February was a productive month in the Neo ecosystem. The month was marked by continued expansion of exchange support for tokens of Neo and Neo ecosystem projects, new partnerships, and ongoing ecosystem project deployments to the Neo TestNet and MainNet. It also included significant new initiatives such as the latest Neo N3 hackathon, a decentralized community funding platform for the Neo ecosystem, and a new portal for Neo N3 developers. 

Migration, Exchange, and Token Listings

Notable exchange support and token listings:

• HitBTC migrated NEO and GAS assets from Neo Legacy to Neo N3, adding to the growing list of exchanges that allow holders to buy and sell NEO and GAS tokens.

• GhostMarket’s GM governance token was listed on non-custodial exchanges including Quickswap and Demex.

• Flamingo Finance added the CAKE token to its DeFi platform and launched an FLP-FLM-fCAKE pool, allowing users to convert Flamingo assets to fCAKE (the NEP-17 wrapped version of the BEP-20 CAKE token) and unwrap fCAKE using a connected wallet that supports BSC.

Governance

Everstake released a video tutorial that walks users through the Neo N3 governance process.

GrantShares, a community funding platform to decentralize distribution of developer funding and grants for the Neo ecosystem, prepared for its MainNet pilot test in February. The project, run by AxLabs, has since launched its initial website. Community members interested in staying informed can register their interest on the GrantShares site.  

Community Engagement

First hackathon of 2022

Neo Global Development (NGD) released a teaser video promoting the Neo Polaris Launchpad, the first Neo hackathon of 2022. This event is the latest in what will be an ongoing series of NGD-sponsored hackathons to continue to attract top talent and innovative new projects to the Neo ecosystem.

Neo Polaris Launchpad features five competition tracks, including DeFi, NFT and Metaverse, Infrastructure, DAO, and General (an open innovation track), a prize pool of $500,000, and opportunities for post-event business incubation support. The Planathon, an optional first phase of the event, is happening now and has included a series of panels and other support to help participants prepare to build their projects. Participants can visit polaris.neo.org to learn how to sign up for the Hackathon phase, which starts on April 12.

AMAs and other virtual events

NGD hosted a Neo Live AMA session with Mega Oasis, an NFT marketplace that launched in February.

Numerous other virtual community events will be ongoing to support Neo Polaris Launchpad participants and other N3 developers throughout the spring.

Neo in the news

BSN, a cross-cloud, cross-portal, cross-framework global infrastructure network used to deploy and operate all types of blockchain dApps, announced that Neo’s technology will be among the blockchain frameworks used to form a China-focused ecosystem on the Blockchain-based Service Network’s (BSN) Open Permissioned Blockchain.  

Neo appeared in several articles by CoinTelegraph in February:

• An article that highlighted Neo’s infrastructure development and featured commentary from leaders with NFT projects that run on Neo N3

• An article that discussed the impact of the Neo N3 blockchain, new NFT marketplaces, and China’s BSN on Neo

• An interview with NEO holders who spoke to why they hold NEO 

Neo and Diesis (a European-based social economy network) announced a collaboration to drive the creation of a safer, decentralized, and circular global economy.

John deVadoss, President of NGD Enterprise, spoke as the featured guest in an episode of The Irish Tech News podcast, where he discussed the Neo Blockchain Toolkit, interoperability, open source standards and more. His commentary also was featured in a CryptoSlate article about why big tech is losing talent to crypto, and Web 3 projects.

Lili Zhao, Director of Neo Ecosystem Growth, joined the Dukascopy TV YouTube channel to discuss the Metaverse. She also was announced as a keynote speaker at the upcoming Paris Blockchain Week Summit that’s happening in person April 13-14th. Neo is a sponsor for the upcoming summit, which will include more than 3,000 attendees, 70 sponsors, 250 speakers, and 100 media partners.

Ecosystem Growth

Neo Global Development (NGD) provided retrospectives of the projects that took part in the successful Early Adoption Program in 2021. Part 1 and Part 2 retrospectives for the Early Adoption Program are available. Look for new 2022 partnerships to be announced through the NGD EcoBoost program in the coming weeks.

Some highlighted activities in February within the Neo N3 ecosystem included:

• Dogerift, a new meme-based game, joined the Neo N3 ecosystem, announcing plans to release an alpha version this spring.

• Flamingo Finance:

• Announced support for Ledger following the release of a new version of the Neo Ledger app. Once the update has been completed on the Ledger device, users can connect to Flamingo via Neon Wallet.

• Surpassed 100,000 swaps since migrating from Neo Legacy to N3.

• The NekoHit Project, a decentralized crowdfunding platform, launched on the Neo N3 MainNet.

• NeoBurger integrated support for Neon Wallet, allowing users to claim GAS from bNEO via the Neon Wallet.

• Rentfuse launched on the Neo N3 TestNet and completed a test minting.

More information about activities across the ecosystem in February is available in the Weekly Reports on the Neo News Today website.

 Developer group highlights

February marked the second full month of stable operation for Neo v3.1. New applications continue to deploy on Neo N3. Core developers shifted their efforts to code maintenance and began to explore new enhancements for the protocol.

A notable special initiative to support the N3 developer community came in the form of a new portal for developers. The Neo Product Experience Team released a preview of Neo Developer Resources, a new developer portal on the official Neo.org website that makes it easy to find, use, and contribute to a comprehensive set of tools and resources to help developers build on the Neo N3 blockchain. The portal will be updated with new tutorials and other resources on an ongoing basis.

See the February Technical Development Monthly Report for a detailed update on the month’s progress.