Introduction  

From start to finish, September was a month of momentum for Neo N3 and the Neo community. The month opened with the Neo N3 Mass Migration phase and closed with a successful Neoverse event. In between, there were many community engagement events, new projects welcomed to the ecosystem, and continued progress from Neo’s community development groups. 

Regular readers of the Neo Global Monthly Report will notice a change in format for this edition. We are updating the composition of these reports to make them easier for readers to consume: Instead of delivering one report every month detailing all activities within the Neo ecosystem, we will begin alternating each month between focusing on general progress and focusing on development.

This edition is the former and will provide you with a roundup of the most important general ecosystem progress from last month. Key topics this month include:

• Migration and community engagement
• Ecosystem growth
• Blockchain standards
• Development progress

Migration and community engagement

Neo N3 MainNet migration entered the final phase

Migration to Neo N3 went into full swing in September as the Mass Migration phase opened on September 1st. The Neo Foundation offered NEO token bonuses as a reward for early migration, starting at 1% and reducing down to 0.5% over a two-month period.   

In September alone, a total of 30,921,991 NEO and 10,378,258 GAS were migrated from Neo Legacy to Neo N3. Including the tokens that were migrated by the Neo Foundation and users during the Early Bird migration period, over 65% of native assets were moved to Neo N3 by the end of the month.

Custodial exchanges began migrating NEO and GAS assets from Neo Legacy to Neo N3

With Mass Migration well underway, multiple custodial exchanges began implementing support for the Neo N3 network:

CEX.IO was first out of the gate to announce its support. CEX.IO automatically migrated any legacy NEO tokens held on the platform to N3 and signaled that it would distribute NEO bonuses in accordance with the Neo N3 Migration Incentive Program. 

Gate.io quickly followed, also automatically swapping legacy tokens to Neo N3. Users are still able to send their tokens to the exchange to migrate to the new network. Withdrawals are only available to Neo N3.  

Huobi and OKEx both paused deposits and withdrawals of Neo Legacy assets as they prepared for Neo N3 migration. 

Looking ahead to the remainder of 2021, other large custodial exchanges that have indicated their intent to support N3 assets this year include Binance, Bittrex, and Bitfinex. 

GAS generation transitioned from Neo Legacy MainNet to Neo N3 MainNet

To ensure consistency in Neo’s total GAS supply, the Neo Legacy MainNet stopped generating GAS when it reached block height 8,000,000. On Sept. 19, GAS generation shifted to Neo N3 only. 

At this point, the circulation of GAS on Neo Legacy was exactly 52,000,000, equal to the initial supply of GAS minted on Neo N3.

From this point forward, NEO holders who wished to continue generating GAS were required to migrate their tokens from Neo Legacy to Neo N3. Doing so enabled participation in governance to receive increased GAS rewards by voting for Neo Council members to manage and decentralize the Neo network. 

Readers should note that even though GAS generation has ceased on Neo Legacy, NEO token holders with unclaimed GAS can still claim their existing tokens.  

Neo Council reduced GAS fees by 80%

Speaking of the Neo Council, the committee stepped up and performed its first action on the Neo N3 MainNet on Sept. 14 by reducing network and system fees by 80%. The council’s action drastically reduced the costs of transactions on Neo. 

Prior to the reductions, the cost for a GAS transfer on Neo N3 was approximately US $0.56, and the cost for a simple NFT mint was around $2.91. 

Following the update, the cost for a GAS transfer on Neo N3 moved closer to $0.10, and the cost for a simple NFT mint near $0.60. 

Community engagement: 12 AMAs

To go along with all the energy surrounding migration events, September saw strong engagement among the NGD leadership team, Neo partners, and the Neo community across 12 AMA events. During the month:

• Neo co-founders, Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang, held an AMA on Neo Reddit to discuss all things Neo N3. Highlights are available here.
• NGD hosted Neo partners TOTHEMOON and Humswap in AMAs on NeoLive.
• John Wang, Head of Neo Eco Growth, joined AMAs hosted by these Neo partners:

• • Crypto SquadX 
  • BlockChain Core
  • Blockelite
  • Decentralized Club
  • Toko Crypto
  • OKEx  
  • O3 Community  
  • Crypto Miners 
  • Crypto Challengers 

Watch for ongoing opportunities to connect with NGD and Neo partners in AMA discussions over the coming weeks.

NGD rolled out Neoverse to celebrate the Neo N3 launch

The most exciting part of the Neo N3 MainNet launch is all the new applications it will enable. The NGD team and the Neo community took time to celebrate with Neoverse, an N3-themed NFT mint and collection event. 

Users could join the event by acquiring blind boxes through direct or secondary market purchases or by receiving airdrops through participation in ecosystem activities.

Neoverse featured 27,000 blind boxes, each containing one of nine different Element NFTs. Each Element NFT fragment represented one key piece of Neo N3 functionality, such as NeoFS, Oracle, and One Block Finality. Participants could burn a complete set of nine Element NFTs to mint a special N3 Collector’s Edition NFT. The collectible NFTs also carry “VIP” privileges in the Neo ecosystem.

Three renowned digital artists crafted custom works for the event:

• The N-Series by Aleksandr Kuskov
• The E-Series by BHQS Chen Bin 
• The O-Series by Reva

By the numbers, 27,000 Neoverse NFT blind boxes were airdropped to community members by NGD and Neo ecosystem partners COZ, GhostMarket, BlockChain Cuties, and NeoLine, or purchased through the Neoverse website. The blind boxes sold out within 40 hours, and trading volume was $254,000 USD across 903 wallet addresses.

