Blockchains 101: NEO
The Ethereum of China
NEO is the cryptocurrency of the NEO Network, a dual layer blockchain similar to Ethereum and built on the Proof of Stake dBFT (Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus algorithm. The NEO blockchain allows smart contracts and can theoretically process up to 10,000 transactions / second.
NEO Raised $24M during an ICO between August and September 2017.
Description
NEO (originally AntShares, rebranded in 2017), was founded by Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang in 2014 as co-founders of the non-profit Neo Foundation. The Foundation manage a small team of core developers and gives grants, incentives and rewards to independent developers for maintaining the network.
50 million NEO were sold during the ICO and another 50 million locked into a smart contract with 15 million unlocked each year for being used by NEO to support the development and growth of the ecosystem.
As per NEO’s official website:
Neo is a community-driven project, which has led to the creation and funding of numerous community development groups distributed around the world. These teams contribute to the development of Neo’s core infrastructure, in addition to producing user facing applications such as wallets or tooling for developers looking to build on Neo.
NEO is an open source platform relying on 3 major components for a Smart Digital Economy, as described in its Whitepaper:
- Digital Identity: The electronic identification of individuals and entities over the web.
- Smart contracts: NEO favors the creation of multi-party smart contracts via the use of its NEOContract module.
- Digital Assets: Digitalization of any assets on the blockchain and their secure p2p exchange between users.
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Consensus: Proof of Stake
Initially, the NEO cryptocurrency was indivisible (multiple of 1, no sub-unit) and the GAS token (used to pay for performing actions such as running smart contracts or performing transactions) was also indivisible when paying for system fees, which made the NEO blockchain difficult to use for developers.
A 2018 update, leading to NEO 3.0 solved these issues by making both tokens divisible, along other improvements.
Block validators on NEO are SuperNodes which are rewarded in GAS for validating transactions and blocks. NEO holders can delegate their NEO to a SuperNode to participate in the consensus and obtain Staking rewards overtime.
Staking NEO is available offline (without the need for the wallet to remain connected to internet).
Storage and wallet
Many different wallets exist to securely store and stake NEO such as Exodus (hot wallet).
Neon wallet is an official wallet developed by the City of Zion, a group of developers working exclusively on NEO project.
Technical specificities:
- Type: Native Coin
- Total Supply: 100,000,000 NEO
- GAS token total supply: 100,000,000 GAS
- Consensus: Proof of Stake (PoS)
- Algorithm: dBFT (Delegated BFT)
- Encryption: ECDH
- Blocktime: ~15 seconds
- Coding languages: C#, JavaScript, Kotlin, Python, Java, and GO
- Open source: Yes
- Privacy: Pseudonymous (low)
Documentation:
- Whitepaper: https://docs.neo.org/docs/en-us/basic/whitepaper.html
- Github code: https://github.com/neo-project
- Official website: https://neo.org/
- Explorer: https://neoscan.io/ & https://neotracker.io/
- Twitter account: https://twitter.com/Neo_Blockchain
- Reddit:https://www.reddit.com/r/NEO/
- Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEO_(cryptocurrency)
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