NEO announces US$100 million ecosystem boost fund at Consensus

At Consensus 2019 in New York, NEO unveiled its new US$100 million EcoBoost fund designed to drive ecosystem growth and development. NEO also outlined various initiatives in its pursuit of making NEO the most developer-friendly blockchain, including NeoFS, NEO Toolkit for Visual Studio, and the NEO Express Node.

Following its successful appearance at Consensus, the NEO team is back to working on NEO 3.0 and building a platform for the Smart Economy of the 21st century.

While founder Da Hongfei’s announcement of the US$100 million ecosystem fund attracted much attention, significant progress was also revealed on development tools that will help make developers lives easier when coding on NEO.

Most noteworthy were the NEO Toolkit for Visual Studio and the NEO Express Node.

John deVadoss, an ex-Microsoft executive who is now heading up NGD’s Seattle office, told attendees at Consensus about his plans to deliver seamless interaction and functions for users, what deVadoss called the “F5 experience.”

His team has been working on building two new tools—the NEO Toolkit for Visual Studio and the NEO Express Node. The NEO Toolkit can be used to write, compile, and debug NEO smart contracts from within Visual Studio, a conventional and widely adopted IDE, whilst the NEO Express Node aims to make it as easy as possible to create, launch, and manage a multi-node private NEO network.

deVadoss gave a demo of the NEO Express Node in which he created a private network, opened a demo wallet, claimed GAS, and deployed a simple NEO smart contract in a matter of minutes. NGD developer Longfei Wang demonstrated a preview version of the new NEO Toolkit for Visual Studio, outlining some of its features.

The US$100 million NEO EcoBoost fund was announced by Hongfei as a continuation and expansion of efforts to boost the growth of the NEO ecosystem. The funds will be used to support dApp development, bolster infrastructure, and foster collaboration with institutions. The EcoBoost program is financed by the NEO tokens held by the NEO foundation and reserved for investment into the ecosystem as outlined in the 2017 NEO whitepaper.

NEO EcoBoost is likely to attract more developers as NEO continues in its efforts towards building NEO 3.0, an optimized version of the current NEO 2.x protocol that will introduce new functionality and allow the blockchain to support large-scale commercial applications. Hongfei told Consensus:

“The mission of NEO 3.0 is to provide optimal infrastructure for mass adoption. The changes to NEO 3.0 include architecture refinement, native contracts, optimization of consensus, and new functionality; for example, Oracle, NeoFS, NeoID and lastly, security improvement.”

Consensus also saw a demonstration of NEO’s forthcoming decentralized and distributed storage platform, NeoFS, developed by the NEO St. Petersburg Competence Center (NEO SPCC).

NeoFS is a peer-to-peer data storage service that will provide secure, private data storage for users, data exchange for small and medium-sized enterprises, and fixed document storage.

It will provide a cost-effective file storage solution that benefits from operating on a decentralized platform. The platform will operate using NEO’s native GAS token to pay for storage and network services.

To find out more about NEO, visit: www.neo.org