Neo APAC Hackathon winner: NeoCast – a blockchain-agnostic communication middleware

NeoCast, the winner of the Infrastructure category at the Neo APAC Hackathon grand finale, is a blockchain-agnostic communication middleware. The project is designed to allow services to access both off-chain and on-chain data. By integrating with dApps and other applications, NeoCast allows users to be informed via push notification whenever a relevant event occurs.

The innovation behind NeoCast aims to bridge the gap in coordination and communication between Web3 services and users. This project emerged victorious at the 2023 Neo APAC Hackathon, under the Infrastructure track, earning high praise from Neo developer community judges for addressing a critical pain point in the general dApp user experience.

NeoCast is not in itself a user-facing project, but can be thought of as a public good, designed for integration into tools which are themselves key contact points for blockchain users. By integrating NeoCast as a communication middleware, applications such as wallets, explorers, exchanges, and games have a convenient way to communicate with their users in real-time regarding on-chain actions without running their own event indexing infrastructure.

Project architecture

To fetch and store contract event data, the NeoCast team employed a combination of the OneGate API, NeoTube API, and NeoGo websockets, with MongoDB used for data storage. A REST API was crafted to deliver this data to a showcase N3 TestNet web application with Neon Wallet support. In its initial form, the app allows users to subscribe to topics of interest or create new ones.

The NeoCast protocol facilitates seamless on-chain and off-chain communications, designed to function across any smart contract, dApp, or backend service using wallet addresses as identifiers. This offers a gasless, multi-chain, and platform-agnostic solution for wallet subscriptions to topics, enabling smart contracts to broadcast messages to specific wallets or groups within a topic. The team is also working on an alpha version of NeoCast Chat, a wallet-to-wallet communication tool.

NeoCast maintains a network of nodes responsible for validating, storing, and delivering communications. Decentralization into an open network is a long-term goal for the team, which hopes to launch a public alpha in the near future. In the meantime, data immutability and non-censorship is to be achieved by packaging validity proofs directly with the payloads.

Currently, NeoCast is operational on Ethereum, Polygon, and BNB Chain, with plans to extend support to additional major EVM and non-EVM chains.

GrantShares proposal

Seeking further development, the team has submitted a GrantShares proposal, requesting approximately $10,000 to fund advancements towards a decentralized architecture, including smart contract-based incentives for user engagement and comprehensive notification systems across major platforms.

The proposal outlines a three-phase delivery plan. For the first milestone, the team would focus on broadening the dApp feature set, including broadened wallet and NeoNS support, and provide a public API and SDK for dApps and wallets to consume notifications. The next milestone would see delivery of an Android and iOS app and establishment of a more scalable architecture with enhanced notification capabilities. Finally, work would conclude with validation of its MVP, audits for smart contracts used in the future revenue layer, and new tools to simplify dApp integration.

NeoCast’s proposal covers approximately two months of development time, however this is just the start for the team, who has offered an ambitious roadmap with a wide array of features intended to help revolutionize Web3 communication. In addition to a revenue layer, which would leverage bNEO token staking, the team affirmed its desire to build a complete webhook & automation workflow-applet marketplace, automated scheduled notifications, data analytics, and integration with NeoFS for data archival.

The NeoCast website can be found at the link below:
https://neocast.xyz/