Given the growing FUD surrounding NEO cryptocurrency regarding it being centralized, delaying of blocks and the consensus mechanism dBFT, its co-founder Da Hongfei came forward to clarify them all.


NEO coin – the fUD and the fACT?

The founder of NEO, Da Hongfei came to the front to clarify the confusion surrounding the NEO cryptocurrency with his straight facts. There has been a lot of FUD around this digital currency regarding its dBFT consensus mechanism, the plan to decentralize the consensus nodes and the delay in the latest block.

The concerns started a few days back when questions have been put up about the above-mentioned aspects of NEO. Due to “alarmingly small number of smart contracts” its network has been alleged to be centralized. It has been further said that NEO blockchain has poor performance that is nowhere near its advertised 1000 transactions per second.

It had also been stated, the developers claim that the smart contract system of NEO not only lacks various features but is also poorly coded. Additionally, NEO had a two-hour block a few days before, that raised questions about its technical foundations. However, a NEO team member explained that it happened because a single node went down that caused a deadlock in the consensus process.

Facts about delegated byzantine fault tolerance (dBFT)

In the light of increasing FUDs, NEO’s founder Hongfei cleared the air around NEO’s consensus mechanism dBFT where no holder participates in the consensus process directly rather through votes via a special voting transaction in Consensus Nodes. These Consensus Nodes’ numbers are set similarly to NEO holders process, that ranges from 7 to 1024.


The elected nodes achieve the consensus block by block in BFT kind of algorithm. Out of the total NEO tokens, NEO Council manages about 50 percent tokens whose focus is on efficiency instead of decentralization right now. They have only used their tokens to vote only in 7 consensus nodes in the past.

He also mentioned that NEO blockchain has hundreds of full nodes online though it is difficult to measure the exact number. As for in 2018, the Consensus Nodes will be around 7 to 13.

Block delay is not unusual…

Hongfei mentioned that the reason given by Malcolm Leridor is “ridiculous and ignorant accusation and can be debunked easily.” He explains that it might be caused by something in the p2p protocol implementation of NEO. They have already tested it and plan to deploy it on mainnet by this week.

According to him, bugs are not unusual to encounter even the most critical ones and the edge of dBFT can surely be seen here. Moreover, he stated that even if the bug in a p2p protocol that caused network stagnation is there, no consensus fork happened and no transactions need a reversal.

Plan to decentralize NEO blockchain consensus nodes

In his clarification, Da Hongfei talked about the decentralization plan that was released in 2018 in San Francisco at NEO DevCon 1. NEO is already working in private networks or testnet with a few companies viz. Fenbushi Capital/Wanxiang Blockchain Lab, KPN, and COZ.

He further explained that the reserved NEO tokens are used to “accelerate development, reward community, and foster ecosystem.” By decreasing the NEO held by NEO Council, the goal is to distribute the governance power to the community.

The clarification is given by Da Hongfei surely seems like straightforward and quite convincing but until the investors get to see the points made by Hongfei into action, NEO’s value and credibility will remain unaffected. As of now, NEO is riding at $106 and showing no signs of boosting but it is yet to be seen!

What are your views on Hongfei’s clarification on concern over the FUD covering NEO? Do you think it will help in giving a boost to NEO price? Let us know below!

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