NEO DevCon 2019 III | Take a closer look at the NEO Ecosystem, bring NEO closer to users

The inaugural NEO DevCon took place in Seattle on February 16th and 17th, 2019. To review what happened on the first day of the conference, you may read NEO DevCon 2019 I. In today’s article, a deeper understanding on NEO’s future outlook and ecosystem arrangement will be provided through a technical and ideological perspective.

Day 2 of the event mainly focuses on NEO ecosystem overall growth and development. Together with various developers in the NEO ecosystem and dApp main personnel, who shared about the improvements and progress in their projects, the public witness the strengthening of NEO Smart Economy ecosystem.

Distributed Storage System

NEO Saint Petersburg Competence Center (NSPCC), headquartered in Russia, St. Petersburg, is an R&D institution formed to support the NEO core and ecosystem. NEO has always been committed to creating a distributed file storage (NeoFS) integrated with NEO blockchain that allows users to store their data without the reliance on a third party provider. The distributed file protocol developed by NSPCC is an important candidate of NeoFS.

At the conference, NSPCC co-founder and technical director of NSPCC Anatoly Bogatyrev, shared the technology and application of distributed storage systems.

“The first main project established by NSPCC was the development of the distributed file storage system. Integrated with NEO public chain, the system provides distributed storage services for dApp developers, both private and public data storage. The system is independent of the data itself and guarantees anonymity and security. Users will be able to store their data without the reliance on a third party provider and provide users with full control of their data. The service is compatible with Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc. These performances are critical for developing applications for the enterprise.”

Developer Community, NEL

As an important part of NEO’s ecological layout, the developer community plays a pivotal role in driving its application. In addition to technical evangelism, NEL, NEO’s largest Chinese developer community, has always been a pioneer in infrastructure construction. Liu Yongxin, the founder of NEL and founder of NEO Domain Name System NNS, shared the milestone project of NEL in the past year.

“In terms of infrastructure construction, we have mainly developed the following projects:

The first is LightDB. LightDB is mainly used to change the storage part of NEO to network storage and can use Light Node to directly find the network database to execute InvokeScript, which is to change the mode of one node one database of NEO to one node one cluster.

LightDB is modified from rocksdb, adding the concept of data types and tables. NEO’s leveldb storage is byte structure and it can be difficult to interpret what the data represents. LightDB stores data through DBValue data structure, which can describe data type and record modification timestamp. At the same time, different types of data are stored through different tables, such as transactions, UTXO etc., to facilitate query.

LightDB supports network communication, which allows many of our current services to interact with nodes without going through the intermediate service layer, such as querying NEP5 asset balances and UTXO data validation. Third, the storage of the database, with taskblock as a unit, mimics the structure of the blockchain. It is connected in blocks and blocks, which makes the data synchronization very convenient. The backup database can be synchronized in units of taskblock. These are the main features of LightDB, which make it easy to open your wallet, browser, and Dapp.

Another project is NEORay. NEORay is an all-in-one tool for developing, compiling, deploying, and debugging smart contracts. We previously provided a local version, NEORay is an online version to meet cross-platform development needs. Here is NEORay’s contract debugging interface. On this page you can execute the contract step by step and observe various information such as virtual machine execution, notify information and calculation of stack to meet the requirements of contract debugging.

The third important project is the NEO Name Service. As of now, there are already 25,000+ registered domain names on NNS. We have gained a lot of wallet support, such as O3, SEA and NEL’s own wallet. In the future, there will be more wallets to support NNS, such as Trinity, BlaCat, Phantasma, and so on.”

As for NEL’s future development plan, Liu Yongxin said: “We are currently focusing on these points: continue to develop high-performance NEO nodes based on LightDB; develop Chrome extension wallet to facilitate Dapp developers and users; research on token liquidity agreement We will continue to focus on the infrastructure that is lacking in the NEO ecosystem and contribute to building the NEO ecosystem.”

During the Panel discussion conducted on the second day, an important point for discussion is the topic of NEO Eco Wallet. NEON Wallet maintainer Maxwell Lasky, O3’s main designer Alex Knight, NEO Tracker founder Alex DiCarlo, and Youtube’s Datadash channel founder Nicholas Merten were involved in the round table discussion regarding NEO wallet user experience and security enhancements.

NEO Tracker founder Alex DiCarlo believes that: “To improve the user experience, it is necessary to make the product as simple as possible in terms of design concept. Currently, most users still choose their trusted bank for business processing. If the operation is wrong, you can also find the bank to seek technical support. However, if the user loses the private key, the result cannot be reversed. So how can we do a good UI design and reduce the occurrence of irreversible errors, is an interesting question.”

In addition to the above-mentioned speakers, there is also wonderful content of various ecological projects and developers to share however, we are unable to report one by one. Please pay attention to NEO Smart Economy Youtube account for NEO DevCon 2019 the second day of content review.

After the exciting two-day schedule, NEO DevCon, the biggest event of the year in NEO’s ecosystem, has come to an end. We look forward to meeting you in every community and reuniting again at this time of the year. Let‘s build a smart economic future and learn about the era of the smart economy.

Catch up with NEO’s update:

Website：https://neo.org/

Github：https://github.com/neo-project

Reddit：https://www.reddit.com/r/NEO/

Discord：https://discord.io/neo

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NEO_Blockchain

Telegram：https://t.me/NEO_EN

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NEOSmartEcon/

Weibo: @NEO智能经济 https://weibo.com/neosmarteconomy