NEO’s upcoming upgrade to its smart economy is dubbed as ‘NEO 3.0’ and is set to be completed by Q2 2020, while aiming to be ready for large-scale commercial use.
The news was shared with Coin Rivet in a press release after co-founder and core developer, Erik Zhang, announced the update.
It details how the team is already “deeply involved” in preparations for the upgrade which is pegged to increase NEO’s speed and stability by “orders of magnitude”. This should help cement NEO as a “compelling choice for large-scale commercial operations”.
Zhang has suggested that NEO’s blockchain technology is aimed at the next generation, commenting: “when we talk about NEO 3.0 being ready for large-scale commercial use, we mean it provides the possibility to run large-scale applications with blockchain technology”.
“In the future, we’d like to see applications such as YouTube, Alipay, and gaming giants like Tencent and Blizzard run on blockchain, and NEO 3.0 will allow these big organisations to do that.”
In a historic move for NEO, it will launch as a new blockchain network from the genesis block. Concurrent development branches for NEO 2.0 and NEO 3.0 will be maintained prior to the 3.0 mainnet launch.
The majority of features will be backwards compatible, enabling developers to continue to build applications without “wasted effort”.
Upcoming features
NEO is also devising an early adopter incentive plan to aid in the transition and has pledged technical support for developers migrating applications. The NEO foundation will be reimbursing costs associated with the testing and re-deployment of smart contracts.
Some of its new features will be:
- An imminent upgrade to NEO’s delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus mechanism – dBFT 2.0. The upgrade improves stability and adds a way to quickly recover data in the rare instance that there is a network failure.
- A huge reduction in the deployment and execution costs of smart contracts.
- Internet Resource Access, a built-in oracle implementation that allows smart contracts to access internet resources during execution.
- NeoFS, a distributed decentralised object storage platform integrated with the NEO blockchain.
- NeoID, a decentralised identity protocol built on NEO.
- A new NEO virtual machine, decoupled from the blockchain and allowing smooth integration with any integrated development environment (IDE).
NEO 3.0 development began in Q4 of 2018 with it scheduled to be finished in Q2 2020. Its testnet is scheduled to launch by June 2019.
Haven’t heard about NEO 3.0 and want to learn more? Discover how NEO 3.0 is nearly here and what else to expect in the future.
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