contract Platforms." 
• From March 21st to March 23rd, NEO jointly hosted the KIT Hackathon as a co-organizer with Kanazawa Institute of Technology and provided participants with a complete online tutorial to develop dApps on NEO. (Link)

Other Progress

New Employees

Li Chen – C# developer

Chen graduated from the East China University of Science and Technology with an exchange year at the Luebeck University of Applied Science in Germany. He previously worked for Citibank and has joined the NEO R&D department as a C# developer.

Wang Yongqiang - Researcher

Yongqiang graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and has worked for companies such as Alibaba, Yitu and more. Yongqiang joins NGD as a blockchain technology researcher.