"Google/Baidu, Facebook/WeChat, YouTube/Youku, Twitter/Weibo – China has long been making its own equivalents of Western technology staples. As cryptocurrency has become more mainstream, Ethereum has become one such staple, and true to form, China has made its own – NEO.1
NEO was launched in December 2016 and has been steadily rising in price since July, collecting DApps as startups flock to it to launch their ICOs. It just finished hosting a conference in San Francisco which featured a lineup of new projects.
But while many are calling NEO the Chinese Ethereum, in reality this is only partially accurate. The two blockchains do have similarities, but also several fundamental differences.
So what is NEO? Can it be seen as a competitor to Ethereum? article https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/neo-one-replace-ethereum-worlds-ico-platform/?utm_source=daily_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=01.02.18 is an attempt to unpack this subject.
There are many other technical differences between the two blockchains, many of which seem to favour NEO at the moment. For example, Ethereum only supports a programming language called Solidity, which developers often have to learn especially to interact Ethereum, while NEO supports Python, Go, Java and .Net, meaning that it already covers about 90% of the developer community, according to Techcrunch.
On the other hand, Ethereum is constantly developing and updating itself (one of its recent updates was called Byzantium, but don’t let that confuse you). For example, Buterin recently published an idea that could solve many of the problems that the rampant ICO market has been facing (DAICO).
Compare that with NEO’s inability to fork and desire to install itself into the existing governmental order, and we can see a potential for inflexibility, which could be seen as a negative as compared to Ethereum.
Whether or not NEO will usurp Ethereum as the world’s ICO platform remains to be seen. But NEO is already 7th in the cryptocurrency rankings with a market cap of over 9 billion dollars, according to Coinmarketcap – and NEO comes from China, so it has an enormous home market even before it spreads internationally. So what is certain even at this stage, rankings aside, is that it stands to become a major player in the future economy.
"