These are exciting times for cryptocurrency lovers!
2017 has been a landmark year for the cryptocurrency space so far. We've seen record amount of money pour into a long list of ICOs. Undoubtably some of these projects will fail, perhaps even at a higher rate than traditional tech startups BUT the handful of legitimate projects with strong teams and sound ideas will go on and dominate in their sector and bring a ton of wealth to early investors - something similar to the dotcom days of the 90's.
Governments are waking up and regulation may actually bring crypto into the mainstream
While most governments are waiting to decide what to do in terms of regulation or taxation, each month steady progress is being made. Once a few prominent governments lead the way, we will be on the road to regulation and education so that regular investors can get better info on cryptocurrency investments and begin to participate in the space on a regular basis with more confidence.
Japan recently took the first steps towards legitimizing cryptocurrency and China has announced it is reviewing ICOs and will soon decide how to regulate the space. While there is speculation China will ban ICOs in the short-term until regulation can be set; in the long-term regulation will only help the space as it will try to keep scams and pump-and-dump schemes out, set capital guidelines and audits for exchanges, and encourage people with good ideas to raise capital for new and innovative ideas.
What is NEO and why I'm excited about it
Often referred to as China's Ethereum, NEO is a platform for smart contracts and applications, and it is China's first open-source blockchain - a country that tends to massively value homegrown technology. Investors hold NEO shares that generate GAS (kind of like a dividend) as a reward for holding and participating in the economy. They can choose to hold on to the GAS for later use or exchange it for other currencies (ie. it has it's own value on exchanges).
NEO introduces many innovations and improvements on smart contracts (including scaling and security), can handle massive loads and numbers of transactions (something that has plagued Bitcoin with slower and slower transaction times and higher transaction costs with growing adoption) and gives developers the ability to write apps in a large number of programming languages unlike Ethereum.
Similar to massive companies like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba that have their own counterparts in the West, NEO could well become the main platform in China with a market cap rivaling that of Ethereum or Bitcoin or even higher. As of today it is a top 10 cryptocurrency in terms of market cap.
Over the last few months the value of one NEO has shot straight up from under $10 USD to around $40 USD with a market cap of around $2 Billion USD. For comparison, Ethereum which has been around for a couple of years now is around $345 with a market cap of around $32 Billion USD and Bitcoin which has been around for much longer is around $72 Billion USD.
This is the chart of NEO, showing an impressive adoption over it's first several months of trading:
Lastly, the community has grown massively on social media in a very short amount of time with r/neo showing 20K+ subscribers, there are NEO meet-ups popping up regularly, and a handful of exchanges now support the coin and its upcoming ICOs and communicate actively with the NEO team (like Binance)
I would love to hear your thoughts about NEO!