Erik Zhang, the co-founder of NEO, one of the world’s largest platforms for building and deploying decentralized applications (dApps), has revealed that NEO blockchain’s consensus algorithm, the delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism (dBFT) version 2.0 has been updated.

As noted by Zhang (via Twitter), dBFT version 2.0 will form “a very important component of NEO 3.0,” a system-wide upgrade of NEO that is expected to go live in 2020. He explained that the latest version of NEO’s dBFT “has been developed and released as NEO command-line interface (CLI) version 2.10.0.”

Command Line Version Of NEO’s dBFT To Be “Deployed On Testnet, Mainnet Thereafter”

Zhang, who’s also the chief technical officer (CTO) at OnChain, a private firm focused on the ongoing developments related to the NEO blockchain network, has also said that “dBFT will soon be deployed to [NEO’s] testnet and upgraded on its [mainnet] thereafter.”

As explained in the newly released specification document for NEO’s new consensus protocol: 

Byzantine tolerant systems have been designed for decades and a recent boom in blockchain inspired solutions has been boosting studies over this topic. While the literature has been extensively contributing towards more reliability, robustness and resilience of consensus systems, few works addressed large scale industrial cases focused on State Machine Replication with one block finality.

State machine replication is a computer science concept which is essentially “a general method for implementing a fault-tolerant service by replicating servers and coordinating client interactions with server replicas. The approach also provides a framework for understanding and designing replication management protocols.”

NEO Supports Smart Contract Development In C#, Java, JavaScript, Python

In an interview with CryptoGlobe last month, John deVadoss, the president of NGDS, an organization that supports the ongoing development of NEO, had said that developers will be increasingly motivated to build decentralized applications (dApps) on the NEO blockchain network because of “the market-leading innovation it offers.”

deVadoss, a former .NET architect and a general manager at Microsoft, had argued that NEO’s version of dBFT is the best consensus protocol to manage a blockchain network. He revealed that Binance, the world’s largest digital asset exchange, had adopted dBFT-based consensus as well.

Elaborating on the other useful features that the NEO platform offers, deVadoss noted that NEO’s “dual token abstraction” allows for two different tokens (NEO and GAS) to be used for incentivizing users on the NEO blockchain. He pointed out that developers are able to program smart contracts on NEO using a variety of different programming languages including C#, Python, Java, and JavaScript. This, he claimed, makes NEO more accessible to a larger number of developers worldwide.