NEO (NEO)

NEO is a non-profit community-based blockchain project that utilizes blockchain technology and digital identity to digitize assets, to automate the management of digital assets using smart contracts, and to realize a "smart economy" with a distributed network

NEO was founded in 2014 and was real-time open source on GitHub in June 2015. Since its inception, the NEO team has experienced the upsurge and boom of the blockchain industry and the frenzy and cooling of the digital money market. We believe technology drives progress and together we can create the future

Motivated by this, NEO has been created to shift our traditional economy into the new era of the "Smart Economy".

The Chinese government supports the Blockchain company OnChain, and therefore Neo. [1]
The Chinese government is not really a big plus, as they are known to seize money from their citizens. On 27 May, 2019 the Chinese government assumed control of Baoshang Bank Co. [2]
Blockchains are usually decentralized, but the cryptocurrency Neo uses another mining algorithm than most. Neos algorithm, named “delegated byzantine fault tolerant” uses consensus nodes to distribute the voting power, but the company OnChain holds seven of them, which makes Neo centralized. OnChain can seize funds, if the Chinese government tells them to. [3]
In May 2019 the Neo foundation unlocked Neo worth $100 Million to pay for further development. This amount of Neo is dangerous as it could be dumped on the market which would result in an immediate price drop. [4]
In March 2019 the Neo Blockchain was down for over 2 hours, as block 3467252 took 127 minutes. This can happen with a single point of failure, as the foundation is controlling 7 consensus nodes themselves. [5]

1.5

The GitHub repository which stores the code for the Neo project is very active and contains a lot of big updates. There are not many commits (updates) with only one changed line of code, mainly because there’s not a big developing team working together. The main developer here is the founder Erik Zhang, who’s currently upgrading the consensus algorithm dbft2 which is supposed to prohibit block forks. [1]

4.6

Neo’s goal is to build a platform for corporate build decentralized apps. Their current focus lies on the Chinese market, where Neo acts as the foundation of the Decentralized Network Architecture system of the Chinese company OnChain. [1]

4.5

Decentralized applications can already be built on the Neo platform. It’s said that the Neo blockchain can handle 10’000 transactions per second, but this is a trade off with decentralization, as the company OnChain controls seven consensus nodes that control and delegate the blockchain traffic.
The most used programming languages can be used for this, Python, Go, C++ and Java, but having malicious code injected to your machine is very dangerous and these languages are not limited by design in any way. [1]

2.8

Neo was developed by the Chinese company OnChain in 2014 with the name Antshares and was rebranded to Neo in 2017. The founders of OnChain are Da HongFei and Erik Zhang. [1]

2.2

Neo will likely be the first choice for decentralized apps that will be built by companies in China as the Chinese government endorses the Neo network.
The rest of the world might want to choose a more decentralized and secure network for the development of their DApps (decentralized applications).

3.8

The Neo foundation is currently working on Neo 3.0 which should be finalized in December 2019. The goal of Neo 3.0 is the capability of supporting large scale commercial applications. It looks like scalability and security will be enhanced by centralizing the network even more.

4.4

Even though the network is centralized, there might be big international companies that would try to build their DApps on the Neo network. This could create network effects so that other companies chose Neo over other smart contract platforms.

4.6

Ethereum is the biggest competitor as most DApps are written on the Ethereum platform. To write a new dapp, a programmer needs to learn the programming language Solidity first. The most used programming languages can be used for DApps on the Neo platform, but having malicious code injected to your machine is very dangerous and these languages are not limited by design in any way. Solidity has more restricted, but safer functionality.

3.0

The backing of the Chinese government looked like a positive argument, but the company that controls the Neo network could seize funds of Neo holders if the government tells them to. [1]
There had been large rumours that Alibaba.com partnered with the Neo foundation. These rumours were false. [2]
The largest telecom company from the Netherlands started hosting one consensus node of the Neo network to further decentralization. [3]

2.1

The community of Neo is very large in China, but there’s fraudulent behaviour as false announcements about partnerships with large known companies are made and spread by the Neo community.
On the other hand are independent developers that create new libraries for the Neo smart contracts.

2.8

Erik Zhang is working on the Neo network, but there’s not much known about other staff members. [1]

2.5