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NEO celebrated its second anniversary today, signifying two years of stable operations since its mainnet launched. While most of us celebrate our birthdays with cake, presents and red envelopes, the Chinese-led crypto project is celebrating the blockchain way— with a “technical articles competition,” as well as other contests.

“The NEO MainNet has been running in stable capacity for two years since its release,” the NEO website said in the anniversary announcement. “As an early blockchain project, NEO has spent the past two years improving its core technology, enriching and extending its ecosystem, and expanding the global presence of the NEO community.”

NEO’s Premature Growth Spurt

NEO was one of 2017’s greatest hits, although the run-up in prices was largely overshadowed by a few other big blockchains. Under the diminutive name of Antshares, the mainnet launched with a token valued at around $0.08 cents—putting it all the way down at 535th by market capitalization.

But Antshares climbed at breakneck speed. By August 2017, when it rebranded, NEO had reached the top ten, with prices pushing $40 dollars. Within a few months, the value quadrupled again, crossing $160 before the bubble began to burst.

Peeking Under the Wrapping Paper

But the two-year-old blockchain is already starting to deliver on the presents. Although Ethereum grabbed most of the spotlight in the blockchain revolution, NEO’s dBFT consensus algorithm comes with significant advantages—including a 10,000 per-second transaction rate that leaves proof-of-work blockchains in the digital dust.

Those advantages have watered a vigorous token ecosystem. At preset, CoinMarketCap lists twenty-seven NEO tokens—more than EOS and Stellar combined.

This makes the “Smart Economy” one of the most versatile platforms, even if not the most overvalued. Since it’s Turing-complete, everything possible on Ethereum can be done faster on NEO: there are NEO identity protocols, decentralized gambling dApps, decentralized travel booking, security tokens, market research platforms, and even a NEO Name Service. Crypto Kitties have not yet made it into the blockchain, but it has no problem managing Hash Puppies.

However, NEO’s promoters are finding their work already cut out: prices suffered more than most as a result of regulatory disfavor and unfriendly market conditions, and NEO coins are now trading at one-tenth of their December high. Although it’s not yet clear if it can return to the top ten, signs indicate that developers and the community believe it has nowhere to go but up.

Unfortunately this means NEO is now entering the Terrible Twos – according to the Mayo Clinic, we can expect “frustration, misbehavior and tantrums” and we need to avoid “challenging situations”.

So, good luck with that.

The author is not currently invested in NEO.