NEO/antshares news update AUGUST invest now or cry later

Update to NEO 2.0

First of all, a big thank you to all of our supporters and contributors out there. July has been a busy month for all of us, not only with rebranding and preparation for NEO 2.0, but also because of the attention and traction that we have been gaining abroad. Our development efforts are now divided into two fronts; a locally managed development team in Shanghai, and a community driven international team by the name City of Zion. We are all very proud to be working on the NEO platform together with all of you.

The rebranding is now in full progress. Social media and source code has been renamed, and exchanges are to follow. Our new website design is finalized and we are working together with the winning contributor to build all the webpages, which will go live on August 8th. We have in retrospect realized that the community expected a “switch” on July 24th where the whole rebranding process was completed in a second. The website did take longer time than expected and is thus delayed, and our power to manage the name switches on exchanges is limited. We realize that we could have managed the expectations better and communicate clearer with all of you, which is also why we want to have an AMA together with you. The AMA will take place on our Reddit at 10pm (Beijing Time), July 27th.

Finalizing update to NEO 2.0

Along the rebranding to NEO, we are taking the opportunity to update the blockchain network. The Antshares network 1.x has limited smart contract functionality, so we will update it to the NEO network 2.0 with a full smart contract system. The whole update process will be done by August 8th as a celebration of our 1-year ICO anniversary. It will be another busy two weeks for all of us, so we thank you for patience and understanding of our tech focus these coming days.

The following is our upgrade process for NEO network 2.0:

We will first need to upgrade all non-consensus nodes. Exchanges, blockchain explorers, and other services, are required to upgrade to NEO 2.0 before August 8th.
Regular users can, but are not required to, update to the new client before August 8th.
On the day of August 8th, we will upgrade all consensus nodes to NEO 2.0.
After all consensus nodes are updated, users who have not updated to the new client will be prompted to do so when starting the old Antshares 1.x client.
It is the same blockchain, so you can copy the "Chain" folder from the old AntSharesCore into the new NEO 2.0 client folder to speed up the blockchain syncing.
If you have your NEO/ANS, NeoGas/ANC in an exchange, then you don't need to do anything.
All your assets are safe and secure during the whole update process.

If you have any questions regarding NEO, rebranding, update to NEO 2.0, or anything else, then feel free to reach out to us on Reddit and Slack. We are keeping ourselves up to date with the community development and are taking steps to expand our team with more international focused team members. We are also lucky to have one of the most constructive and helpful communities out there, so we thank you once again for all your contributions.

(Community member Malcolm Lerider also made contribution to this blog)