Why China's Neo Can Do What No Other Cryptocurrency Can

Amid recent bans imposed by China, Neo has the potential to emerge as the cryptocurrency of choice in the heavily regulated nation, and perhaps across the globe.





Since its inception, Neo’s Onchain technology was designed to be regulator-friendly with a centralized approach that is quite different from most other cryptocurrencies.





This article explains the technology behind Neo and Onchain, their relationship, how they differ from standard blockchain technology, and what potential synergies and opportunities lay ahead, including the rumor that they may yet win acceptance by the Chinese government.





Focus on Being Regulatory-Compliant

Neo maintains a clear distinction from other standard blockchain platforms, as its focus remains on being regulatory-compliant. While digitized assets and smart contracts are also popular on other blockchain platforms like Ethereum, the third key feature of “Digital Identity” separates Neo from the rest.









Every individual, business, or any other entity operating on the Neo platform is expected to have a unique digital identity that will be verifiable. People, businesses, and projects have the option to transact among themselves only if the other party has the required identity, which makes the Neo network regulatory-compliant.





Even the various nodes on the Neo network may need to have identification before they can contribute to the transaction verification and other activities like accounting and bookkeeping.





Enter Onchain

While working on Neo, the cryptocurrency's founders, Da Hongfei and Erik Zhan, received interest from various enterprises looking for private blockchain solutions. Thus emerged Onchain in 2014, an independent technology company that works with the necessary financial and legal frameworks and provides blockchain solutions to various enterprises.





While Neo works like bitcoin and ethereum, Onchain focuses on the creation of private and consortium blockchains to meet the specific needs of the industry.





Onchain’s major product, Distributed Networks Architecture (DNA), uses digital asset applications to help businesses by creating private and public blockchains. DNA is believed to be the blockchain platform that can be customized to address all sorts of different problems in the private and public sectors.





Relationship Between Neo and Onchain

Neo and Onchain are two separate entities that exist independently, and neither owns the other. Neo targets the B2C segment, where C can refer to a customer or even community, while Onchain focuses on B2B enterprise services.





Both are separately funded. Neo is funded by a public community, while Onchain is backed by China’s largest private conglomerate called Fosun.





When asked why he chose Fosun as an investment partner, founder Da Hongfei said:“The three major arms of their (Fosun’s) portfolio include finance, medical science, entertainment and lifestyle, which has good synergy with blockchain tech. This is why we chose Fosun Group as an investment partner because we highly value the Enterprise resource that Fosun provide, a platform for Onchain to display blockchain technology.”



