As we witness the close of October and enter the first week of November, many crypto enthusiasts are curious to see if the tables will turn for digital assets, as most have experienced less-than-stellar results over the past 30 days.
Bitcoin, for example, has experienced its lowest volatility in years, but this has resulted in relatively stagnant prices for the father of cryptocurrency. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $6,300 – a $100 spike since its recent drop to $6,200.
Bitcoin’s latest track record has caused some traders to put their faith into competing altcoins such as Ethereum and Litecoin. Chinese digital asset NEO has also gained widespread attention. Often regarded as the “Chinese Ethereum” and formerly known as Antshares, NEO is a smart economy platform able to execute and create across varying blockchains.
NEO’s Progress in October 2018
October 2018 marked an important month for the digital competitor, which celebrated its 2-year anniversary since launching on the mainnet on October 17, 2016.
In addition, Dutch telecom service provider KPN was voted in as a consensus node on the NEO mainnet following the platform’s latest election on October 20. This is the latest in a string of moves designed to make NEO more decentralized. 2 other consensus nodes have been voted in in recent months: CoZ in July 2018 and Swisscom Blockchain in September 2018.
NEO is scheduled to fully democratize the election of consensus nodes in 2019. Information on NEO consensus nodes can be found here.
In terms of development updates, NEO shared that their mainnet and testnet have been upgraded to 2.9.0. They’ve also launched NEO-CLI 2.9.1.
A Growing Community
In its October monthly report, NEO shared that the platform is boosting its global expansion efforts to much success, stating:
Japan-based NEO developer community Keymakers has been making progress in education and technical documentation, opening the door to NEO for many Japanese-speaking developers. AmazonNeo is another newly-established community organization focused on growing NEO in Latin America. NGD also held its first meetup in Russia, with the purpose of engaging local community resources.
And it’s clear that NEO is striving to actively include their community members in key processes.
October also saw the conclusion of the first NEO Creative Design Competition, after roughly 100 designers from over 30 different countries entered to show off their latest NEO-based projects. The competition came to an end on October 22, with developers like Nicholas Ang from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, winning a special Nominee Award during the 5th week of the event.
Ang’s winning entry involved a newly designed NEO-based ecosystem that could enhance smart contracts capabilities. Other contest winners included Jake Holland – who took home a special award for his NEO icon designs – and Chau Ly for his revamped design of NEO’s official website.
NEO’s Expanding Social Reach
NEO is also adding constant storage for NEOContact and is experiencing heightened popularity on social media. On its blog page, the company mentions that NEO now boasts over 317,000 followers on Twitter and over 30,000 on Facebook. Over 3,000 people are subscribed to its YouTube channel, while over 2,000 individuals read its Medium posts regularly. The company also has nearly 100,000 followers on Reddit.
NEO offers the public an opportunity to ring in with comments and suggestions and recommends that they send their inquiries directly to [email protected] or join the NEO Discord channel and discuss their topics there.
