Neo (formerly Antshares) is an open-source

decentralized Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group. Conce ...

blockchain decentralized application platform founded in 2014 by Da HongFei and Erik Zhang. Since its rebranding to ''Neo'' from ''Antshares'' in 2017, the project's vision is to realize a "smart economy" by utilizing blockchain technology and smart contracts to issue and manage digitized assets. The Neo network runs on a

proof of stake Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are a class of consensus mechanisms for blockchains that work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency. This is done to avoid the computational cost of ...

decentralized Byzantine fault tolerant (dBFT) consensus mechanism between a number of centrally approved nodes, and can support up to 10,000 transactions per second. The base asset of the Neo blockchain is the non-divisible Neo token which generates GAS tokens. These GAS tokens, a separate asset on the network, can be used to pay for transaction fees, and are divisible with smallest unit 0.00000001. The inflation rate of GAS is controlled with a decaying half life algorithm that will release 100 million GAS over approximately 22 years. A total of 100 million Neo were created in the Genesis Block. 50 million Neo were sold to early investors through an

initial coin offering An initial coin offering (ICO) or initial currency offering is a type of funding using cryptocurrencies. It is often a form of crowdfunding, although a private ICO which does not seek public investment is also possible. In an ICO, a quantity of cr ...

in 2016 that raised US 4.65 million, with the remaining 50 million Neo locked into a smart contract. Each year, a maximum of 15 million Neo tokens are unlocked which are used by the Neo development team to fund long-term development goals. The core of the Neo feature set revolves around tools that allow developers to efficiently deploy and scale smart contract applications on the Neo blockchain.

X.509 In cryptography, X.509 is an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard defining the format of public key certificates. X.509 certificates are used in many Internet protocols, including TLS/SSL, which is the basis for HTTPS, the secu ...

Digital Identities allow developers to tie tokens to real world identities which aids in complying with KYC/AML and other regulatory requirements.

Neo 3.0 update

Neo3 or N3 was first announced by Erik Zhang in 2018 as an upgrade to the previous Neo protocol (now known as Neo Legacy). N3 improves on previous versions with more powerful features and a modular design. Due to the extent of improvements implemented in N3, certain features do not have

backward compatibility Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especiall ...

with the Neo Legacy blockchain. N3 was implemented and launched with a new genesis block.

History

In 2014, ''Antshares'' was founded by Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang. In the following year, it was open-sourced on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

and by September 2015, the white paper was released. Neo was officially rebranded from ''Antshares'' in June 2017, with the idea of combining the past and the future. The word “neo”, originates from the Greek word “νέο“, meaning ‘new’, ‘modern’, and ‘young’. The vision of building a “smart economy” was developed along with the rebranding. In March 2018, Neo's parent company Onchain distributed 1 Ontology token (ONT) for every 5 NEO held in a user's

cryptocurrency wallet A cryptocurrency wallet is a device, physical medium, program or a service which stores the public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys, a cryptocurrency wallet more often al ...

. These tokens will be used to vote on system upgrades, identity verification mechanisms, and other governance issues on the Neo platform.

References

External links

Official Website
{{Cryptocurrencies Blockchains Cryptocurrency projects