Finally, the Feb 16th-17th NEO 3.0 Devcon Conference went down on a freezing, packed Hyatt Regency’s conference room in Seattle. Blockchain fanatics, developers and, of course, the media were some of those who braved the unfriendly temperatures of the seaport city.

It’s safe to say the 2-day event was a success. Various dignitaries in attendance got to hear about NEO’s future plans, especially on NEO 3.0, plus a host of other highlights. Also, the co-founder gave a keynote speech on how far the Blockchain technology has come.

In a nutshell, though, everything went on smoothly with several things to write home about. If you never got a chance to make it, don’t worry – we’ve got your back.

It was regrettable that NEO co-founder couldn’t make it to such a high-profile gathering in person. Erik Zhang, despite having spoken highly of the meeting, only attended via a video conference, through which he made his presentation. And he rightly made up for his absence by unveiling the news that probably everyone wanted to hear.

In line with the event’s tagline “ContiNEO – We keep on going,” his presentation was about the core goal of 3.0, which basically revolved around its intended application in industry-scale use. His sentiments dealt on the fact that, despite having been around for a decade now, no single Blockchain project is currently what NEO is envisioning to do.

Ideally, part of NEO 3.0’s role when it finally starts to be used in large scale commercial uses will be to combat the current issues on the global scale. As the co-founder said, it will help solve issues around gas prices, stability in the industry, issues pertaining to scalability in the crypto world, and so forth.

NEO’s current VM-supported smart contracts will feature native contracts, for the first time. This means users will conveniently “run whichever native code” on it directly. They’ll not need to deploy or upgrade, something that infamously creates hash changes.

And the essence of this is to enhance scalability; increased TPS speeds that enable quick verification of transactions. Other than that, users will get unlimited data storage capacities.

What this feature aims to solve it the most common issue surrounding NEW and creating assets. Previous versions come with limited ways of creating assets and most of them are hardly utilized. However, with this feature, NEO 3.0 will enhance how the system performs.

In Smart Contracts, via URLs, NEO 3.0 users will freely access any resources on the web. It will only take the processing of transactions and confirmation of data consistency for data pair to be entered on a block header. Once this is done, the rest of the nodes will access the block header and find resources that are consistent as it executes transactions.

This feature is important because it will counter flaws in the network. It will essentially add extra steps on the working of the DBFT Consensus mechanism when the nodes are offline. This, according to Zheng, is meant to every NEO transaction is 100% irreversible.

Smart Contracts can efficiently store data, although the costs involved are sky-high for enterprises. And so, for a workable solution, NEO will introduce NeoFS – affordable and distributed storage networks with spaces for data storage. Users will essentially share any unused space within the network.

Well, that’s probably the billion-dollar question in the minds of NEO’s a thousand contributors and over half a million users.

However, as it turned out, it would take a while before they break the ground since even when the timeline for such a mega project is still decidedly TBD. For many, 2020 is a realistic target given that NEO 00 hasn’t started yet. The co-founder was categorical in his presentation, saying that no other company would do invest in a similar venture in the near future.

What he may have deliberately avoided speaking about, especially because of the undertaking’s sheer size and requirements, was that it would probably require a total overhaul for it to work. According to industry pundits, NEO at its current state can’t support Zhang’s vision and only a hard fork, plus a return to Genesis block would make it feasible.

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