When trying to determine the best smart contract blockchain for today’s developers, NEO certainly deserves consideration (see our NEO guide). The platform is much faster than Ethereum (daily speeds of 1,000 – 10,000 transactions per second are standard); NEO doesn’t depend on arcane mining security (NEO’s Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance may prove to be the best in industry), and NEO makes developing dApps easy by supporting all popular programming languages.
As NEO gradually adds more masternodes to become more decentralized, this Chinese blockchain seems to tick all the boxes. If ever there was a smart contract blockchain in need of a “killer app”, NEO is it. Fortunately, its Western dev community, City of Zion, is leading the charge.
NEO’s City of Zion
NEO leans hard on the City of Zion – it must. As a Chinese blockchain, many of the materials and communications issued by NEO are in Chinese. The blockchain benefits from massive western interest. For this reason, NEO has been wise to support volunteer coalitions like CoZ, essentially funding them as if they were core NEO developers.
This has allowed CoZ to create such flagship NEO projects as the NEON wallet, centralized crypto exchange and currency NEX, and now the NEO Tutorial Competition. Tutorials aren’t fascinating in and of themselves, perhaps, but they are a major step forward when it comes to NEO’s westward expansion.
A year ago, a Western developer might find it hard to create a dApp on NEO for a number of reasons. 1) GAS requirements were too costly (an issue NEO is now reconsidering), 2) best practices had not yet been developed, and 3) English language tutorials were few and incomplete.
Best practices for NEO dApp development are now standardised. NEO’s announcement that they may remove the GAS cost barrier for new dApps could be one less barrier to entry for first-class developers. Finally, the introduction of new developer tutorials through this competition will allow many more to release their creations on the NEO blockchain.
CoZ’s NEO Tutorial Competition
The now-concluded CoZ NEO tutorial competition has 10 winners, each rewarded with 1,350 GAS ($7,087.50 USD). Here’s a breakdown of the winners.
- How to Write NEO Smart Contracts
- How to Make a Turn-Based Video Game With NEOContract, ASP.NET Core, SignalR, and AngularJS
- Creating a Video Game With NEO & Unity
- How to Release NEO NEP-5 Tokens Using NEO’s Private Net and Go
- NEO C# Smart Contract Development Part 1
- NEO Smart Contract Developer Setup for Java
- Practical Tips for Developing NEO Smart Contracts
- Generating Random Numbers With NEO Smart Contracts
- NEO ICO Tutorial Video (Series)
- Designing & Developing a NEO dApp
These titles will all be available to the general public through the City of Zion. A further 21 applications were received and may be released. The quality of the submissions involved should be encouraging to NEO investors and users, who hope to see the platform used for world-class development, beyond the usual purview of blockchain technology.
For now, NEO prices remain severely depressed following months of market declines. However, NEO has managed to sustain community interest through clear communication, the development of NEO 3.0, and steady performance. With these new resources, hopefully Western NEO development will be further cultivated.
(*Information in this article should not be taken as investment advice.)
Featured image source: Flickr