This time I had the pleasure to interview the NEO team. One of the most loved projects by the Crypto community. A flexible blockchain platform aiming to fit the business needs.

How would you describe the main pillars of the company?

NEO is an open source project, so the main pillars are all the community groups that are actively building and expanding the ecosystem. The NEO Council is located in Shanghai, community developer group City of Zion are more than 50 developers distributed all over the world, and community developer group NewEconoLab sprouted up in China around two months ago and now gaining a lot of traction across China.

What’s the role of the tokens at NEO project?

NEO has two main purposes:

1.Slowly generate new GAS (until cap is reached) 2.Enforce network integrity a) Vote for consensus nodes b) Ensure gas circulation. GAS has one main purpose: 1.Utility token for service fees on the NEO blockchain. GAS circulation: 1.All system fees are recycled and distributed proportionally to all NEO. 2. If transaction fee is charged, then that GAS is distributed only among consensus nodes.

About the team and supporters, what are your strengths?

Counting all daily contributors, we are now a team of close to 100 developers working on this project, spread all over the world. In Shanghai, we are close to 30 full-time team members and still growing, preparing to change to a bigger office for the second time. Our biggest strength is of course our community. We have amazing developers building on this project; developers who see what needs to be done and just go ahead and do it. Community groups, for example CoZ, are funded by NEO Council and independently managed, meaning that we reduce bottlenecks in rewarding contributors.

Thinking about the future, do you have relevant upgrades or partnerships on track?

Yes, but we don’t want rumours to spread. We will announce when we have something to announce.

What will be the real use for GAS? An how it will fit in NEO project?

GAS is the utility token. GAS is paid to deploy Smart Contracts and to get priority transactions. It’s divisible and can also be used as service fee within Smart Contracts, comparable to a network “currency”.

What’s the added value of NEO against other competitors like Ethereum?

NEO transaction capacity is already 1000tps+ single core on MainNet. Other projects claiming similar speed do not have a production ready product. Projects claiming “millions of tps” are using sharding / state channels. These technologies are just as easily applied to NEO. Transactions are free. Consensus algorithm never create branches. A transaction is 100% final after the first confirmation. Smart Contracts can be written in C#, Java, Python, JavaScript, Go, Kotlin. Smart Contract deployment fee serve as an extra protection layer against ”trash data” and scam projects. Very different focus, Ethereum wants to build a network for unstoppable applications, NEO wants to build a network for smart economy (adhere to legislation).

Evaluation of the current scenario for NEO and the blockchain platforms industry.

I feel most blockchain platforms are trying to adapt business use cases for blockchain. NEO actually take the other approach, and have built a blockchain platform that is adapted to business use cases. We want to link the real economy and the digital economy.

Thanks for your time