NEO Makes Progress Towards NEO3 Launch

During the inaugural NEO Community Assembly (NCA), NEO introduced three new products. Fresh off the week-long NCA, NEO launched NEO3 Preview1, a pilot on their testnet that demonstrates considerable upgrades that could soon be incorporated on NEO’s mainnet protocol. These additions have pushed NEO closer to its anticipated NEO3 mainnet launch.

Inaugural NEO Community Assembly (NCA) Product Launches

Taking place from September 2 to 6, the NEO Community Assembly offered powerful insights into mass blockchain adoption within the China landscape by bringing together NEO as well as leading China-based projects such as Ontology, VeChain, PlatON, and Bytom. The biggest news out of this event was the release of three products focused on advancing towards next-gen Internet by enabling large-scale blockchain adoption through NEO’s signature developer-centric approach to innovation.

NEO•ONE offers an end-to-end framework for simplified programming, testing, and deployment of NEO dApps. NEO Blockchain Toolkit for .NET and NEO Express, developed by Visual Studio and Microsoft .NET, is a plug-in to improve the accessibility of smart contract development for both platforms’ large developer communities, 21 million and 7 million respectively. 

Finally, NeoFS provides a system for decentralized file storage that emphasizes privacy, security, fault tolerance, scalability, and performance. The vision for NeoFS is to support dApp users who need to store data by providing a much cheaper alternative to what centralized cloud providers currently offer. The combination of all three tools are part of NEO’s strategy to strengthen the foundations of the project’s growing ecosystem.

NEO3 Preview1 Goes Live

Besides the launch of new products, the focal point of NCA was the talk surrounding the future of NEO’s protocol changes. Since the project published the NEO3 roadmap in April 2019, NEO developers have been working towards a full-scale mainnet upgrade which will provide several improvements that are vital to enterprise adoption. Recently, NEO achieved another milestone with the launch of its NEO3 Preview1 pilot on TestNet, representing a step towards NEO’s goal of building the foundation for next-gen Internet. NEO3 Preview1’s upgrades and features only apply to the TestNet. Nevertheless, they offer a compelling snapshot into NEO3 ahead of the planned migration, which is expected to happen sometime in Q1 2020.

Numerous upgrades have gone into the release of NEO3 Preview1. This includes an auto compression mechanism on P2P messages, which provides savings on space and bandwidth. In turn, this increases the possible number of transactions per second (TPS). While many changes apply to the efficiency of the blockchain itself, there are several refinements made with developers in mind. As one example, NEO 2.x has nine different transaction types that are related to a particular application scenario or provide more niche functionality. With NEO3, there will only be one transaction type. Other changes are focused on small tweaks for specific scenarios. For instance, the time unit of each block timestamp has been changed to milliseconds to open up more possibilities for IoT use cases.