NEO (NEO)

While many cryptocurrencies are facing imposed bans in different countries due to their decentralized and unregulated nature, NEO has the potential to emerge as a mainstream cryptocurrency for environments that only allow regulated currencies. NEO Onchain technology is designed to be regulator-friendly and unlike other cryptocurrencies, it adopts a centralized approach.

NEO’s goal is to provide a platform where corporations can develop and implement their decentralized apps. Their main focus, for now, is to capture the Chinese market. NEO is itself a technology of a Chinese company Onchain, where it serves as the foundation of the Decentralised Network Architecture System of the company (NEO, 2018).

The actual platform that NEO has developed is already in the working phase and is functioning. Decentralized applications can be built on the platform. The company claims that the NEO network can handle up to 10,000 transactions per second. However, this high transaction speed is achieved at the expense of decreased decentralization. Onchain controls seven consensus nodes and therefore themselves controls the blockchain traffic.

The platform supports the use of C++, Java, Python and Go as programming languages for the development of decentralized apps. However, these languages are not limited by the design of the network in any way and may become a reason for the injection of malicious code on to the network (NEO, 2018).

NEO is developed by Onchain which is a Chinese company. It was developed originally as Antshares in 2014 but was later on rebranded and changed to NEO in 2017. The founders of Onchain are Da HongFei and Erik Zhang (Zhou, 2017).

The main lead of the development team is Eric Zhang who is working tirelessly to improve the existing algorithms and protocols of the network. However, there is not much information regarding other team members.

The GitHub repository of NEO Onchain is impressively active and productive. The repository showcases a lot of updates and active participation by all the developers. The main developer is Erik Zhang, who is currently working hard to upgrade the consensus algorithm dbft2. The algorithm is supposed to block any attempted forks on the NEO network. It is important to note that the development team of NEO is not really big, and they are still trying to make things work.

NEO will likely make a name in the Chinese market more than any cryptocurrencies and will become the first choice for decentralized applications, especially those built by companies operating in countries that require cryptocurrency regulation, like China. The rest of the world might continue using platforms like Ethereum which offer a more decentralized network and a more secure network.

The flagship project that Onchain is working on is NEO 3.0. According to the plans, the upgraded version is planned to be released by the end of December 2019. The updated version of the NEO network will provide better support for larger-scale commercial applications. The NEO network will become more scalable and secure, as there are plans to centralize the network even more.

NEO possesses promising potential. Even though the network is centralized, there might still be companies or partnerships that would want to build their decentralized applications on the NEO network. This can increase the popularity of the NEO network and promote it to become the user’s choice over smart contract platforms.

There is a claim that the Chinese government supports the Blockchain Company Onchain, and therefore its blockchain technology NEO (See, 2017). However, it is hard to decide if one should be excited or worried about this development. The Chinese government is notorious for seizing money from their citizens and is therefore not completely a big plus for the company. An example like this can be found from the likes of Baoshang Bank Co, where the government assumed control of all its resources and assets in May 2019 (Bloomberg News, 2019).

Usually, cryptocurrencies are based on such blockchain technologies which feature complete or partial decentralization. However, NEO stands out in this aspect. It used a mining algorithm named as “delegated byzantine fault-tolerant” which uses consensus nodes to distribute the voting power. The company Onchain holds seven of such nodes, keeping the control of the network with them and making NEO a centralized cryptocurrency. Users are critical of this point, as Onchian can seize their funds if the Chinese government tells them to do so (Manoppo, 2018).

NEO Foundation has recently unlocked the NEO token worth $100 million in May 2019. The revenues generated from these new tokens are planned to be used for further development of the technology. However, this amount of NEO tokens could be damaging if they are released into the market all at once, as it might result in immediate inflation (G., 2019).

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.

The Neo community is quite large in China, but lately, there have been numerous complaints of fraudulent behaviour as false announcements about partnerships with large known companies are made and spread by the Neo community.

The community also actively participates in the development of the NEO network. There are many independent developers that are creating new libraries for the NEO smart contracts.

The Chinese support towards the NEO blockchain seems to be of great importance, but in fact, it has some deeply rooted concerns. This means that Onchain might sometime in future be working for the Chinese government and under their directives, which implies that they might at some point be in control or seize user funds.

Still on the news concerning NEO’s partnership, it was rumoured that Alibaba.com has partnered with the NEO network. However, a little research into the news revealed that this was not true.

NEO has partnered with the largest telecom company from the Netherlands. They have been given the control of one consensus node of the NEO network. This will improve the decentralization of the NEO network (Muller, 2018).

The most notable and perhaps the most powerful alternative to the NEO blockchain is Ethereum, mainly because most of the decentralized apps are being built on top of the Ethereum network. The major drawback Ethereum network faces in terms of usage is that the programmer first needs to get accustomed to the ‘Solidity’ programming language. NEO platform, on the other hand, allows the developers to use C++, Java, Python and Go which are far more common languages. This might take NEO’s popularity ahead of Ethereum.