• NEO has released a summary report on its projects for 2018
• The report touches on several arms of the project as well as upcoming projects
• While the market has not spared NEO from the bear, its community keeps growing

2018 was certainly an eventful year for the blockchain industry and NEO saw a lot of changes. As NEO DevCon kicks off, the team released a report on the developments that took place in 2018.

City of Zion — the earliest developer community in the ecosystem

The report touched on how the CoZ and NEO partnership came to be, and what a happy coincidence it was. The team had released their initial white paper and were struggling with translating it, only to find out that CoZ had already done so.

Since then, a number of collaborations have taken place with CoZ, including the development of the NEON wallet and the compiler and Python compiler by CoZ.

CoZ also regularly hosts competitions and training which has helped to not only discover new talent but to train and refine their skills as well.

NEL — the first Chinese developer community

2018 saw the opening of NEO’s first Chinese developer platform.

This platform was created by Liu Yongxin and Li Jianying at the end of 2017. Both had previously worked at NEO and thus, were on a good footing to start NEL.

One of the biggest goals for NEL was to grow the network and bring more developers on board, which it has done through off-line lectures, online streaming courses, community AMA and content communication.

NeoResearch — Latin American developer community

Based in Latin America, NeoResearch is headed by Victor and Igor, who came across the project while looking for a compiler for an Ethereum-based project.

NeoResearch has helped in the development of the NeoCompiler. The NeoCompiler ecosystem has now become decentralized consisting of compilers RPC servers, shared privnet and tools for transaction building and basic/didactic converters.

NeoResearch has also helped organize meetups and workshops in Latin America.

NSPCC — St Petersburg developer community

This arm of the community was formed by Fabian Wahle in St Petersburg, Russia in 2018.

The goal of NSPCC is to support the core infrastructure.

A meet up was held in November 2018 where NSPCC announced the forthcoming NEO distributed file storage system, an update for which is expected to be announced in 2019.

KeyMakers — a Japan-based community

KeyMakers is the Japanese arm of NEO that is headed by Miki from NGD overseas.

This arm works to localize the project infrastructure by participating in local conferences and meetups.

They have also translated the developer handbook into Japanese.

According to the report, the handbook “works as a beginner’s guide for developers to learn about NEO mechanism and compile smart contract on NEO.”

NEXT — a domestic developer community

NEXT is a Hangzhou-based arm of NEO that is behind a number of infrastructural facilities such as Blolys explorer and iwallic wallet.

NEXT is currently working on ‘a dApp incubator dedicated to integrating blockchain with real economy’ as well as tutorials.

It has certainly been a busy year for NEO. And while the market cap has bled terribly – as for every other coin, we can see the team and the ever expanding community laying the foundation for a strong future.