What is NEO ?

NEO is a blockchain and digital currency developed by the Chinese company Onchain, based in Shanghai. The cryptocurrency bears the name NEO since July 24, 2017: before that time it was known under the name Antshares (ANS).

One of the special features of the NEO blockchain is the support for so-called smart contracts, or smart contracts. These so-called smart contracts - in the case of the NEO blockchain called NeoContracts - make it possible to program applications on the NEO blockchain according to certain logic, so that processes and transactions can be automated. We also see this technique in Ethereum (ETH), which is why NEO is regularly referred to as "the Ethereum of China".

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Meet NEO: the Ethereum of China.
The fact that NEO has been developed in and by China brings considerable advantages for the cryptocurrency. Asia is a gigantic market where Western companies often struggle to achieve success. However, local companies are successful, probably because they know the market better and can count on more support from the local population. While Western companies such as Walmart, Facebook, Uber and even Google are getting off the ground in China, Chinese companies such as Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu and ICBC are now one of the largest companies in the world.

In 2013, the Chinese government stated that Bitcoin (BTC) was not regarded by them as a currency and indicated that Bitcoin should not be used to pay for goods and services. At one point they even went so far that banks and payment processors were forbidden to use Bitcoin. In contrast to Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, AntShares, nowadays NEO, received support from the government.

Besides the fact that NEO receives support from the Chinese government, the platform has even more advantages. As described earlier, NEO supports smart contracts just like Ethereum. To be able to write a smart contract for the Ethereum blockchain, programmers must first learn the programming language of Ethereum called Solidity. At NEO this is not the case: NeoContracts can be written in various general programming languages ​​such as C #, VB.Net, F #, Java and Kotlin. In the future, NEO plans to add even more programming languages, including C, C ++, GO, Python and JavaScript. The step for companies to adopt NEO is therefore smaller than for Ethereum, because the programmers do not have to specifically learn a new programming language. Stratis Platform has already shown that this concept works.