INTRODUCTION

NEO, frequently nicknamed within the cryptocurrency community as the One, Chinese Ethereum or Ethereum "killer," could be a blockchain platform that implements digital assets, dApps, and smart contracts, and tries to solve some scalability and regulatory issues of its competitors. With strong partnerships and support from the Asian cryptocurrency community, Neo is one of the most promising currencies within the crypto-assets space, with the ambitious goal of becoming the main “smart economy” of the world during the next few years.

NEO maintains a clear distinction from different standard blockchain platforms in its focus on being regulatory-compliant whereas digitized assets and smart contracts are popular on other blockchain platforms like Ethereum, the third key feature of what it calls its “digital identity” separates Neo from the rest.


HISTORY AND FOUNDERS

NEO was introduced in 2014 under the name Antshares by the China-based company Onchain, a blockchain-specialized company founded in 2014 by Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang. 2 crowd sales in late 2015 provided the start for the project. On these crowd sales, 17.5 million and 22.5 million Neo tokens were sold for $550,000 and $4.5 million, respectively. On June 22, 2017, in an incident at the Microsoft Headquarters in Beijing, the rebranding of Antshares to Neo took place, which vastly increased the renown of the project that was soon to become one of the most outstanding projects in the whole cryptocurrency sphere.

Da Hongfei is the most recognizable face behind the project and is now one of the most respected experts in cryptocurrencies in the world. Erik Zhang is the co-founder of Neo and CTO of its associated company, Onchain. He is the mastermind behind the dBFT consensus algorithm, one of NEO’s cornerstones.


REASON TO BUILD THE PROJECT

NEO aims to change the management of digital assets through the use of smart contracts, with the ultimate aim of building a distributed network-based smart economy system. Users are able to record, buy, sell, exchange, or circulate varied types of assets. The Neo platform allows for linking the physical asset with a similar and unique digital avatar on its network. Neo also supports the protection of assets. Those assets registered on its platform have a validated digital identity and are protected by law.


BASE OF PROJECT

NEO implements a changed Proof-of-Stake model named Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT), as opposed to the additional classical Proof-of-Work model used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Neo Network will be thought of as a two-tier system. All token holders are ready to vote on the consensus nodes that will validate the network. These consensus nodes can then be the ones that validate each block in the blockchain. These consensus nodes are identifiable and can even be contacted if necessary. This makes the system completely different from the majority of the most well-liked blockchains, and especially attractive for regulation.


USE CASES

The range of industries that will benefit from the implementation of smart contracts is vast. Some examples are:

Financial Services: Smart contracts can be used to mechanically execute commercial transactions, payments, and agreements, eliminating any delays and any needs for a middleman
Real Estate: In an industry with such a vast number of legal contracts and third-party agents, smart contracts could greatly simplify and reduce the costs of the many operations.
Government: Governments are studying the possibilities of blockchain technology for a large variety of problems. A decent example is voting
Supply Chain: Several companies are introducing projects to automate the tracking of goods during the supply chain automatized thanks to blockchain technology, with the goal of preventing fraud and theft.


CURRENT & UPCOMING PROJECT

Major Projects: 

Bluzelle
Zilliqa
RedPulse
Switcheo
NEX
Thor
Thekey


MAJOR NEWS AND EVENTS

DATE

NEWS/EVENTS

IMPACT

07/05/2022

TerraUSD and LUNA both collapsed, and as a result, a number of crypto platforms folded in the aftermath

-42% Decrease

18/05/2021

China closes financial, payment, and cryptocurrency trading institutions

-50% Decrease

18/04/2021

The newly updated version of Go node N3

+29% Increase


CONCLUSION

Other blockchains with smart contract capabilities employed Proof-of-Work (PoW) for consensus after they were released however are slowly switching to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms, like, for instance, Ethereum. Neo was established as a PoS chain from the start, accumulating years of experience with BFT-based accord algorithms.

In a nutshell, Neo3 are a lot of attractive for a wider audience due to lower smart contract deployment costs, better accessibility for developers, an integrated Oracle and distributed storage system, as well as better performance and security. Ultimately neo could power following era of enterprise-grade blockchain applications.