The NEO network has upgraded, and all nodes are now running the delegated byzantine fault tolerance (dBFT) consensus mechanism. Other than implementing a more refined consensus method, the upgrade changes the fee structure and adds a new oversize fee for transactions larger than 1,024 bytes, June 5, 2019.
Upgrade Season
With many new mainnet releases and network upgrades, 2019 is truly shaping up to be an exciting year for cryptocurrency development. The changes to the NEO network are not earth-shattering and mostly focus on optimizing network fees to guard the network from spam attacks and malicious transactions.
"Successfully upgraded NEO MainNet on Monday! The long-waited dBFT 2.0 & NEO-CLI 2.10.2 is proven to elevate the stability and overall performance of the MainNet. We’ll let the numbers speak."
Transactions with network fees below 0.001 GAS are considered low priority, and only 20 are allowed per block. Low priority transactions cannot exceed 1,024 bytes.
The starting fee to become a high priority transaction is 0.001 GAS. The memory pool will be ordered based on the size of the fee, so transactions with larger Priority Fees will be prioritized over transactions with lower Priority Fees. If a high priority transaction size exceeds 1,024 bytes, an additional network fee will be levied on the transaction.
In April 2019, NEO announced their desire to start anew from a new genesis block, dubbing the new blockchain “NEO 3.0.” The new blockchain was considered necessary because the network infrastructure was not capable of handling the performance and stability NEO hopes to achieve.
The plan is to launch NEO 3.0 by the second quarter of 2020 with development currently underway. The new pricing model and dBFT were the first two steps on the NEO 3.0 roadmap, which have now been ticked off.
Muted Growth, Extensive Competition
Smart contracts are undoubtedly turning into one of the most sought after technological innovations from a global viewpoint. Governments and corporations alike are eager to explore their use cases to improve their legacy service offerings.
NEO has seen muted growth in 2018 and 2019, with many other competitors scaling and growing much faster. Ethereum, along with EOS and TRON, continues to dominate the smart contract issuance game, but many competent projects are coming up to provide a broader range of competition.
The Ethereum ecosystem, in general, is stackedwith projects attempting to improve smart contract architecture while TRON has found its niche as a media and gaming platform. For the near future, it doesn’t seem like anyone can break Ethereum’s dominance over smart contracts.
