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Analysis: NEO – Will It Replace Ethereum as the World’s ICO Platform?
https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/neo-one-replace-ethereum-worlds-ico-platform/Google/Baidu, Facebook/WeChat, YouTube/Youku, Twitter/Weibo – China has long been making its own equivalents of Western technology staples. As cryptocurrency has become more mainstream, Ethereum has become one such staple, and true to form, China has made its own – NEO.
NEO was launched in December 2016 and has been steadily rising in price since July, collecting DApps as startups flock to it to launch their ICOs. It just finished hosting a conference in San Francisco which featured a lineup of new projects.
But while many are calling NEO the Chinese Ethereum, in reality this is only partially accurate. The two blockchains do have similarities, but also several fundamental differences.
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So what is NEO? Can it be seen as a competitor to Ethereum? This article is an attempt to unpack this subject.
Smart contracts/smart economy
Ethereum has been the second most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap for a long time now. While Bitcoin’s value is largely based on the fact that it was the first cryptocurrency and thus the most well-established, Ethereum’s success is a result of its unique utility – it allows users to write their own smart contracts on top of its blockchain.
A smart contract, or DApp, is a contract locked into code which requires a crypto-token to operate. It takes away the ability of people to cheat the contract, such as often happens in messy reality, because the contract when activated is permanent; the adjudicator is a computer.
Smart contract creation is something that NEO, née AntShares, has in common with Ethereum. Both are open source platforms, and both are more than simply holding systems for currencies, although both have cryptocurrencies with real value. NEO currently has 27 DApps listed on its website, offering services from WiFi sharing to courier services to bad weather insurance.
However, while Ethereum aims to “build a more globally accessible, more free and more trustworthy Internet” (official description), NEO aims to build a new economy entirely – a smart one.
Ethereum has gone some way towards achieving its goal, being as it is the base platform for almost all of the world’s ICO projects. It wouldn’t be fair to compare success stories just yet, because NEO is newer and has a much grander aim.
A smart economy is an entire economy based on smart contracts. In such a world, all physical assets would be represented digitally and all transactions and parties to those transactions registered with a digital identity.
A digital identity will be mandatory for participation in the blockchain, and will be set by that blockchain (according to the X.509 certificate, which has been the international standard since 1988). In fact, NEO has already partnered with a project called TheKey – a blockchain-based identification verification tool “which is exclusively authorized by government authorities.”
The word government brings us to another key difference between the two platforms.
Government
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