The Darkest Hour is Just Before the Dawn—NGD Annual Report 2018
“2018 was a tumultuous year for us but we have been holding on to the vision of smart economy and will make NEO the most developer-friendly public chain.” — Da Hongfei, NEO Founder
The market has experienced insanity and cooling in 2018 and NEO, as an industry player, had gains and losses. If we think from a dialectic perspective, we would agree that it was the extreme insane market sentiments that popularized the concept of blockchain, thus facilitating the development of the industry. It worked the same way for NEO.
Examining our performance during the whole year, we owe many thanks to the community, which has played a significant role in improving NEO infrastructure jointly with NGD. These communities around the globe, either old or newly established, has contributed to enriching the NEO ecosystem.
As a sub-institute of NEO Foundation focusing on the execution of strategies, NGD will walk through its performance in 2018 from perspectives of NEO community, dApp ecosystem, global performance, technical progress and team building.
Community development
NEO community resources were sufficiently replenished by newly established communities in 2018. Aside from the old and mature communities represented by CoZ, which has developed its own ecosystem and streamlined the process of building NEO infrastructure, there were also other new communities flourishing. NEL is a Chinese developer community established late last year with a series of output such as game SDK development and NEO Name Service (NNS). NeoResearch has assisted with forward-looking research to improve the performance of NEO. Other developer communities like Keymakers, Next, NEO Denver and NSPCC also played their roles in 2018.
Social media followers maintained stable growth rate this year. In 2019, NGD will invest more efforts in producing contents of higher quality to address community concerns and push community boundaries.
Incomplete statistics of NEO Global Community
City of Zion(CoZ) — — Global
New Economy Lab(NEL) — — China
NEO News Today(NNT) — — Global
NeoResearch — — South America
NSPCC — — Russia
NEO Denver — — Colorado, US
Next — — Hangzhou, China
Keymakers — — Japan
Final statistics of the community
Twitter: 315851
Youtube: 3302
Facebook: 30500
Reddit: 97829
Medium: 2100
Wechat: 19915
Weibo: 8913
R&D
NEO client:
NEO-CLI 2.6.0–2.9.3/NEO-GUI 2.6.0–2.9.0
Optimized the consensus algorithm continuously to eliminate forking risk and enhance the stability of the consensus mechanism, further ensured the security and activity of NEO consensus mechanism.
NEP proposal: complete the writting of NEP-6 to NEP-10 and implement of NEP-5 to NEP-10
Testing: Improved the testing process and testing standard, perfected the entire testing system, and used automated testing to increase efficiency.
Ecosystem improvement:
l Consensus node: Optimized the consensus node page. User could have a comprehensive view of NEO node status and NEO holders may file applications for consensus node through the new consensus node page. The consensus node monitoring page is added to build a monitoring system for the consensus node, which is convenient for developers to obtain logs. In addition, the Swiss Telecom Blockchain was elected as the consensus node on NEO TestNet, City of Zion and Royal Dutch Telecom (KPN) was officially elected as the consensus node on NEO MainNet. At present, the NEO MainNet has seven consensus nodes. Netherlands-based telecommunications company, KPN, and open-source community group, City of Zion, host one node each. The other five nodes are currently hosted by the NEO Foundation in various regions around the world.
Document: Publish and update a series of tutorials and technical documents on NEO website and github respectively. For details, please refer to “Community Tutorials” to quickly find the required tutorials.
NEO official website: The global deployment of the official website has been made, added activitiy and DEVCON page, updated client and consensus node page, so that people around the world could understand NEO more quickly and comprehensively.
Blog: Unified page design and added search capabilities.
Added 10 new seed nodes to the MainNet and TestNet respectively, and updated to the current height for the community to quickly access .
Start NEO Vulnerability Bounty Program.
Add webpage sync.ngd.network to manage offline packages automatically.
NEO 3.0:
l Added NEO 3.0 milestone on Github and has started discussion.
dApp ecosystem development
Public chains compete in different areas. The number and liveness of dApps directly tells the prosperity of a public chain. The eco growth department established after NEO was reorganized is responsible for business and ecosystem development. One of its main focus in 2018 was liasing with more developer teams who are willing to build dApps on NEO and maintaining current dApp developer relations.
NNT made an infographic layout of NEO ecosystem at NEO MainNet 2 Year Anniversary, which covers all existing dApps on NEO. The information displayed on ndapp.org will give you a panoramic view of NEO dApp ecosystem. As of now there have been nearly a hundred dApp built on NEO, growing by over 3000% in 2018.
Global activities
NGD has hosted/sponsored over a hundred events in 2018, including community expansion events and purely technical events. The first NEO DevCon was the largest event which gathersed NEO developers together. NGD will also draw experiences from this event and deliver better outcomes in NEO DevCon 2019 to be held in Seattle.
NEO DevCon,Jan
Europe Tour, Jan
Dublin — London — Hamburg — Amsterdam — Vienna
APAC Tour, Mar
Singapore — Tokyo — Taipei — Melboume — Sydney
Europe Tour, Apr
Amsterdam — Lisbon — Madrid — Paris — Vienna — Zurich
South America,May
7th, May in Santiago — 12th, May in Rio de Janerio — 14th , May in Sao Paulo
Chinese blockchain development course (offline)
NEO Blockchain Programming Day — 3rd session
NEO Blockchain Open Class — 6th session (From July to Nov)
Hackathon Tour (From Oct to Nov)
Rotterdam&Delft — Berlin — Zurich
NEO Challenge (From June to Sep )
ShenZhen — London — Tokyo — Chengdu
Competitions
NEO Blockchain Game Competition
NEO Webpage Design Competition & Wallpaper Design Competition & Icon Design Competition
Team Building
NEO Foundation reorganized its subordinate structures in March, 2018 and NGD was newly established. The reorganization was followed by team expansion. There are 38 full-time NGD employees as of now with a growth rate of 200%.
NGD Shanghai Office held a one-day team building event in September.
NGD Milestone Events in 2018
1st NEO DevCon;
NEO Foundation was reorganized and NGD was established;
NEO Sponsor Giveback Plan was complete;
NEOCLI/NEOGUI Upgrade;
NEO Decentralization was further enhanced;
NEO docs page redesign — addition of NEO Tutorials webpage;
NEO Challenge & Hackathon Tour;
NEO MainNet 2 year anniversary;