If all goes well, $700 million worth of cryptocurrency is about to find a new home.
That's because Shanghai-based Ontology, a project closely tied to the "smart economy" blockchain Neo, is expected to launch its live blockchain on June 30, a step that will find one of the top 20 crypto assets finally releasing its proprietary technology.
Described as an enterprise-focused platform, Ontology is seeking to provide a high volume of fast and cheap transactions, all while helping businesses grapple with the thorny problems of interoperability and digital identity. As such, Neo is one of several public blockchains catering to enterprise that have recently or will soon go live, Tron and Vechain being other notable contenders.
However, what might distinguish Ontology's claims is the experience of the team.
The protocol emerged from Neo, an ethereum challenger whose founder, Da Hongfei, is Ontology's CEO. Both Neo and Ontology are subsidiaries of Onchain, which developed a private enterprise blockchain platform called DNA. Da is also Onchain's CEO.
Meanwhile, Ontology's founder Li Jun told CoinDesk that his company and Neo are co-funding work on API standardization, shared smart contract standards, and "cross-chain technology innovation."
Ontology's corporate and technological genealogy might be difficult to keep track of, but the result is a pragmatic approach that appears to combine ambition with a lack of the ideological fussiness.
As Li said at a meetup in March:
"When you want blockchain to become a mainstream industry like the internet today, you have to link to the real business scenario."
For a while, Li added, it seemed that appealing to businesses meant building a permissioned framework like DNA, but it soon became clear that "public blockchain is the future."
If you already trust each other, he explained, "blockchain is not necessary."
Having adopted that stance, Onchain – which has since received backing from the Chinese conglomerate Fosun Group and been accepted to Microsoft's Shanghai accelerator – began work on a public platform that would meet some of businesses' most pressing needs: anchoring digital identities in the real world, allowing for flexibility in terms of technical design, and preventing the creation of restrictive silos.
See more:
https://www.coindesk.com/800-million-ontology-blockchain-live/
