Weekly Report #14–2017.10.10

City of Zion (CoZ) is a global community of open source enthusiasts, with the shared goal of helping NEO achieve its full potential. CoZ primarily operates through the community Slack and CoZ Github, central places where the community shares knowledge and contributes to projects.

CoZ is neither a corporation, nor a consulting firm or a devshop / for-hire group.

Governance

There is no formal process in joining CoZ. Interested individuals will have to do the work first, and the submitted code has to be licensed under the MIT License. Consistent contributors will become eligible to join the CoZ organization, and begin collaborating on projects. The governance process of this organization can be found here.

Funding

Since its inception, the CoZ Council has been in close contact with the NEO Council. The NEO Council provides support to the community, in the form of NEO rewards, which CoZ redistributes weekly.

For individuals who are interested in financially supporting CoZ development, our donation address is AXSoNQEKjmqPBNPg5cNrHyWivfjok3Vj9D.

For transparency, CoZ Council members are excluded from weekly NEO rewards, and any CoZ competitions. This week, 200 NEO were awarded for the following contributions to the NEO ecosystem.

Week in Review

My trip to Shanghai (Written by FCC, founder of CoZ)

On Friday, I met up with the NEO Council in Shanghai, on behalf of CoZ, to strengthen our working partnership in accelerating the development and adoption of the NEO platform. I would like to start by saying that I enjoyed every minute of my trip in Shanghai, and the entire NEO team was very welcoming and receptive, as hosts and partners.

On Saturday, I presented the first public CoZ roadmap, which covers Q4 2017 and Q1 2018. If you missed the livestream of the event, the slides used in the presentation are available here.

Our roadmap reflects the focus of CoZ Council in laying the foundation for dApp development, on the NEO platform. By no means does this roadmap encompass all of the development efforts ongoing within the NEO community. I encourage all developers interested in developing on the NEO platform to join us on Slack, and I am excited to see the depth of developer support within the #develop channel.

After the presentation, I had a private meeting with the NEO Council to discuss various ideas for improvement, and align our long term vision, commonly known as “The Road to Parity” within the CoZ Council. Da and Erik emphasized their commitment in supporting CoZ, committing to a plan which provides funding for CoZ, over the next 5 years. This funding will originate from a small portion of the NEO tokens unlocked in October, which will be spent by CoZ, in small increments. We finished the productive day with a wonderful dinner.

On the last day, I visited the Loopring team and had a pleasant chat with Daniel and Jay. In the near future, we will be publishing joint research articles on cross-protocol / cross-chain solutions, with the goal of developing a robust solution for execution of ERC20 and NEP5 token trades, across LRC and NEX protocols in the future.

You might be wondering, what is NEX? On this note, I will end the report of my trip to Shanghai, and share news that will definitely excite NEO community members.

NEX Announcement

Neon Meta Exchange (NEX), is a decentralized exchange project, founded by four CoZ Council members, namely Canesin (Founder of CoZ), Ethan (Neon wallet creator), Luciano (NeoScan creator) and Fabian (fabwa).

Rest assured, the four members involved in this project will continue contributing in their full capacity as CoZ Council members, for the foreseeable future.

NEX platform is built on a completely new protocol developed within the NEO ecosytem, utilising the best features NEO platform has to offer. NEX will consist of a reference exchange application, which will make it easy for developers building exchanges and payment services, to integrate with the NEX protocol. This project will possess a high level of innovation, building upon research done by Erik, on superconductive exchange technology.

NEO Council will be investing in the token sale of the NEX utility token that will occur at the end of this year, or at the beginning of 2018. In order to execute this token sale, we will be developing a brand new token sale system, that will be open-sourced with a MIT license, and donated to CoZ. This token sale system will include frontend, backend, and smart contract implementations.

Furthermore, the NEX project will be the first project to utilise the token sale legal framework, developed by the NEO Council. As seen above, the NEX decentralized exchange project will fulfil two major milestones listed on the NEO roadmap.

At the moment, we are still evaluating designs for the project’s visual identity. Our landing page is scheduled to go live alongside the NeoScan update, which occurs in one week. Stay tuned for more information on the NEX project.

Campaigns

dApp Competition:

Registration is now open! We hope that the launch of this NEO dApp competition will spark further learning, and sharing of insights on the #develop channel (NEO Slack).

Stack Exchange:

We need experienced Stack Exchange users (with more than 200 reputation) that want to be active in our community, to commit to the proposal. You can do so here.

Development Updates

Neo Python (neo-python):

• Continued development of python smart contract compiler
• Implemented NEP5 compliant smart contract in python, deployed to testnet, and tested functionality across different interfaces (Neon, neo-python, neo-gui). View the smart contract here.
• Further support for invoking NEP5 token methods

Neon Javascript SDK (neon-js):

• NEP-5 support through invocation transactions and invoke RPC
• Code reorganization for transaction construction
• Account model to manage key relationships
• CircleCI integration

Neo Javascript (neo-js):

• Improved unit test coverage
• Bug fixes

Neo Javascript Compiler (neo-js-compiler):

• Add selection support to editor that highlights relevant bytecode
• Fixed JMP/JMPIF address bug when using more than 3 conditionals

Neon Wallet (neon-wallet):

• RPX Token sale support (smart contracts with `mintTokens`)
• New tests
• Linting and reorganization of containers/components

Neo Developer GUI (neo-gui-developer):

• Add string support to param editor
• Add textbox to show invoke results (rather than messagebox)

Blockchain Explorer (neo-scan):

• New design integration
• Code review and upgrades for new design data
• Test fixes

CoZ Community Resources (awesome-neo):

• Addition of new resources relevant to the developer community

Follow CoZ on Facebook, Medium Publication and Twitter for the latest updates on CoZ development!