Alt-News #5: Antshares rebrand to NEO & new whitepaper / Singapore Startup TenX use of Visa Debit Cards / Sia bounties and ASIC Presale is live

[Photosource: NEO]

China's first open-source blockchain platform Antshares has rebranded to NEO

The new name comes from the Greek and stands for youth and novelty. The ANS symbol on exchanges will soon be replaced by NEO while the developers are currently working on new clients and revamping the UI for the new brand which comes with new and innovative Blockchain development plans.

They recently organized a big meeting at the Microsoft headquarters in Beijing which was attended by 200 representatives of different organisations, several major potential investors, industry specialists, Blockchain enthusiasts and even representatives of the Chinese financial and mainstream media attended the meeting.

Some of the presenters at the meeting were:

Da Hongfei, founder of NEO who announced some of NEO's plans and strategies and how their new smart contracts will make it a reality.

Erik Zhang, core developer of NEO, introduced the new Smart Contracts 2.0 to the audience and explained the main differences between NEO and Ethereum, for instance, Ethereum has its own programming language called Solidity whereas NEO will be able to support all porgramming languages via a compiler. Including languages like Microsot.net, Java, Kotlin, Go and Python with the hopes of attracting a vast community of developers.

They recently also released a new and updated whitepaper which can be found here:

https://github.com/neo-project/docs/blob/master/en-us/index.md

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[Photosource: TenX via Bloomberg]

Since one of the biggest challenges to date is how to use cryptocurrencies in the real world, the new Singapore-based startup says the answer will be its Visa card. They are pitching their debit card as an instant coverter between multiple digital currencies and fiat money, i.e. the dollar, yen and euros.

They've received over 10,000 orders for their cards already and will be taking a 2% cut from each transaction. Although for some of the cryptoheads this may seem like a huge cost, don't forget that giants like Paypal and Western union take anywhere between 5-15%.

The transactions are currently capped at $2,000 a year but users can apply to increase the limit through identity verification. To avoid the huge volatility risks in crypto that's been happening over the past years the company has built an app that serves as a digital wallet connected to the Visa card so that when it's swiped at a cafe or restaurant, the merchant is paid in their local currency instantly and the user's crypto account is debited at the same time.

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Siacoin announces a bounty program

It has by now been posted on their github and can be found here:
https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/issues/2155

All bounties will be paid in Siacoin and they have recently started off one for integration with Minio which is a popular project in the storage space. The offer stands for 300,000 siacoin which is currently valued at $3000.

A group of Sia enthusiasts and probably early adopters set up the funding for this bounty program and quietly organized a "donor's club", they wished to remain anonymous.

Siacoin ASICS are now live for pre-sale

The website was weirdly hard to find through google and their usual website: http://sia.tech/
Could be an indicator why only 1350 out of 4000 units have been sold so far, but that is only speculation, if you want to access the site directly, here is the link:
https://obelisk.tech/

I talked about this pre-sale in "Alt-news #2" and it has been live now for a few weeks already.

Some technical details about the ASIC:

CHIP: FULL CUSTOM 28NM ASIC
HASHRATE: 100+GH/S
POWER CONSUMPTION: 500 W OR UNDER
NOISE: 65 DBA OR UNDER
WEIGHT: 20 POUNDS OR UNDER
POWER SUPPLY: INCLUDED

Profits Calculator:

As it says at the end, this is with their current block reward and with the 4000 ASIC miners included. 150,000 Siacoin a month would equal around $1,500 monthly income if the price remained steady minus electricity costs depending on what they charge you for that in your location.