A quick summary.

On 3rd March 2018, the Singapore leg of the NEO APAC Tour took place at the iconic Marina Bay Sands (you know, the building with a ship in the sky and the infinity pool). At its peak, there were probably more than 200 participants at the event. As someone who has bought into the idea of the smart economy that NEO is trying to build, I RSVPed to the event the moment I read about it.

Malcolm Lerider was there to kick the event off with an introduction to NEO for those who didn’t really understand it. Malcolm currently manages the tech team and community in Shanghai, and is not just a manager — he has worked on the voting mechanism for consensus nodes in NEO too.

For a basic introduction of what the NEO Smart Economy is, check out this link.

In his introduction, Malcolm highlighted one of the issues of existing blockchains that work on Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). His slide below explains it succinctly and clearly.

As part of the NEO Smart Economy ecosystem, NeoX allows private-public chains via cross-chain interoperability. This enables private chains that will be public within the private organisation, but not accessible by others outside. For example, the Ontology Project (ONT) has databases that are centralised as the information it stores is confidential and should be kept private. It is possible to give access of this data to people outside the organisation via the blockchain if needed, and it is this customizability that makes the smart economy and many interactions within the economy possible.

Here’s another slide that provides a clear comparison between NEO and some other existing blockchains.

In a separate conversation with Malcolm, he shared that NEO is the only blockchain that is able to keep up with demands of traditional IT enterprises. Instead of building a completely separate system, NEO is built to integrate with what exists.

He added that NEO wants to keep network transactions free or feeless as long as possible. They are also looking at the possibility of not even needing to spend gas for the transaction, but merely holding a drop of gas in your wallet will allow the transaction to move forward.

In the same topic of feeless transactions, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) tech like IOTA and NANO currently achieves that goal. If adopting / integrating DAG technology into NEO is something that will help NEO with its aim towards building a smart economy, they will be happy to consider and test it; just present ideas and suggestion through NEP (NEO Enhancement Proposal)!