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NEO offers the possibility of both Public and Private blockchains in the same ecosystem

Zalando, located in the heart of Dublin’s Silicon docks, was the venue for the first meetup of NEO – dubbed the Chinese Ethereum – in Dublin. It was also the kick start off for a European tour with the NEO stars heading off to London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Zurich before ending January with a large two-day DevCon in San Francisco. The Meetup was oversubscribed twofold with many developers disappointed not to make the gig.

The main speaker was Malcolm Lerider, senior R&D manager for NEO. His talk covered off the key components of NEO, namely that it was designed with business in mind. Lerider spoke of the main features promised by NEO including speed.

‘We can cope with thousands of transactions per second,’ he said. ‘That is pretty impressive but I have to warn you that there are other projects suggesting they can offer multiples of that – I ask you to listen with a degree of scepticism. Claims like that are all using off-chain scaling mechanisms, which are technologies just as easily applied NEO. In the end, the on-chain single core processing speed is what matters. The faster on-chain transactions are, the more you can scale it with off-chain scaling solutions.’

Lerider went onto talk about the smart contracts on NEO which are written in familiar languages such as C+, Python, Java, Javascript, Kotlin, with more to come.

‘The chain never branches, so all transactions are 100% final directly after the first confirmation. We are building this platform to fulfil business demands, instead of forcing businesses to adapt,’ claims Lerider. ‘The 100% finality after just one confirmation is very important for financial applications’.

However, there was one part of his presentation which caused some interest. Lerider went on to speak of interaction between NEO’s public blockchain and OnChain’s private blockchain. ‘It is possible to build your own private blockchain and then communicate with NEO’s public ledger in the same ecosystem,’ he said.

Onchain is the blockchain R&D company behind NEO. NEO was developed first and then Onchain began looking at private implementations of the technology.

This harps back to the philosophy that NEO was developed with business in mind. ‘We built a public blockchain, an open source structure,’ he says. ‘But it has to operate within regulatory requirements, and the decentralisation has to be balanced.

‘During the transition to a digitized society, we have no choice but to work with the tools we have today. Enterprises joining the transition to a Smart Economy still ask to sign physical contracts with physical enterprises,’ he says. ‘And so from this business requirement, Onchain was born to serve as the B2B gateway to NEO Smart Economy.’

Onchain develops private chains for enterprises that has specific requirement on for example data privacy. These private chains have the same underlying architecture as NEO and can connect to NEO Smart Economy using a cross-chain protocol. This gives us a unique situation where enterprises can control their own private chains using Onchain technology, and still connect to the public digitized economy on NEO, gaining the benefits of both private and public ledger.

Here Lerider introduced Ontology which he explains was forming the next part of the puzzle.

‘Enterprises are already storing personal data that is not to be shared on a public ledger for privacy reasons. There is a paradox here; it would be valuable to the individual to access this data in a digitized economy, but we cannot put it on a public ledger because of the data privacy issues.

‘For example, one may want to provide a digital signature proving certified bank account balance, but this data is safely stored offchain at the bank’s servers and is not to be published publicly. Ontology is specifically designed to bring ownership of data back to the individual, so that the individual can authorize third parties to share specified personal information in a secure manner on the public blockchain.’

NEO Smart Economy digitizes all assets and allow trustless digitized commerce on a public blockchain.

Onchain develops private chains for enterprises using the same underlying architecture as NEO, allowing them to connect to the public blockchain using cross-chain protocol. Private chains can thus also gain the benefits of the public ledger on NEO Smart Economy, and vice versa.

His talk was greeted with many questions including the location of the headquarters – China.

Lerider was very sanguine. ‘Yes, NEO is based in China but it is a distributed, decentralised platform. NEO is global project first,’ he assured the visitor. ‘There is no way to stop it.’

There were a further six speakers from Asia’s top NEO customers.

Red Pulse was presented by Stanley Chows from Red Pulse. Red Pulse claims to separate the signal from the noise. Its platform is an open eco resource system for research.

Deepbrain Chain was presented by Li Chuanfeng. His Artificial Intelligence company was the first to move to the blockchain – a powerful combination he contended.

Wowoo and OKWave gave a joint presentation. OKWave is Japan’s largest Q&A community – ‘O’ standing for question and ‘K’ for answer. It was looking for a way to monetise the kindness of people answering questions and decided the blockchain was the answer. Wowoo was providing a way for non-programmers to launch their own token without need for blockchain knowledge. The first project for Wowoo is OKWave and the next is a project based on stem cells

Next up was Hiroyuki Enomoto of the QRC Group. Hiroyuki explained that QRC was a RegTech company. He explained that changes to regulations often required huge expense and time to implement in financial companies. Some changes could run to thousands of pages with very costly impact on the company needing to comply.

‘In addition, regular compliance in implementing KYC or AML can be very time and labour intensive,’ he explained. ‘Moreover banks don’t share this information which duplicates cost and irritates customers.’

QRC was putting these systems on the blockchain with the intention of ‘making the world more complaint and secure.’

Finally a major investor for Zeepin Chain, Leo Chai explained his company was connecting creators with consumers, giving greater value to the designer and cutting out the middle man. In the Zeepin Chain eco system creators would earn more for their products, protect their copyright and reach new markets. ‘Earn, pay and invest,’ were the key words for the company. Leo also pointed out that the CEO, Zhu Fei, was a former CEO of Arting365, a massive marketplace for creativity and innovation. ‘It was a natural extension to move the concept onto the blockchain with the advantages it brings,’ he says.

Two hours later the audience had a lot of information to digest. There will be more meetups to come.