NEO uses blockchain technology along with digital identity to allow for asset digitization. It also lets these digital assets be self-managed via smart contracts and achieves a “smart economy” featuring a distributed network. The smart economy is the result of smart contracts, digital identity, and digital assets. This community-based blockchain project has been around for several years, proving its stability and value to the blockchain community.

When Was NEO Founded?

Since NEO was founded back in 2014, it is among the older platforms and community projects in the blockchain world. On June 2015, it had a real-time open-source listing on GitHub. Because of its long history, the NEO team has handled the project throughout the increase in popularity of the blockchain industry, including its boom, plus the frenzy and then cooling of the market for digital money. The team at NEO feels that technology is the driver for progress and aims to shift the current traditional economy into a “smart economy.”

What Are the Key Components of NEO’s Vision for a Smart Economy?

As mentioned, the smart economy in NEO’s vision is made up of digital assets, digital identity, and smart contracts. The digital assets are programmable and exist as electronic data. Blockchain technology allows them to be trustful, decentralized, highly transparent, traceable, and without intermediaries. Using NEO’s blockchain, users can register, trade, and then circulate various assets.

The digital identity is the information regarding a user’s identity, whether it is an organization, individual, or other entity. Specifically, it is this information in digital form. Experts prefer the digital identity system that is based off of the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) X.509 standard, and NEO’s standards are compatible with this. Its digital identity standards will support the point-to-point model for certificate issuance of the web of trust.

Finally, the smart contract system, NeoContract, is what the team considers to be the biggest feature for seamlessly integrating the current developer ecosystem. It allows developers to use mainstream programming languages within the IDE environments they are familiar with for all tasks related to smart contracts, including developing, debugging, and compiling them.

Additionally, NEO has a Universal Lightweight Virtual Machine known as NeoVM that has high scalability, concurrency, and certainty. With the NeoContract system, millions of developers worldwide can efficiently develop smart contracts. For more information, you can look at the NeoContract white paper.

What Are Some Technical Features of NEO?

For those who want more technical information, NEO’s underlying technology supports various digital asset types, letting users register, trade, and transfer. It also supports digital certificates to put trust in the public blockchain and provide full legal protection for the assets that the NEO platform digitizes.

NEO also facilitates the P2P digital asset exchange, without requiring any third-party exchanges. The smart contract is Turing-complete and supports parallel operation and sharding. It also offers unlimited scalability in cases when it is run using NeoVM. NeoVM is lightweight and stack-based to reduce startup times and provide efficient execution. NEO also has unlimited theoretical scalability thanks to deterministic calling tree technology.

The consensus nodes on NEO use the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) algorithm to meet their consensus and confirm transaction finality. Provided a Byzantine fault affects fewer than a third of the nodes, it ensures the system remains available and final.

NEO also has the Cross-Chain Assets Swap and Cross-Chain Distributed Transaction protocols. It is able to achieve the atomic swapping of assets while guaranteeing smart contracts operate consistently on various chains. Finally, it uses Lattice cryptography-based signing along with encryption techniques to prevent a quantum crisis with Turing decryption and encryption problems into the SVP (Shortest Vector Problem), which current quantum computers cannot solve.

What Tokens Does NEO Use?

NEO includes two native tokens, including NEO and NeoGas (GAS). NEO has 100 million tokens, and token holders get the right for network management, including voting for things like network parameter changes and bookkeeping. Half of the NEO tokens were proportionally distributed during crowdfunding to the supporters, with the other half managed by the NEO Council, which will use them for maintaining and operating the ecosystem and long-term development.

GAS is used to control the network resources. There is also a maximum limit of 100 million. The minimum GAS unit is 0.00000001. GAS is used to pay for charges associated with storing smart contracts and tokens, as well as operation. This method prevents abusing resources and gives bookkeepers economic incentives.

What Type of NEO Clients Are Available?

You can find NEO wallet clients for mobile, desktop, and web usage, including versions for various operating systems. The web versions include clients for both users and developers, making it simple to contribute to the development of NEO and allowing it to be a true community project. There are also several wallets available across the various platforms.

What Is the NEO Dev Competition?

NEO is currently hosting its first dev competition together with Microsoft. This competition is designed to attract NEO community developers around the world, showcasing their ambition, passion, and creativity. The competition’s bounty pool is as much as $490,000 USD, with the winners receiving the equivalent bounties in GAS. As of Feb. 23, 436 candidates had signed up for the competition, with 110 from China, 75 from the U.S., 23 from India, 11 from Russia, 10 from the UK, and competitors from several other countries. The competition does not end until March 10, so there is still time to sign up and submit work.

The dev competition requires participants to develop using the NEO blockchain, and collaboration as a team is allowed. All submissions must include codes and programs that are executable. The winners will be announced and the rewards will be distributed on March 31.

Conclusion

With a long history in the blockchain world, NEO is well established, already proving itself to be a useful resource for developers. There are already dozens of NEO dApps made by the community, showing the usefulness of NEO and that it is likely here to stay, working toward creating the smart economy.