CEO Changelly, Eric Benz, keeps on surfing around the crypto universe to find the answers to the most exciting questions that keep on electrifying the global crypto community. So, our today’s guest at “Crypto Talks with Changelly” is John Wang, who plays the role of NEO eco growth director. While having a conversation with John, Eric tried to get the juiciest insights about the NEO foundation plans on the network further development, and figure out if the concept of “living on crypto” is already possible.



Eric:

For the beginning, tell us a bit about Neo roots? What was the original mission and philosophy of the company? Has it changed after the last five years? If so, in which direction?

John:

NEO was founded by Da Hongfei and Eric Zhang. It is important to mention that NEO is not a company, but a Foundation, that governs the blockchain. Our philosophy now is Practical Idealism, which means that we aim for the idealistic goal to improve the world with distributed technology.

Eric:

The technology behind Neo has much in common with the Ethereum blockchain like smart contracts, or a native GAS asset that “fuels” the network. Can you tell that you’re the continuers of the Vitalik’s philosophy, or it is your goal to go beyond the existing technology and make something even more significant, something that will make Neo stand out from the crowd?

John:

We are definitely different in the sense that we have a dual-token system, our Gas is used to pay for the execution of smart contracts, but it is also traded on exchanges. Also, NEO tokens generate Gas for investors. Another key difference from Ethereum is that NEO supports multiple programming languages, so developers can use the languages they are familiar with, such as C#, Python and Java.

Eric:

Tell us a bit about the upcoming Neo network update. What key positive changes will it bring?

John:

NEO3 will be released in 2020, with some of the features first released on NEO2.0 this year.

Some of the major features will be: built-in oracle implementation, which will allow smart contracts to access Internet resources.

NeoFS will be a decentralized file storage platform built on NEO. It will be primarily used by dApps as data storage infrastructure, in addition to acting as a Content Delivery Network.

NeoID is a decentralized identity protocol built on NEO, NeoID will support the issuance of decentralized identifiers in addition to being compatible with the industry-standard X.509 level certificate issuance model.

NeoVM will be completely decoupled from the blockchain in NEO 3.0, which is intended to offer several benefits including the support of non-blockchain applications and easy contract debugging without needing blockchain data.

Finally, there will be significant reductions in smart contract deployment costs, which is great news for everyone building on NEO.

And many more, that I can’t mention here, otherwise my answer will be too long 🙂

Eric:

Decentralization is one of the core principles that inspire the global crypto community. What does this term mean to you? Is it true, that along 2019 you are planning to make Neo network fully decentralized?

John:

NEO is gradually decentralizing, NEO has 7 consensus nodes and four of them being distributed to different entities, such as Swisscom, KPN, CoZ, etc.

Eric:

Let’s talk about the community. China is the birthplace of the NEO community. Now as it is expanding rapidly, are there specific regions in which the company plans to increase its influence in the first place?

John:

Actually, the NEO community was very global from the beginning – it is not quite correct to say that China is the birthplace of the NEO community. Our presence is really evenly distributed across the world, both our NEO supporters and core developers coming from Japan, South Korea, Western and Eastern Europe, South, and North America. We are boosting our presence in the US, where we’ve opened a new office this year, headed by senior ex-Microsoft employees.

Eric:

Our common yet intriguing question at the end of every interview sounds like: What do you think of living on crypto? Is it already possible, or is it too early to talk about that?

John:

It’s not quite possible yet, well at least it’s not convenient. However, major cryptocurrencies have proved to be a good store of value – you should be ready for volatility, but coins like NEO or Bitcoin have been around for many years, so they have proved themselves and are here to stay.

Eric:

The other question sounds like: what question would you ask Satoshi if you meet him/her face to face someday?

John:

I’d ask how can you prove you are Satoshi 😊

