As expected from the news announcement from yesterday, NEO has increased their efforts to decentralize. Today they have voted in one of the CoZ nodes to act as a consensus node on the network. New has also surfaced about the voting mechanism and work has started to incorporate it into wallets.
DECENTRALIZATION
The big news of today was the addition of one of the City of Zion community nodes to become an official consensus node on the live NEO blockchain. Since up until now all consensus nodes have been under control of the NEO foundation, today marks the official start of NEO's decentralization process.
CoZ has been succesfully operating consensus nodes on the NEO Testnet for the past six months, as have the two partners Fenbushi Capital and KPN Telecom. The mainnet itself remained fully under the NEO council control up until now.
While the addition of the CoZ node is great news, the implications are still rather small since NEO counts a total of 7 nodes and 6 of these are still under control of the NEO council. Still, it is a step in the right direction and dates have been mentioned for further decentralization. Both the Fenbushi Capital and KPN nodes are expected to be voted in at the end of 2018, with a public open campaign for election of all consensus nodes following in 2019.
NEO has launched a website where it is possible to keep track of the consensus nodes, as well as the network traffic. Have a look at this website to see more details.
VOTING MECHANISM
The NEO whitepaper has been updated with details surrounding the voting mechanism(scroll all the way down). As I understand it, NEO has chosen a voting mechanism where 1 NEO equals 1 vote, and it will be possible to vote for multiple candidates. For example if you own 100 NEO and you vote for three candidates, all three candidates receive 100 votes. This model has immediately received criticism on the forums, because it carries a risk of cartels forming. Whether this is the final model that NEO will use or if it is still subject to change is unknown.CoZ has announced that they will start implementing the new voting mechanism into the NEON wallet as soon as possible. The NEON wallet is currently undergoing a massive revamp, and they posted a picture of the new wallet's voting interface:
It gives you a sneak peak into the new wallet design too - it looks pretty awesome!
Of course, after yesterday's announcement we all kind of hoped for more, and bigger news than 'just' one extra consensus node to the network. The decentralization process is taking very long with NEO, though I am still on the fence on whether this is good or bad. One only needs to look at the current mess that EOS is in, in order to understand that there may be some merit to NEO's slow, steady and controlled approach.
I'm immensely bullish on NEO and despite that progress may be slower than we like it to be in this fast-paced cryptocurrency world, I like to think that Da Hongfei and the NEO developers are looking long term.