N Series - Aeras

Ecosystem growth

Catalyzed by the mass migration to the all-in-one Neo N3 blockchain, September brought many new beginnings for the Neo ecosystem. New projects joined the community, and activities centered on the Neo N3 migration and other initiatives began to bring alive the promise of the new Neo blockchain.

Three new projects joined the N3 Early Adoption Program

Neo Global Development (NGD) accepted three new projects into the N3 Early Adoption Program. This program is a $10M initiative designed to incentivize development of new dApps on the Neo N3 blockchain. It is part of Neo’s broader $200M set of investments allocated across multiple tracks to support Neo ecosystem growth, nurturing projects ranging from those of grassroots developers to established businesses and institutions and everything in between. 

The new projects accepted into the program in September were:

• Humswap, a DeFi platform built on Neo N3 to offer liquidity pools for various tokens, a marketplace for NFTs, and token swapping, along with the opportunity for users to play games and win prizes.
• TranslateMe Network, an instant translation service using a trustless protocol that leverages machine translation, human validation, and blockchain technology to enable more efficient, accurate translations while enabling human translators to generate ongoing revenue streams from their contributions.
• Rentfuse, an NFT-renting protocol layer to enable Neo N3 NFT owners to rent out their assets in both the metaverse and the physical world.

NGD will continue to accept new projects into the N3 Early Adopter program through year’s end.

Ecosystem projects announce new plans and hit new milestones 

Outside of the NGD-led N3 Early Adoption Program, new projects still found their way to the ecosystem. At the same time, existing projects made plans to expand into Neo N3, launched new initiatives, and achieved new milestones. Some highlights included:

• Elements, a server backend engine for games and applications that require cloud connectivity, announced plans to integrate with Neo. 
• Flamingo Finance announced its Neo Legacy to Neo N3 migration plan and previewed its upcoming Initial DEX Offering module (IDO).
• GhostMarket announced upcoming support for additional blockchains and planned launch of a governance token that will live on the supported chains.
• NekoHit announced that it has started developing on Neo N3, including making its smart contract more scalable, supporting the NeoLine wallet, and making additional documentation available. 
• NNT issued its first developer grant, the first of two grants to encourage developers to explore building on Neo N3 and share their experiences.
• OneGate announced the launch of its dApp store, with phase 1 plans including the development of a gateway for Neo N3 products.
• Poly Network achieved a significant total trading volume milestone, exceeding $11.4B.
• TranslateMe Network added translation support for 14 new languages with the update of its Telegram Translator to v5.2.14.  

Blockchain standards

InterWork Alliance (IWA) merged with the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC)

Continuing the effort to define industry-level standards for the blockchain of the future, the InterWork Alliance (IWA) merged with the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC).

The GBBC is a Swiss-based international non-profit organization that launched in 2017, composed of more than 330 institutional members. It aims to further the adoption of blockchain technologies by engaging with regulators, business leaders, and changemakers.

Founded in June 2020 by Neo, Microsoft, Accenture, and other industry partners, the IWA is now an initiative within the GBBC that will continue to build blockchain-agnostic frameworks and standards, advancing the goal of helping blockchain technology achieve mainstream adoption. 

Development progress

As mentioned at the beginning of this report, moving forward, this report will alternate between general progress reports and development focused reports. However, these general progress reports still will give you an overview of the progress achieved by Neo core and community teams throughout the month.

Core developers completed preparations for the Neo v3.0.3 release

Enhancement of the core Neo protocol continued at the same pace as development prior to the N3 launch. Completed tasks in September included user experience improvements in NeoCLI, two new RPC API methods for accessing historical states, and support for ECC encryption/decryption in the core.

Further components of the NeoFS C# port approached completion. Plugins that provide a NeoFS CLI and the necessary logic to operate InnerRing nodes are under review, while the storage implementation is undergoing testing.

Developer communities further refined Neo's multi-language infrastructure for dApp developers

We’ve come to expect steadfast progress from Neo’s global development community, and September was no different:

• NGD Enterprise shipped a preview release of its new NeoTrace tool, enabling powerful new debugging capabilities using historical network states. 
• AxLabs implemented a new test framework for Neow3j to simplify the automated testing of Java smart contracts, working out of the box on established tools such as JUnit and testcontainers.
• COZ  enabled migration for Ledger Nano hardware wallet users in Neon Wallet v 2.9.0+, enabling them to migrate from Neo Legacy to Neo N3 through Neon.
• Red4Sec contributed its expertise to the NeoFS C# implementation with a code analysis, and provided smart contract auditing services to a community project. 
• Neo SPCC published its usual plethora of improvements across its products, including but not limited to NeoFS node, contract, and service updates; an experimental P2P state exchange extension for the NeoGo node; and a prototype sFTP gateway for use with NeoFS.
• The Neo Tracker team neared completion of NEO Tracker for N3 and published a new version of NEO-ONE for the N3 platform, featuring a MainNet compatible node and numerous compiler upgrades. 
• NeoResearch officially launched its in-browser developer environment NeoCompiler Eco for N3, making use of recent fixes applied to its csbiginteger implementations in C++ and JS.

What’s in next the Neo Global Monthly Report: Development deep dive

The pace of activity that kicked off last month with the Mass Migration shows no sign of letting up. The Neo team will continue to share the highlights with you from monthly happenings during this energizing time. Looking ahead to the next Neo Global Monthly Report, watch for a development-focused edition providing in-depth details on the significant progress made during September and October.