In a heavily regulated nation such as China, NEO has the potential to become the crypto of choice both in China and other countries around the world. The founders of NEO got the attention of enterprises in search of private blockchain solutions, and this inspired them to create Onchain in 2014. The Onchain technology was designed to function in line with the existing financial and legal framework while providing blockchain solutions to several enterprises. It has a centralized approach that differs significantly from that of other digital currencies.
Having managed to capture the imaginations of the Asian markets despite the regulatory uncertainty that exists in China, the NEO ecosystem has become more vibrant than it was before courtesy of the strong community and the hard work of developers.
About NEO
The blockchain-based project is a non-profit that many regard as “China’s Ethereum” and was launched in 2014 in Beijing, China. The founders are Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang. NEO was initially known as Antshares. However, the team behind the Antshares project came up with Onchain to provide blockchain solutions.
The name Antshares was later changed in June 2017 during a rebranding process and NEO became the new name of the smart contract economy. Perhaps the primary reason why NEO is often compared to Ethereum is that it was created to serve the same purpose as Ethereum.
The developers of NEO’s goal was to create a decentralized platform where others can build their decentralized applications, which is also the idea behind the creation of Ethereum. Find out more about other smart contracts platforms by reading “The Digital World of Crypto Riches.” The book summarizes over a hundred digital currencies, their use cases, challenges and achievements.
The team behind NEO sees it as a distributed network for the smart economy and it is the first open-source and decentralized crypto to be developed and launched in China. As a public platform, NEO leverages the Onchain network to establish an optimal governance scenario. Like Ethereum, NEO has smart contracts that run on the NEO virtual machine. The project already has plans to release their vision of the “Smart Economy,” which many crypto enthusiasts have termed a “significantly improved vision for smart contracts.”
The name NEO is also a smart choice when you consider its Greek meaning — new and young. This is the perfect name for a platform that many people see as a more recent version of Ethereum. One of the factors that have helped NEO over the years is the support it has enjoyed from Chinese regulators.
The developers behind NEO proposed a major upgrade to the network in May 2020 which would feature a new governance model. With the new strategy, those who hold the NEO coins would be allowed to vote for a committee of 21 governing members. The committee members would represent the community and have the ability to vote on several changes to the network’s coding and various adjustable parameters of the NEO blockchain.
According to the new proposal, those who vote for the 21 governing members will be rewarded with additional GAS to appreciate their involvement in the governance process. Another feature of the upgrade is the interoperability feature as the blockchain will be positioned to gain more cross-chain capabilities.
What are some of the Problems NEO wants to Resolve?
The project is focused on dealing with several challenges facing the crypto space, even as it’s meant to serve as an alternative smart contracts platform that’s more flexible than Ethereum. Since NEO makes use of a philosophy that evaluates design options on a multivariate spectrum, the project can easily make adjustments to its market approach accordingly.
Developers of this project can make decisions (based on a specific use case) on the level of centralization/decentralization that’s most suitable for a project. The developers can also make similar judgments on other crucial topics like the level of on-chain/off-chain governance. The availability of such options offers NEO with more use case scenarios for increased adoption in the government and commercial sectors.
The blockchain project makes use of a two-tiered system to provide the entire ecosystem more flexibility both for developers and users. The two tokens that are being used on the NEO network are NEO and GAS. The firm will issue a total of 100 million of GAS and NEO. The NEO token represents a share of ownership in the blockchain and plays a crucial role in governance. The token has indivisible units and unlike Ethereum, it cannot be divided. They are like stocks that can’t be split into smaller units.
The second token is GAS and it’s the utility token for the network initially called ANC-Antcoins. It functions just like ether in Ethereum. For the transactions that developers engage in, they require GAS. Another function of GAS is that users get their rewards in GAS tokens and the number of rewards per block will be reduced after two million confirmed blocks.
Users can directly convert their GAS to NEO and trade it for other digital currencies like Ethereum, Bitcoin and Litecoin. NEO is quite popular and you can purchase it on several exchanges like Poloniex, HitBTC and Binance
The NeoVM, which is a universal lightweight Virtual Machine, offers developers several benefits. The virtual machine has high certainty, concurrency and scalability. Another merit of NeoVM has to do with its compatibility with other popular coding languages, which includes Java and C++.
Presently, developers on Ethereum use the official language of the platform, which is Solidity. Hopefully, when Ethereum 2.0 is fully implemented, more languages will be supported. Like Ethereum, NEO offers several use cases ranging from digital identities to smart contracts and digitized assets. These are some of the factors that investors consider before investing in NEO. It’s also crucial to point out some limitations that may likely delay the mass adoption of NEO. One of them is that NEO is entirely a Chinese initiative which implies that there are insufficient materials available in English.
~ The official website of NEO is https://neo.org/
