Summary
NEO is a non-profit community-based open source blockchain project. Its three main applications are digital assets, smart contracts and digital identity. Adding these technologies together, your funds and assets might be associated with your fingerprint in the future. The project was founded by Da Hongfei in 2014 under the name “AntShares” but was later rebranded to NEO in 2017.
Much of the development efforts today are delivered by an open source community known as City of Zion. They are a global, independent group of open source developers, designers and translators formed to support the NEO core and ecosystem. The vision of NEO is to shift our traditional economy into the new era they call The Smart Economy. The goal is for you to be able to trade digital assets through smart contracts and sign them with your digital id instead of a long hard-to-remember hexadecimal number.
The cryptocurrency NEO is a security asset that can be staked (Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance) in the blockchain to earn dividends. Dividends are paid in GAS, which is a utility token used as fuel for dApps to run on the blockchain. To stake your coins, you just have to keep them in your offline wallet. No need to run a server of any kind. To claim your GAS, you simply send yourself a transaction (which is feeless) and your GAS will appear in the wallet. This can be done at any time.
Over 40 dApps are already powered by the NEO eco-system. One of the most anticipated ICO’s is the NEX platform, which will have its token sale in April 2018. It is a decentralized exchange powered by an off-chain matching engine to enable much faster and more complex trades than existing decentralized exchanges, they claim.
Important: Neo is NOT divisible. If you send 1 NEO to your wallet from an exchange, and the exchange charges a fee (say 0.1 NEO), the exchange will get 0.1 NEO, 0.9 NEO will be sent to your wallet but get lost since it is illegal to transfer partial NEO on the blockchain! So you have lost your whole 1 NEO. Some exchanges have implemented safety measures so you won’t be able to withdraw an amount that makes you lose your NEO, but be careful. Always withdraw a whole number + the exchange fee (in above example 1.1 NEO).
Swot analysis of NEO
Strengths
- Flexible Development Environment. NEO’s platforms support various programming languages which include Java, VN.Net, F#, Kotlin, C#, and Python. It also plans to add support for C, C++, Javascript, and Golang in future. This makes NEO a developer-friendly platform.
- Transaction speed. NEO can handle up to 10,000 transactions per second.
- Quantum secure. NEO is ready for the future of technology because it has a quantum computer proof feature that makes it secure from future of quantum computers.
Weakness
- Possible to lose coins when transferring partial amounts.
- Wallet sometimes synchronizes slowly.
Opportunity
- China could adopt NEO on a national level.
- NEO’s governance protocol disables hard forks.
Threat
- Ethereum has first-mover advantage.
- Minor chance that NEO can be negatively affected if China becomes anti-crypto.
- Increasing competition.