- The highlight of the report is NEO DevCon 2019 that will take place in February
- The report covers improved technical aspects of NEO
- Gao Yuan has joined the NEO team, according to the blog post
Events in Pipeline
Several events were hosted or attended by NGD in December. The first one was the Blockchain Symposium held by the Universität Freiburg in Germany on December 1st, which was attended by NGD EG director Lili Zhao. The second event was held by NGD. It was a hackaton titled “Use Python, C# and Javascript to Create Smart Contract Prototype for Services on NEO Blockchain” in St Petersburg, Russia, which took place on December 8th and 9th.
In December, NEO DevCon 2019 was announced; it will take place in Seattle, US on February 16th and 17th. It will be the second-ever NEO DevCon, the first being DevCon 2018. The list of speakers includes senior executives from companies like Microsoft and Accenture. More speakers are to be announced. Tickets are available for purchase.
December also saw NEO take new steps in the direction of decentralization. The team released and updated “How to Become a Consensus Node” document containing detailed information on consensus node distribution and selection schedule. The 7 existing consensus nodes will be delegated to independent parties during 2019, allowing the network architecture to become decentralized.
Development progress
During the December, NEO saw several of its technical aspects upgraded:
- NEO-CLI 2.9.3 was released;
- Hash interop names were introduced to save space in compiled bytecode (smart contract);
- Hot configurations for plugins were introduced;
- There is now an option to claim GAS using changeAddress CLI command.
P2P was improved as well. The system now limits incoming P2P connections based on parameters; the performance of the P2P network for header and block propagation is better.
Improving the stability
During December, numerous issues have been fixed. These include the one that was able to cause chain sync to get stuck, display error that occured after opening the NEO-CLI wallet and bugs in both the consensus algorithm and smart contract cost calculation. Thanks to upgrades of NeoVM, several other bugs have been eliminated and the execution is now more stable and secure than ever before.
More transparent than ever
NEO Foundation has announced the plans to publish the financial data within three weeks from December 31, 2018. This is another action that should further increase transparency of NEO – a goal the team has set in the middle of 2018.
Changes in the team
The NEO team itself has improved, too – it was joined by Columbia University graduate Gao Yuan, whose previous workplaces include China UnionPay International, Qdaily, and The Beast. He will work at NGD as senior international marketing manager. NGD also moved into a new office this month.