I have heard about ANT/NEO over and over either online or from crypto lovers around me. It gets me excited at first thinking it is the next Ethereum, so I decided to do my own research before committing. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by my findings when NEO, IMHO, couldn't get the basic things right. I am not going to be talking about the fancy terms in whitepaper and roadmap. I am only going to focus on areas that I can easily research on and evaluate them as a fully-funded startup to understand their product development in the past year. If I overlooked any major aspects, please share in the comment below. (FYI on my background, I am a Chinese software engineer)
Here is my findings
1.Wallet(app.antshares.org) is not usable at all! Never finish syncing! I sent some antshares from exchange to my own wallet. I can see it from the antcha.in, but coins didn't appear in my wallet until after almost 2 weeks. Besides, the design sucks! The PC wallet looks like it was built in 1990s.
SECURITY!! The new wallets coming out (http://neowallet.cn, http://neowallet.net) are not in https! That means all your interaction with this website can be hacked. Either any hacker can change the actual content of the website, or they can intercept your request in this website, for example, when you are uploading your backuped wallet, they can see it!
Website was broken for more than 2 weeks (last month, at the time when I was doing research). Document links were not working because they didn't "备案“ in China (meaning, they didn't register their document site with chinese government. therefore, nobody can get access it).
In their previous website design (I think they just redesigned the website), they have a section showcasing pictures of the contributors. But if you look closely, they duplicate the contributors' pictures to make it looks like there are a lot of contributors working on it.
Developers, they really have too few of devs. They had 3 phases of ICO. The most recent one is about a year ago and they got 6129 Bitcoins, that’s about $3,677,400. That’s HUGE, especially when they are in China. A seasoned developer in Shanghai costs about $50k; A top-notch, Google T-6+ level engineer in Shanghai costs about less than $150k. But if you look at their github link: Neo Core: https://github.com/neo-project/neo/graphs/contributors, only the CTO Eric Zhang is contributing on a constant basis. (image:
) .I'm not gonna post all the repositories, but if you go through all the projects, https://github.com/neo-project, TBH, I think it's less active than some scam coin. I'm not saying active means the project is great, but at least it suggests there are people actively working on it. NEO promised a lot, but if nobody works on things, what does that mean?
I have also seen so many comments about how Chinese government support / will support NEO or how chinese only prefer chinese company.
First, there is no public news about chinese government supporting NEO and there is no history about chinese government support any type of“民企”（company owned by chinese individuals /investors / stakeholders). Chinese government usually only support “国企“ (company owned by the government, because they are the government’s arms and legs).
Secondly, Chinese government might still support digital assets or blockchain in general. But most likely, they won’t be comfortable with a decentralized distributed system. Do you know that Chinese can’t even exchange more than $50k worth of RMB to any foreign currencies? If Chinese government is going to embrace blockchain, it’s likely going to be a centralized system. In fact, the central bank already established THEIR OWN research institute to work on blockchain and digital currency.Obviously, despite having very few developers, NEO’s international marketing is BADASS! There are so many hype and praises and 0 critiques about NEO in English forums while tons of critiques in Chinese forums.
In summary, the only thing that NEO is great at, based on my research, is their international marketing. It seems like the slogan “NEO is the Chinese Ethereum” is working really well. And maybe due to the language barrier and cultural unfamiliarity, research is just hard . From my perspective, if they can’t get the basics right, why should I trust them with my hard-earned money?
Happy to debate.