NEO Council Monthly Report – October

 Author [email protected] posted on 11/1/2017

I always write this monthly report with big excitement, but this time with a bit more excitement than usual. We have had plenty events and progress during October, some of them marking important milestones.First of all, Red Pulse held the first token sale ever on the NEO blockchain. As a first token sale, we are very happy with the stability of the NEO blockchain while performing with reasonable transaction speed. We had blocks with a few thousand transactions and average speed of 28 tx / second. We never reached full load, and are looking forward to more network traffic to prove our full performance.The first token sale also helped us to identify areas to improve. Firstly, there was confusion about the start of the second phase, since time was communicated in clock time and not block time. We ask both users and projects to pay attention to this detail for future development and usage of smart contracts; the block time is the time previous block was created +15 seconds. Secondly, the refund process was far from optimal. We are implementing a solution for instant refund to make it a better experience.The second milestone is the unlocked funding. The 50 million owned by NEO Council is now available and can be used to fund our ecosystem. Of these 50 million, 35 million will stay in the contract and 15 million will be available following the plans in the whitepaper:
http://docs.neo.org/en-us/index.html#distribution-mechanismWe are greatly looking forward to see new community projects and reward accordingly. We have more than enough funds to do so. We receive plenty of requests from people asking for NEO in order to do this or that; this is not how we intend to distribute NEO. In principle, we reward after contribution. If you have a larger project and are unable to fund it, then please join our community Slack. City of Zion reward community members in Slack on weekly basis.Some projects have already been or will be rewarded (from previous funds):

• City of Zion, community managers and developers, has been rewarded pools of NEO to distribute among community contributors.
• Neotracker.io, has received a one-time reward.
• Antcha.in, has received a one-time reward
• Antchain.xyz, has received a one-time reward
• Dean, creator of NeoNewsToday, will receive quarterly rewards to keep up his good work.
• Shargon, Security expert, received a reward for security report on NEO project.
• David, Security expert, received a reward for security report on NEO website
• Coranos, freelance developer, is rewarded for Ledger development
• Many smaller rewards for documentation, translations, meetup organizing, community development, and other ecosystem assistance. All of you are important, and too many to mention all by name.

