City of Zion, the official community group for NEO development, has announced they plan to build a decentralized exchange within the NEO ecosystem. Their upcoming exchange will be called the Neon Meta Exchange (NEX), and is built on a completely new procotol developed for the NEO ecosystem.
The Neon Meta Exchange will also feature a reference exchange application, which can serve as a blueprint for developers to build their own exchanges and integrate with the NEX protocol. A NEX token sale will take place later this year, or in the beginning of 2018. I could not find more details on this token, and it's sale, yet.
In order to facilitate this token sale, CoZ will be developing a completely new token sale system. This is likely due to the failures that occurred during the Red Pulse token sale recently. The NEO Council will be an investor of the NEX utility token.
Interestingly the announcement also points out that the NEX project will be the first project to utilise the new token sale legal framework. The wording of this is interesting, and makes me wonder if these plans mean that NEO has figured out a way to re-introduce ICO's/token sales in a way that is legal (in China). It is, more or less, expected by many that NEO will take a place in China's crypto-future, and if NEO officially is allowed to offer ICO token sales in China that will be huge. 🚀
Lastly, the announcement states that the Neon Meta Exchange is in fact the fulfillment of the decentralized exchange project on the NEO roadmap. For a while it seemed like the decentralized exchange project may have been planning to be built ontop of the Loopring protocol, but this announcement seems to refute that theory. On the flipside, Loopring is mentioned in the announcement. It states CoZ members have visited Loopring, and have agreed to publish joint research articles on cross-protocol/cross-chain solutions with the aim of developing a solution for trades across the LRC and NEX protocols. This seems to indicate that NEX will, in fact, be linked to the Loopring (go do your research on this one).
You can read the full CoZ announcement in the weekly report here
Please consider Upvoting, Resteeming or Following if you liked this content! I write frequently about crypto-related things, so consider following me if you are interested in that sort of thing! Thank you!