NEO Launches NEO3 Preview1 On Testnet

NEO launched NEO3 Preview1 on its NEO3 TestNet, giving users a chance to test new features before the upcoming launch of NEO3 on mainnet.

Top features on NEO like on-chain and off-chain governance as well as Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (DBFT) have already made it one of the more appealing blockchains for businesses and enterprises. Now, the project is adding additional features that improve functionality.

What Is NEO3 Preview1?

NEO3 Preview1 is the first look at some of the changes that are anticipated to occur when the project transitions from its current NEO2 protocol to NEO3. NEO3 TestNet, which was also released on September 16, provides users with the option to check out these improvements. According to NEO, this iteration isn’t a finished product. Rather, it is the first step towards testing what will be introduced in 2020. Based on feedback from their blockchain community, NEO will launch additional builds until the official mainnet release of NEO3.

What Changes Are Found In This Build?

The first, and possibly most fundamental change on NEO3 Preview1, is the decision to switch from a UXTO model to an account-based model to record and save state. Along with this move, NEO and GAS are implemented as native contracts and follow the NEP-5, NEP-10 standards so that the operation of digital assets follow a unified standard. The goal of this move is to give users more flexibility and functionality when creating assets on NEO.

In #NEO3, all the UTXO-based global assets have been removed and replaced in favor of the contract-based account model. NEO and GAS are implemented as Native NEP-5 which can be handled by smart contracts. Witness Scopes will secure NEP-5 transfers on NEO3. https://t.co/sMKIB0BoGi — Erik Zhang (@neoerikzhang) September 17, 2019

In addition to the potential for lower system fees and network fees, the NEO development team has introduced changes in NEO3 which could decrease the NeoVM opcode fee to about 1/1000 of the cost needed to perform the same operations on NEO2. As a result, users are likely to see lower contract costs.

Overall, there are several optimizations that not only make the process of developing on the NEO blockchain simpler for developers but could also improve the performance of the blockchain. NEO3 will introduce a new auto compression mechanism on P2P messages.

According to developers, this could possibly lead to space savings of over 92% in some cases with large block sizes and large compression ratios. This upgrade could also save bandwidth and make it possible for NEO to improve the average number of transactions per second it can handle. The NEO3 Preview1 build is available for anyone to download and try out on the NEO3 testnet.

NEO 3.0 Roadmap

Since Q4 2018, NEO has been developing NEO3. The goal is to complete all of the steps in the roadmap in Q2 2020. The project appears to be on schedule in its execution of this plan. Currently, the project is readying for the migration by ensuring most of the new features of NEO3 are backwards-compatible and NEO 2.x dApps will be valid even if deployed to NEO3.

NEO Global Development (NGD) is providing technical support to help developers with the migration of their dApps. When NEO3 is activated on mainnet, NEO and GAS holders will have the ability to swap tokens to activate new ones that are compatible with NEO 3.0.