NEO is a Chinese based cryptocurrency that enables smart contracts as well as digital assets and it’s been frequently called the Chinese Ethereum since both cryptocurrencies surround smart contracts.

NEO has a speed of more than 1000 transactions per second, it has a rapidly growing amount of developers, especially Chinese ones, worldwide independent dapp teams and finally a live MainNet.

As of December 18th, the official twitter page for NEO confirmed they passed another security landmark, the cryptocurrency had a 3-month complete code audit by Reg4Sec, as well as penetration testing ordered by Swiss datacenter Deltalis.

Now, NEO intends to have the final step in their plan, to officially become decentralized. The developers have begun the process in order to reach this landmark by distributing 7 consensus nodes among the NEO council, the CoZ developer community, independent companies, and the NEO community. The progress will continue during the forthcoming months and the number of nodes can grow by as many as 10 times.

Now, you might think, “Wait a minute! This is not decentralization?!”. Well, you are actually correct, however, NEO’s game plan is to first deploy the network on working nodes (which has been completed), but now, they intend to move forward by choosing trusted 3rd parties around the globe to run nodes, and then finally, allow NEO holders to vote for whoever they want to run nodes, giving the power back to the people.

Curious side fact: One of NEO’s nodes is located in Deltalis. Deltalis is a very interesting data center because it’s not only built into a mountain, but it’s also located within an old army bunker.

NEO is looking pretty great for 2018! The developers have announced NEO DevCon, partnerships with several big companies (like for example QLink or Ontology) and upcoming NEO-based ICOs.

If you’d like to read more about NEO, make sure to check our article explaining how their dBFT consensus algorithm works.