Moreover, the funding of City of Zion has come to an agreement. City of Zion have secured funding for five years, to be released once per semester. This funding will give CoZ more freedom to reward and promote community contributions that improves the NEO ecosystem. It will also allow CoZ community members to work full time on NEO Smart Economy.CoZ Council
canesin, fabwa, unignorant, totalvamp, afong, localhuman, ashant, lllwvlvwlll, luciano_engelCoZ Members
snowypowers, shawn, evgeny, bjornborg, coranos, revett, andreit, apisit, hal9000, nikolaj-k, yenct15, Shargon, Samuel, Velocihamster, jlqe, birmas, zeshon, Steffel, fetter, kurisu, ytk, milanoooo, lespaul, vincentt, vardthomas, Jhepkema, Fernando Jack, Shou, arithmetric, Lostfella, cinooo, satoshinaireWe at NEO Council are very grateful for the support from City of Zion and look forward to grow our community together. We are also eager to see the results from the CoZ dApps competition which ends at November 16th. At the moment, there are more than 30 dApps participating. For more details, see here: https://cityofzion.io/dapps/1.The third milestone is that the first NEP-5 token got connected for trading on an exchange. The Chinese documentation on how to set up NEP-5 on exchanges is already completed, and we are now in the process of translating it to English. We are also continuously working on the token template and documentation to make it easier for developers.Related to the third milestone, NEO also achieved a fourth one: NEO is traded as main trading pair against RPX and GAS. This is a very important first step in NEO being recognized as a main token and we are welcoming more exchanges to follow suit.The fifth, and last milestone for this month, is that NEO Council announced our "NEO Sponsor Giveback Plan". NEO Smart Economy will be world’s first ICO to offer full-amount giveback to all ICO Sponsors. ICO, a highly-efficient yet controversial financing method has its two sides. On the one hand, it may facilitate funding for blockchain technology development and pool together the community force; on the other, it makes it convenient for defrauders to perform illegal fund-raising under disguise. We hope that the "NEO Sponsor Giveback Plan" will set a good example for the community. The 50% NEO under the management of NEO Council will not be used for the giveback, as it is reserved for the development of community and ecosystem. Sponsors that request giveback in NEO will receive it by NEO Council buying it back from the market. More detailed information about the giveback can be found here: https://neo.org/blog/details/3014Roadmap AdjustmentsNEO DevConNEO DevCon has its preliminary date postponed to January because of scheduling and visa related issues.Decentralization of Consensus nodesWe experienced long block time at Saturday evening, Beijing time. This coincided with RPX listing on Kucoin, and since this is the first exchange to list NEP-5 tokens, we started to investigate the NEP-5 trading process to see why the block was delayed. There was however nothing wrong with the NEP-5 trading, so we looked at the other event which occurred around the same time: the unlocking of 15 million NEO for ecosystem funding.The 50 million locked NEO has never been “broken”, they were stored as one entry of 50 million. Since the sum of NEO has not been divided into smaller parts, all 50 million NEO was sent and 35 million was returned as change (that’s how blockchain work). The problem that occurred was that the 35 million was returned to a change address and not to the original address. That change address was not set to vote as the original address (votes are linked to address). This resulted in two external nominees got selected as consensus nodes, and these consensus nodes were offline. The issue was resolved by transferring the 35 million NEO from the change address back to the original address. The problem was thus a human error and not a technical error.It is far from optimal that a human error has this large impact, and in the end, it boils down to lack of decentralization. Our original plan was to start decentralize in Q1 2018. We are however growing faster than expected and cannot accept the risk with being as centralized as we currently are. The conclusion is that we re-prioritize and start the process of decentralizing today. We believe that NEO community groups and exchanges will be suitable to run consensus nodes; community groups already know the technology, and exchanges are already running full nodes with high uptime and monitoring. We welcome interested parties to reach out to us on [email protected]. A NEP to encourage voting will be presented in the coming weeks.Events and developments during October (not in order of importance)

• First token sale
• Participated and presented at GNOME 2017
• Hosted “Blockchain New Landmark: NEO Global Developer Community”
• Received Canesin from CoZ to launch “Road to Parity”
• Attended “Suzhou Blockchain Technology Exchange Summit”
• Hosted “INNOxNEO Blockchain Open Night: Digital Identity Applications with Blockchain Technology”
• Hosted “NEO JOY @ Nanjing: Exploring the use of Blockchain Technology”
• Hosted “Blockchain Programming Day – Beijing”
• Testing neo-gui-wpf
• Start trial to connect Chinese NEO development community with overseas NEO community
• Technical documentation for deposit and withdraw NEP-5 token for exchanges
• New website, open source: https://github.com/neo-project/neo.org/tree/develop
• Voting simulation
• Neo Enhancement Proposals
• Neo Sponsor Giveback Plan
• Visited South Korea and hosted first Seoul Meetup
• Presentation at the National Assembly Memorial Hall to audiences of The (South Korea) Congressional Legislation Research Center and the Asia (South Korea) Future FinTech Forum. Pictures below.

During our trip to South Korea, we were humbled by the great interest in NEO and were positively surprised by the high knowledge about blockchain technology among the Korean community. We see both interest and market gap for NEO’s technology in South Korea, and it is a very important market for us. We encourage our Korean-speaking community members to join Slack and help us with both community growing and Github translations.As always, we are very grateful to have such an amazing community: all of you reading this report. With the released funds, we are extremely excited; these funds are reserved for you. We now have an incredible opportunity to pick up the pace together with the community, to build a complete Global Ecosystem for Smart

 Economy.Neo Council
2017-11-01