A currency for all seasons
NEO when translated from Greek means young and new and this refers to the new next generation smart economy platform aptly named NEO. It was formerly known as Antshares has had a monumental rise to fame and most know NEO for its explosive growth. At the moment is also known as the Chinese Ethereum.
NEO is mainly known as the Chinese Ethereum because NEO is positioned as a ‘public cloud’ and it is a part of a much bigger strategy by the Chinese government in establishing pre-eminence as a Blockchain platform industry leader. They generally want developers to use their tools and platform and to develop the ecosystem. We can see an example of this in the City of Zion team.
The NEO system includes:
Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (DBFT) algorithm. This is a consensus mechanism used instead of the traditional proof of work/stake that allows the system to resist the Byzantine Generals problem and maintains consensus even if some nodes bare malicious intentions.
Neox. This system will create the ability to execute and operate across the various Blockchains.
NEO Contract. This is the mechanism which is used for creating smart contract seamlessly in scalable, high performance environments that integrates pre-existing code bases such as C#, VB Net, F#, Java, and Kotlin.
NeoFS is a service which allows decentralized storage like a peer to peer Dropbox.
NeoQ is a lattice-based cryptographic mechanism which creates problems which cannot be solved by quantum computers and making sure that they are quantum-proof.
NEO differs from Ethereum as NEO supports many additional bases such as C#,
- Net, F#, Java and Kotlin while Ethereum has its own propriety language which is called Solidity. This requires developers to learn that before any development can take place. Obviously then this will mean a longer learning curve and barrier to entry which could hinder the number of developers that can enter the ecosystem.
NEO has a proof of stake model and also a 100% pre-mine which allows to derive additional coins in the form of GAS by holding them in a wallet. NEO distributes coins through a crowd funding event which allowed people to invest but NEO still made money from the sale. The distribution was greatly centralised as there was no mining and only the issuance of tokens. NEO and its team are making big moves to grow deep roots in the Asian continent and beyond.