COZ Delivers Record-Breaking Rewards to Neo Ecosystem Builders in Latest Proof of Working Distribution
A Milestone Distribution for Independent Developers
City of Zion (COZ), a key contributor to the Neo blockchain ecosystem, has made waves with its latest funding round, distributing an impressive 936 NEO tokens across four innovative projects. Released on March 17 through the Proof of Working 2.2 report, this distribution represents a significant milestone for the program’s relaunched series. The numbers tell a compelling story of growth—this round more than doubles the 440 NEO distributed in round 2.0 and substantially exceeds the 446 NEO allocated in round 2.1. The Proof of Working initiative operates on a straightforward but powerful principle: it rewards independent contributors who are actively building and delivering tangible work within the Neo ecosystem. It’s worth noting that COZ maintains integrity in the selection process by excluding its own staff members from receiving awards, ensuring that the funds genuinely support external innovation and community-driven development. This weekly program has become an essential lifeline for developers who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on the Neo blockchain, providing them with the financial backing needed to transform their ideas into reality.
Privacy-Focused Social Networking Gets Continued Support
Among the four beneficiaries, HushNetwork, developed by contributor aboimpinto, secured funding for the second consecutive round after also receiving support in round 2.1. This returning recipient is working on something increasingly relevant in today’s digital landscape: a decentralized social network that puts privacy and data ownership back in the hands of users. In an era where personal information has become a commodity and centralized platforms hold enormous power over user data, HushNetwork’s mission resonates with growing concerns about digital privacy. During this funding period, the team made substantial progress across multiple fronts. They successfully stabilized the alpha version of their chat messaging system, ensuring that users can communicate reliably within the platform. The development team also pushed forward with enhanced posting functionality, making the social experience more robust and feature-rich. Perhaps most notably, HushNetwork completed the end-to-end workflow and user interface refinements for their NEP-17 token forge tool—an innovative feature designed to democratize token creation. This tool aims to make launching tokens as simple as clicking a button, empowering communities and crowdfunding initiatives to create their own digital assets without requiring extensive technical knowledge. By lowering the barriers to entry for token creation, HushNetwork isn’t just building a social network; they’re creating an ecosystem where communities can easily develop their own economic systems and fundraising mechanisms.
Bringing Transparency and Clarity to Blockchain Data
Neo Analytics, the brainchild of developer ethArek, received funding for its work on making the Neo N3 blockchain more accessible and understandable to everyone. In the complex world of blockchain technology, where transaction data can seem like an impenetrable wall of numbers and codes, Neo Analytics serves as a translator. The project provides a public dashboard that transforms raw on-chain activity into clear, comprehensible information that updates daily. What sets this tool apart is its commitment to transparency and reliability—the classification rules it uses are both transparent and deterministic, meaning anyone can understand how the data is categorized and trust that the same inputs will always produce the same outputs. During this funding round, ethArek implemented several valuable improvements that enhance both aesthetics and functionality. Recognizing that many developers and users prefer working in low-light conditions, the team added dark mode support, making extended viewing sessions easier on the eyes. They also made a significant architectural upgrade by migrating from direct raw RPC (Remote Procedure Call) calls to the more streamlined Dora SDK, which should improve reliability and maintainability. Additionally, the project tackled historical data gaps by implementing USD swap backfill, ensuring more complete financial information is available to users. Finally, they added oracle transaction detection, an important feature for tracking how external data sources interact with the blockchain. Together, these improvements make Neo Analytics an increasingly indispensable tool for anyone wanting to understand what’s happening on the Neo network in real-time.
Building Better Tools for Decentralized Storage
The Typescript NeoFS SDK, developed by Merl and the team at AxLabs, represents the kind of foundational infrastructure work that may not grab headlines but is absolutely critical to a healthy blockchain ecosystem. NeoFS is Neo’s answer to decentralized, distributed object storage—think of it as a blockchain-based alternative to services like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage, where files aren’t stored on servers controlled by a single company but distributed across a network. For this storage system to be useful, developers need good tools to work with it, and that’s exactly what the TypeScript NeoFS SDK provides. TypeScript has become one of the most popular programming languages for modern web and application development, so building robust TypeScript tooling opens NeoFS to a vast community of developers. During this funding period, the team accomplished two significant technical milestones. They implemented gRPC-js support, which provides an efficient way for applications to communicate with NeoFS services using a modern remote procedure call framework. They also developed a protoc generator plugin in the core package, a technical achievement that streamlines the process of working with the protocol buffers that NeoFS uses for data serialization. While these improvements might sound highly technical, they translate to a concrete benefit: developers can build applications that leverage decentralized storage more easily, with less boilerplate code and fewer technical headaches.
Conversational AI Meets Blockchain Security
Fireche’s Neo N3 AI Assistant represents one of the most forward-looking projects in this funding round, sitting at the intersection of two cutting-edge technologies: blockchain and artificial intelligence. The project tackles one of cryptocurrency’s most persistent challenges: making wallet management and blockchain operations accessible to people who aren’t technical experts. Anyone who has tried to explain cryptocurrency wallets to a non-technical friend knows the challenge—private keys, gas fees, smart contract interactions, and transaction confirmations create a steep learning curve that discourages mainstream adoption. The Neo N3 AI Assistant takes a different approach by allowing users to manage their wallets and perform blockchain operations through natural language conversation. Instead of navigating complex interfaces or memorizing specific commands, users can simply describe what they want to do in plain English, and the AI assistant handles the technical details. This conversational interface could dramatically lower the barriers to entry for cryptocurrency, making secure wallet management accessible to a much broader audience. The emphasis on security is particularly important—as AI takes on more responsibility for managing digital assets, ensuring that these interactions remain secure and that the AI can’t be manipulated into performing unauthorized actions becomes paramount. By combining the security and decentralization of blockchain with the intuitive interface of conversational AI, this project points toward a future where blockchain technology fades into the background, becoming as easy to use as sending a text message.
Transparency and Looking Forward
COZ has maintained its commitment to transparency by publishing the transaction hash for this distribution, allowing anyone to verify the payment on the Dora mainnet explorer. This on-chain verification ensures that the funding process remains accountable and that claims about distributions can be independently confirmed by anyone with internet access. While the report confirms the total distribution of 936 NEO and identifies the four recipient projects, it doesn’t break down exactly how much each project received individually. This approach respects project privacy while still maintaining overall transparency about the program’s total funding commitments. The full Proof of Working 2.2 report is available on COZ’s website for anyone interested in the technical details of each project’s progress. As the Proof of Working program continues to grow—more than doubling its distributions over the course of just three rounds—it’s becoming an increasingly significant force in the Neo ecosystem. By providing consistent, merit-based funding to independent developers working on publicly verifiable projects, COZ is nurturing a diverse ecosystem of tools, applications, and infrastructure. These four projects—spanning social networking, data analytics, developer tooling, and AI-assisted interfaces—represent different facets of what’s needed to build a mature, user-friendly blockchain ecosystem. Whether users care most about privacy, transparency, developer experience, or accessibility, this round of funding supports innovations that advance all these goals simultaneously.
