Dear Neo community members,

2020 has been a momentous year on various levels-- from the team to the Neo community as well as the greater blockchain space. As Neo celebrates the fourth anniversary of its MainNet launch, we would like to thank everyone for their passion and support for the entire Neo ecosystem. Our community has always been at the center of Neo’s mission, and we are grateful for everyone’s enthusiasm and understanding this past year. 

As we look back upon the last four years, it is incredibly striking just how rapidly the blockchain space has shifted and evolved -- there have been many great innovations around various layers of the blockchain universe, especially the tremendous development of DeFi in the past year. And yet, we are also facing numerous challenges: We are still slow in mass adoption and industry regulation, while scalability and usability are yet to be improved for many platforms. Nevertheless, despite a quickly changing world, Neo remains as committed as ever to driving the development of digital asset protocols. Throughout 2020, we consistently affirmed our commitment to building new standards for digital assets by working together with leading organizations. Back in June, we joined the InterWork Alliance (IWA), a consortium of leading industry and blockchain players, as a founding member, to develop and advocate for the digital asset standards. Later on this year, we also partnered with the Blockchain-based Services Network (BSN) to build the foundation of mass adoption for a global blockchain network, thus enabling us to build our vision of an interconnected and truly frictionless world.   

More significantly, 2020 also marked two groundbreaking milestones for Neo. First, we have launched an interoperability protocol alliance - Poly Network, as a founding member, together with Ontology, and Switcheo. Pioneering heterogeneous interoperability, Poly Network is already enabling cross-chain asset transfers and transaction atomicity in cutting-edge solutions such as Flamingo Finance - an interoperable full-stack DeFi protocol built on Neo. The peak of Total Value Locked in “Mint Rush” reached $1.6 billion USD, among which around $500M were cross-chain assets. After Mint Rush and Mint Rush 2, the Swap module was launched and now has stable liquidity of around $200 million USD. Meanwhile, we are working on the next 2 important modules of the platform, Perp (perpetual contract trading) and DAO (community governance). With these developments, Neo has built up a solid foundation for future DeFi development. 

Moving forward, we are also pleased to share with everyone the latest updates for Neo3. As a new iteration of the Neo blockchain, Neo3 will be a future-proof full-stack blockchain solution comprising a decentralized files storage system - NeoFS and a DID solution - NeoID (both are community-developed), as well as a built-in Oracle. As we move close to the release of Neo3 Preview 4 - most likely the final preview version before Neo3 TestNet goes live, we are finishing up on implementing the new governance and economic model, which includes a new governance committee and a voting-based incentive mechanism. These, together with vast new features and enhancements in system security and performance, Neo3 will surely become the ideal next-gen internet infrastructure for mass adoption. On the other hand, with previous interactions of preview releases, our community developers have also made significant progress in infrastructure migration and improvement. We target to invite everyone to experience Neo3 on the TestNet by the end of the year - with Neo3 MainNet set to launch in the first quarter of 2021. 

In preparation for Neo3, we have various exciting activities planned which we welcome everyone to join in. To facilitate a smooth and seamless transition for our current ecosystem, we are developing an early adopter plan for projects and developers, as well as a migration plan to smoothly transfer tokens and assets. On the other hand, we are also reaching out to new developers by setting up a developer grant program by the end of this year while hosting a hackathon for developers interested in trying out and building on Neo3.

Throughout these past four years, we have built a strong foundation for our future success and growth - and it was made possible through your continued support. With our community at our core, we are confident that together, we can build a more open, connected, and efficient world and realize the smart economy of tomorrow. The future is here, and it is brighter than ever.  

Neo Foundation

17th October 2020