NEO consensus protocol upgraded, on schedule for NEO 3.0

NEO upgraded its consensus mechanism ahead of the scheduled move to NEO 3.0 in 2020.

NEO recently opened a U.S. office―NEO Global Development Seattle, led by former Microsoft executive John deVadoss―and hosted its second developer conference in the same city.

Part of the process of readying the NEO blockchain for version 3.0 involved updating its Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus mechanism.

The consensus mechanisms used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, where blocks are solved by computers "Mining" blocks, the dBFT mechanism works by using a small group of trusted servers-currently numbering less than 10-to secure the NEO blockchain.

DBFT ensures transactions made are irreversible and that forks cannot be made to the NEO blockchain.

Version 2.0 will "Guarantee immediate transaction finality and includes a recovery method to help failed nodes on the NEO network get back online with minimal disruption," according to a release from the company.

The new consensus mechanism will also make it so the NEO blockchain cannot be forked, making the system "Truly irreversible." The feature is a benefit for enterprise applications of NEO but may pose problems in the future around the decentralization and governance of the system.

The upgraded consensus mechanism is just one part of NEO's roadmap to NEO 3.0, a completely new blockchain that will require users to swap their tokens ahead of the migration.

At NEO's 2019 developer conference, Da Hongfei, the co-founder and CEO of NEO, said he wanted NEO to be the number one blockchain by 2020.

NEO hopes 3.0 will make the blockchain ready for large-scale adoption by companies such as Alipay or WeChat.