NEO, billed by many as “China’s Ethereum,” grabbed the number 6 spot as its price neared $50, giving it a market capitalization of $2.445 billion, surpassing seventh-place Litecoin’s $2.283 billion, according to coinmarketcap.com. NEO’s price of just over $18 seven days ago jumped well over 100 percentage points in the period.

NEO reached $50 on Sunday, then dropped to $46.25 on Tuesday. The price was $11.79 on June 20, which marked a significant high point from late May when the price was about 50 cents. The price began accelerating in early June.

NEO was the only top 10 crypto to post a gain in the 24-hour period, rising nearly 5 percentage points, along with 8th place NEM and 9th place Dash which rose 3.5 points and 0.22 points, respectively.

A Promising Start

NEO development began in 2014, and the blockchain-startup ONCHAIN is overseeing its enterprise version. Already the platform offers more languages than Ethereum supports.

NEO smart contracts are based on NEO’s Virtual Machine, which is similar to Ethereum’s Virtual Machine. NEO is designed to solve the same problems as Ethereum. NEO’s incorporation of sharding and concurrency in its computer science model solves scalability problems.

By using Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) for its blockchain operations – a consensus method proponents claim offers better security for blockchains – NEO places itself in the company of the well-known blockchain project Hyperledger, and the lesser-known Stellar. “Specialized bookkeeping nodes” reach consensus via “delegated voting” per NEO’s dBFT model. It takes a two-thirds vote for approval of a current copy of a blockchain.

Demand Exceeded Supply

The Western market first learned about Antshares, a smart contract and decentralized application (dApp) platform, just ahead of the company’s rebrand to “NEO.” The fact that only one exchange offered bitcoin-NEO trades has led to a bottleneck in supply. Prices skyrocketed in the weeks ahead of the rebrand. Antshares’ ICO was in the fall of 2016.

NEO’s partners include crowdfunding platform WINGS and multinational technology corporation Microsoft. Reports last year of a partnership between Alibaba and the former AntShares were false, though the companies have worked together.

NEO’s collaboration with Wings is for research and development purposes. With Ali Cloud and ONCHAIN, NEO is working on a proof of existence e-mail repository.

Also read: Token Analysis: Is NEO (Formerly Antshares) ‘China’s Ethereum’?

Gaining China’s Approval

NEO seemingly has approval from the Chinese government – having attended a government-sponsored industry conference, which could bode well for the blockchain project.

If NEO becomes the default cryptocurrency of Chinese projects, on which they build Ethereum-like projects, then it is easy to see a strong and developed response in China garnering a lot of value.

Featured image from Shutterstock.