Disclaimer: Novice Crytpo posts will be the resting place of my thoughts on various blockchain based technologies at a certain point in time. My thoughts should not dictate your actions or be perceived as investment advice but simply be a 'help' in to your own research and an opportunity for the community to comment and correct any misconceptions I may have.
Below are some of my musings on NEO following days of research in the first few weeks of October 2017 to get my head around their vision vs some of the more established competitors.
In short, following my research I have invested in NEO with a view to hold my position until at least early 2018, but ideally for years to come. My conclusion was that NEO is the most established and credible Blockchain of their type in China which offers equivalent or improved capabilities vs those of Ethereum. They already have some great traction with the likes of Alibaba (China's Amazon) and offer a highly scalable solution all while eliminating barriers to adoption for developers and native Chinese speakers. Formally Antshares, NEO is not the shiny new thing, it's the most established player giving it the first mover advantage on emerging competitors in China.
It is also now clear that Xi Jinping will continue in China's top job with a platform of economic and technological growth, innovation and a clearly stated view that China should embrace innovative solutions from abroad then build and use home-grown equivalents. My feel is that China will add regulation to ICO's and the likes of NEO, ultimately lifting the ICO ban either shortly before the end of 2017 or in the first quarter of 2018. If this happens and NEO manages to live up to it's reputation as the Chinese Ethereum why wouldn't we expect NEO's market cap ( $1,356,200,000 USD) to be comparable to Ethereums ($100,941,536,472 USD) in the coming years? - note: market caps as of time of posting
NEO - https://neo.org
- Commonly referred to as the 'Chinese Ethereum' as the company from China
- Allows for smart contracts and programmable distributed apps in C sharp and Java, this is a key advantage vs Ethereum as it lowers the barrier to entry for developers - Ie. It's easier for developers to keep coding in languages they are used to vs learn Ethereum's proprietary language
- Ethereum seems to be playing catch-up to Neo in many technological respects, it would be reasonable to think of Ethereum as gen 1 and Neo as gen 2. Ethereum are currently implementing (via hard forks) gen 2 capabilities while Neo seem to be heading towards gen 3 capabilities
- Currently scales better than Ethereum - Neo throughput was in no way an issue during their first hosted ICO, by contrast this is typically an issue for Ethereum with transactions being delayed in many instances by > 12hrs
- Does not require a hard fork to innovate / build upon the platform - there is a consensus mechanism instead
- Has a very encouraging ecosystem of start-ups based in China
- The more you look into their core team, founders etc the more you recognise that they have a very credible and capable team
- Neo's developer community is known as City of Zion, their documentation looks good and is available in many languages - https://cityofzion.io/
- Uses dBFT in place of POS or POW. The view is this is much more scaleable and equally resiliant. If true this will deliver a key advantage in the forthcoming 'scaling wars' - Read More: http://www.econotimes.com/Blockchain-project-Antshares-explains-reasons-for-choosing-dBFT-over-PoW-and-PoS-659275
- Neo and Microsoft are working together in relation to Azure via the Coco Framework - they are not the only one working with Coco
- Better placed to work with regulators and overall are much more regulator friendly than Ethereum
- Incorporating a 'digital identity' - note: Ethereum is considering the same feature
- Neo will be used a core technology in Alibaba's forthcoming platform to compete with Amazon AWS / Azure - this should not be underestimated
- Will pay the equivalent of dividends to holders of NEO in the form of 'GAS' which is 'fuel' for using the NEO network - https://neotogas.com - typically NEO will see a price rise shortly after a price rise in GAS
- If GAS usage continues to rise well over time, this will be a good buy / hold
- Price will jump quickly if more exchanges support the currency
- Price will jump quickly if the ICO ban in China is lifted - all indications are this will happen closer to Christmas / early new year
- Neo has been used as the 'token' to buy 'redpulse', an ICO in China. This will happen frequently once ICO's are underway again in China which will be good for NEO as people 'stock up' on Neo in advance to buy of a buy in new offerings
- NEO Price: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo/
- GAS Price: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/gas/
- Neo Explained:
Please comment, like and contribute. I'm more than happy to have my logic tested, to learn and to grow. Let's help each other lift the skirts on the the hype and pick the winners in a blockchain future!
Cheers,
TTD