“New Kid On The Block?”
https://qoinbook.com/neo/One of the first cryptocurrencies to come out of China, NEO used to be called Antshares until it rebranded in late 2017.
As one of the breakout crypto systems of 2017, many people have been questioning why it’s important and what it’s able to do.
And with its CEO & Founder (Da Hong Fei) even calling Bitcoin (& Blockchain) a bubble – stating that the recent rally on Bitcoin was a major boon for his own offering… but isn’t deluding himself into thinking everything is fine – he expects a sharp correction to happen in the new year.
The point of NEO is like many of the other cryptocurrencies – low barriers to entry have made it very easy for different people to create different coins, and NEO is no different.
The big deal with NEO is that it’s been called the “Ethereum of China” – a nod to its nature as a decentralized platform (rather than a singular set of functionality such as Bitcoin), the coin’s value is predominantly based on the idea that NEO could be utilized by the massive Chinese government (imagine all the SOE’s using it).
Regardless of whether people feel this is a worthy investment or not, it’s great to read about how developments are occurring in countries such as China. In this instance, NEO is representative of the new technology bubbling through to the surface. As such, it is a good indicator of the health of the Chinese market (the Japanese market is a different kettle of fish entirely).
As ever, please appreciate this is not financial or legal advice. The information contained within this article is for education and entertainment purposes only, and is not an endorsement or recommendation of any asset or security.
What is NEO?
NEO is a development of a company called OnChain.
This is important. OnChain are a legitimate company registered in China, which puts them squarely in the enterprise category.
Simply, this means that rather than Bitcoin (which is based around a decentralized infrastructure), NEO is part of a growing brood of successful blockchain companies providing infrastructure development & management services for profit.
Such other crypto coins as Ripple and Stellar also operate this model (relatively successfully). This means that even before looking at the technology behind NEO, its intentions are relatively clear from the outset – to create commercial (or consumer) solutions which can be implemented with its own technology set (cryptocurrency).
Onchain was founded by CEO Da HongFei and CTO Erik Zhang to consolidate a lot of the press and interest garnered by their AntShares offering (this was the precursor to the NEO coin we see today).
Rather than the week-old startups releasing ill-conceived ICO’s (which almost always ended in disaster), the pair took 22 months of R&D to even begin providing services commercially. Whilst they already had a strong asset (their Antshares coin), their enterprise offering was wrapped around the OnChain company.
In April 2016, the company delivered China’s first whitepaper on consensus protocol (dBFT -delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance).
In terms of technology, the NEO (and OnChain) offering is not overly different to others – specifically from the likes of Ripple or Stellar, with 3 major pieces of functionality:..........
