The Darkest Hour is Just Before the Dawn—NGD Annual Report 2018

Published in

The Neo Pulse

6 min readDec 31, 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%.