NEO, previously known as AntShares (ANS), recently suffered a rebranding for opening to the international market. Lately is on the spot for passing from 12 to 50 dollars in just 4 days and winning the 6th position of market capitalization with 2.5 million dollars, above Litecoin. NEO is also known in the community as the “Chinese Ethereum”, so let’s analize what is this project about and what are the pros and cons that we find on it.
As Ethereum, it is a decentralized apps and smart contracts platform. However, Ethereum just currently allows the development in Solidity, a specific language for its platform that not so many developers know and as we could read recently on a Forbes interview made to NEO’s co-founder:
“NEO developers can write smart contract code in .NET and Java/Kotlinm, and we are currently testing integration with Go, JS, and Python for a rollout in the future. This will allow a great number of developers globally to build smart contracts on NEO.”
Da Hongfei. NEO Co-founder
Another point that is interesting is that as Ethereum still didn’t solve the scalability issues and continues with the Proof of Work (PoW) model waiting for Metropolis and Casper activation to solve this problems, NEO’s platform has already solved the scalability issues integrating sharding and concurrence to its model and already works with Proof of Stake (PoS).
The system doesn’t depend on the power of computation to validate transactions, it allows you to use your own funds to mining and obtain another coin in exchange called GAS, that is used to pay transaction fees and to create smart contracts. On this page you can calculate the GAS you will generate over time with your NEO invest.
To buy NEO, I recommend Bittrex platform but it is very important not to leave your investment on any online exchange as you will not receive the gas generated by your funds. Once you purchase your coins, store them in a local wallet where you will have control of your private key, like Neon wallet.
NEO’s development community is growing up at a good path and starting to develop interesting projects. If you want to know more about this community, visit CityofZion.io, they have a Slack group with a lot of activity and updated info about projects’ status.
There are other projects that are trying to compete with Ethereum, like EOS or Waves. The difference is that NEO might be at a great market position, as it has the support of the chinese government and of big companies like Microsoft and Alibaba.
Conclusion
Is a project that has just woken up after a long sleep and now has a lot of work to do. It can be found in only 7 exchanges and that might have caused the current price increase, we will need to see if it hold the price up after being accepted by the majority of exchanges. In my opinion, I truly believe that is a good long term investment but that is risky for the short-medium term. Maybe, the biggest challenge that it could find is the platform globalization, right now the platform is focused on the chinese market, but I think that little by little we will start hearing about more NEO based projects and ICOs that will make this blockchain to keep growing and getting stronger.