COZ primarily operates through the community Discord and COZ GitHub, central places where contributors share progress, collaborate in public, and turn ideas into working ecosystem tools.

There is no formal process for joining COZ. Interested contributors have to do the work first, and submitted code must be licensed under the Apache 2.x License. Consistent contributors can become eligible to join the COZ organization and collaborate more directly across projects.

Organizational decision making is made collaboratively by the COZ Council, a multi-disciplinary body of platform and functional leads, and communicated by an appointed member holding the Speaker role.

COZ is not a regulatory body and takes no responsibility for the quality of third-party smart contracts deployed on affiliate platforms.

COZ staff members are excluded from weekly rewards.

This week, we are awarding 537 NEO distributed across the following ecosystem contributions:

Award Proof: Transaction

Proof of Working 2.5 shows progress across multiple layers of the ecosystem at once: interface experimentation, cheaper token infrastructure, stronger storage and event tooling, and continued maintenance of the JavaScript foundation many projects rely on.

That spread matters because healthy public ecosystems do not advance through one type of contribution alone. They advance when new experiences become easier to imagine, infrastructure becomes cheaper to use, and core tooling becomes safer and easier to maintain.

• Neo AI Agent (ethArek):
  
  Neo AI Agent pushes the Neo user experience in a more agent-driven direction by letting users interact with Neo N3 through natural language instead of a rigid sequence of manual wallet and contract operations. The CLI-based assistant supports balance and history checks, GAS handling, contract interactions, and even built-in Flamingo Finance swap flows with routing and slippage handling, while using OpenAI or Gemini to plan actions and an experimental REST surface for broader integrations. Watch the demo.
  
  This matters because better interfaces do not always mean more UI. Work like this explores what a more approachable, automation-friendly Neo experience could look like for users and builders who want to operate at a higher level than raw wallet steps.
• NeoFS Streaming + Neo Event Filter Plugin (Merl / AxLabs):
  
  This round also includes infrastructure work that improves both real-world storage usability and developer ergonomics. nstream makes it possible to stream media directly from NeoFS into applications such as VLC, while also shipping a frontend for managing NeoFS containers. In parallel, the Neo event filter plugin, now maintained by AxLabs, brings a more EVM-like event-querying experience to Neo.
  
  This matters because infrastructure becomes more valuable when it is both easier to use and easier to build on. Streaming moves NeoFS closer to practical media and application use cases, while better event filtering improves the day-to-day experience of building and debugging dApps.
• FORGE — Lean Token Architecture Upgrade (AboimPinto):
  
  FORGE continued improving the economics and design shape of token deployment on Neo through a new LEAN token template that cuts deployment cost by roughly 11–12 percent while preserving compatibility with standard wallet flows. The work also advances a split architecture model that keeps the token lightweight and pushes more shared behavior into a common engine, while pointing toward a future MultiToken direction with potentially much larger cost savings. Related proposal discussion is also visible in the Neo proposals thread.
  
  This matters because lower deployment cost and cleaner architecture make experimentation easier. Token ecosystems grow faster when the path from idea to launch is cheaper, more practical, and easier to maintain.
• NeonJS Maintenance (AboimPinto):
  
  A major share of this round focused on the continued health of NeonJS, the core JavaScript SDK used across the Neo ecosystem. The work replaced an outdated crypto dependency with @noble/curves, updated multiple supporting dependencies, reduced audit risk, and improved long-term maintainability through a broad set of upstream pull requests including #955, #957, #967, #968, #969, #970, #971, #972, #973, and #974.
  
  This matters because ecosystem reliability is not only about new products. Maintaining the shared SDK foundation used by JavaScript-based wallets, tools, and dApps improves security, trust, and long-term development velocity across the stack.
• FORGE + NeonJS Combined Impact:
  
  Taken together, the FORGE and NeonJS work reflects a healthy pattern for ecosystem progress: improving what gets built and improving the tooling used to build it. One side reduces deployment cost and opens up room for more token experimentation; the other strengthens the shared JavaScript base that many Neo applications depend on every day.
  
  This matters because strong ecosystems need both visible innovation and disciplined maintenance. The combination makes Neo easier to extend, cheaper to experiment on, and safer to build with over time.

If you want to understand the broader purpose of the initiative, read Proof of Working Is Back. You can also review previous rounds in Proof of Working 2.0, Proof of Working 2.1, Proof of Working 2.2, Proof of Working 2.3, and Proof of Working 2.4.

At a higher level, this week’s work strengthens four connected surfaces of the Neo ecosystem: AI-assisted interaction, token-launch infrastructure, storage and event tooling, and core SDK stability.

Together, these contributions point in a practical direction: better UX, lower operating cost, stronger developer ergonomics, and more reliable foundations for the next wave of Neo applications.

If you are building in public, maintaining useful tooling, publishing research, or helping move the ecosystem forward in concrete ways, join the conversation in the COZ Discord, share your work on GitHub, and take part in the next round of contributions.