NEO Cryptocurrency Review – China-based project! NEO is a China-based project that’s being developed by a company called OnChain. The project is headed up by Da Hongfei, and the OnChain team has worked with a number of high-profile tech firms including Alibaba and Microsoft. The NEO project specifically has also worked with Microsoft China on some joint events.
NEO is a blockchain platform that allows for the execution of trustless smart contracts. That means that, like Ethereum, it can be used for financial transactions, but it also can serve as a platform for more complex interactions and fully-featured distributed apps (dApps).
Although it shares the same basic functionality as Ethereum, there are a few key differences between the two projects.
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First, while Ethereum requires developers to code in its own programming language (Solidity), programmers who’d like to write a dApp for NEO’s network can do so in a variety of languages they may already know, including C#, VB.Net, F#, Java, Python, Ruby, and Kotlin. That makes getting started with a NEO project much easier for first-time blockchain developers coming from other platforms.
Second, instead of using a power-hungry proof-of-work consensus algorithm like Bitcoin or Ethereum, NEO uses a proof-of-stake system with delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT). What that means – to vastly oversimplify – is that consensus is achieved when 66% or more of the nodes on the NEO network confirm a transaction.
Having established itself as China’s leading smart contracts platform, NEO’s future looks bright. The token has already seen massive growth over the past year, but with fewer circulating coins than Ethereum and a far lower market price, the sky’s the limit for NEO if it really proves to be the “Ethereum killer” it’s sometimes billed as, or even just manages to stake out a claim to a significant share of the world’s smart contracts market.
