NEO has made an announcement on Twitter indicating that something big might be around the corner which the community has dubbed NEO 3.0 and which might bring with it further decentralization and a change to the indivisibility of NEO.
NEO 3.0 ON JULY 4TH
The news was announced, or rather pre-announced, on the NEO Twitter account with a cryptic message that reminds us somewhat of the 'Three lifetimes of blessings' pre-announcement they made around the turn of the year although it is clearly more defined than last time.
source:Twitter
DECENTRALIZATION
It seems clear that decentralization is one of the key aspects of the news announcement that will be made tomorrow on July 4th. I assume this means more nodes will be added to the network, but it might also mean that a voting mechanism might be implemented. After all, the manual addition of nodes is still done in a centralized way, but a working voting mechanism would change the dynamic entirely and push it towards full decentralization. As most people know, NEO is still not fully decentralized currently, and it has been a hurdle in adoption of the platform.DIVISIBILITY
Within the NEO community it is also rumoured that NEO 3.0 will make changes to the indivisibility of NEO. Currently it is not possible to own fractional shares of a NEO; you can only own complete NEO shares on your private wallet. NEO's Da Hongfei has often commented that they are thinking of changing NEO to become divisible into fractions so that people can also own fractions of a NEO much like one can own fractions of ETH. Part of the reasoning behind this is the rapid price appreciation of NEO, which would quickly make it impossible to purchase for regular people if the price continues to appreciate further and above a certain price level. Making NEO divisible keeps NEO within reach for the average investor and user as well.
OFF-CHAIN SCALING
Perhaps not entirely related to NEO's 3.0 release, but still relevant, is the fact that the Trinity Network for NEO is to be released around the same time. Trinity acts much like Bitcoin's Lightning Network or Ethereum's Raiden Network, in that it sets up payment channels, but for NEO (and other blockchains in the future). This allows for infinite off-chain scaling and instant payments - which are further enhanced by being free since transacting on NEO is free.
Scaling solutions such as Trinity are going to be vital in implementing blockchain technology in existing services, such as computer games where millions of data transactions happen every second.
We're going to have to wait and see which features actually make it into NEO and which don't, but if you're technically inclined (I'm not) then you could visit the NEO github to view the current commits and pull requests for NEO 3.0 to see exactly what will change.
If you're a regular reader of my content then you know I'm very bullish on NEO's future, and NEO is actually my main holding in my portfolio. The only thing holding it back is the current state of decentralization - and I'm very happy that decentralization is still a priority of the team. At $37 per NEO, I think it's steal.
