A decentralized open source blockchain application platform, Neo, revealed that it has become the first blockchain member of Microsoft’s .NET Foundation.

According to a press release on September 24^th, the platform announced that during the .NET Conference 2019, Neo “joined the .NET Foundation, the Microsoft-created, globally leading open-source foundation,” adding:

“Based on their shared open-source heritage, NEO and the .NET Foundation will further empower millions of developers to build the foundation for next-gen Internet. This partnership comes after NEO’s release of Blockchain Toolkit for .NET and NEO Express in September.”

Neo also released a preview of its Blockchain Toolkit in the conference, which had different apps like the Neo Express, Smart contract debugger, Visual DevTracker, etc.

Big Neo update coming

Neo is the 21^st-biggest coin as per its market capitalization. It had reportedly hinted at a big update to Neo 3.0 which is to be launched later in 2020. The upgraded version of the platform will purportedly be released as a new blockchain network, where users will have to exchange their existing tokens with the latest ones.

As per Erick Zhang, the core developer and co-founder of Neo, the upgrade is essential as the various architectural improvements to Neo’s performance are not compatible with its existing blockchain network. 

The existing version of Neo blockchain is only getting bug fixes in the updates and has very simple features. However, the Neo 3.0 update will have some major improvements.

These improvements include features like deployment of smart contacts, faster blockchain network powered by a unified model for transactions, and cheaper transactions.