NEO and Ontology sign MOU concerning strategy and technology

The NEO Foundation and Ontology Foundation announced today the two teams have signed Memorandum of Understanding concerning strategy and technology integration. NEO is dedicated to realizing a distributed network that serves the smart economy.

Ontology is a distributed trust network that focuses on digital identity, data exchange and other trust collaboration scenarios. Both NEO and Ontology share a common technical understanding and vision, and both wish to promote blockchain technology and its applications.

NEO and Ontology together provide compliance-ready, regulatable protocols to global developers. These protocols are supported by NeoVM with exceptional finality and a smart contract system with a robust and stable infrastructure-level network.

As such, the NEO Foundation and the Ontology Foundation have agreed to cooperate on the following:

Key Cooperation Areas:
1. NEO brings a mature and complete smart contract platform as well as distributed network infrastructure services to the table. Ontology will provide digital identity, data exchange services, and other customized services.
2. Smart Contracts: NEO and Ontology will work together to build a smart contract ecosystem, fully support the development and adoption of NeoVM and NeoContract, and collaborate on developing smart contract open standards.
3. Data Integration: Both parties will provide standardized technology interfaces (APIs, SDKs, etc.), and share and communicate development achievements and research results.
4. Cross-chain: Both parties will push forward with cross-chain research, with the eventual goal of producing integrable mainnets.

Shared Resources:
Cooperation will be further facilitated by two initiatives:
1. NEO and Ontology will together set up a joint task force (comprised of representatives from both parties) dedicated to realizing the goals specified above and to moving forward on other relevant projects.
2. Jointly providing funding to relevant research institutions. Funding will be earmarked for academic research dedicated to exploring blockchain technology development, including but not limited to consensus algorithms, encryption algorithms, cross-chain protocols, and formal verification. Other communities, institutions, and individuals that share the same interest in blockchain protocols are more than encouraged to join in these funding initiatives.