NEO is a blockchain platform and cryptocurrency which enables the development of digital assets and smart contracts. The project is based in China and was originally launched in 2014 as AntShares. NEO uses a delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) consensus mechanism and can support up to 10,000 transactions per second. NEO tokens can be staked to produce GAS tokens which are used as the fuel of the platform, to pay for computation or deployment of smart contracts within the NEO network. The project was founded by Da Hongfei.^[1][2]

General:

NEO rebranded from Antshares to NEO in June of 2017.

A total of 100 million NEO was issued and represents the ownership of the chain. 100 million was created in the Genesis Block and distributed according to distribution mechanism as described in its white paper. The total amount of NEO shares is fixed at 100 million and can not be increased. The smallest unit of the NEO is 1 NEO and cannot be divided.^[3]

NEO works on the guidelines of Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dbFT ). This technology offers quick verification of the transactions relies on one blockchain, zero risks about the leaking of the blockchain transactions, the safety of forks and lessens the risk of any illegal actions.

NEO will support almost all programming languages via a compiler, including those on Microsoft.net, Java, Kotlin, Go and Python, greatly lowering the difficulty for developers to write smart contracts.

Much of the interest in NEO comes from its association with Onchain. Onchain developed out of NEO as a way of separating the digital currency from the blockchain development team. Onchain helps businesses to integrate blockchain technology into their day-to-day operations. NEO’s relationship with Onchain helps to bring business ventures to the platform, which aid in its growth.^[4]

The Two Tokens: NEO vs GAS

The Neo ecosystem has two tokens:

• NEO – formerly known as Antshares (ANS). Max Supply: 100,000,000 Total Supply: 100,000,000 Circulating Supply: 50,000,000 Remaining Supply: 50,000,000
• GAS – formerly known as Antcoins (ANC). Max Supply: 100,000,000 Total Supply: 10,457,112 (as of Dec 2017) Circulating Supply: 8,267,959 (as of Dec 2017) Remaining Supply: 2,189,153 (as of Dec 2017)

The NEO system includes:

• Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (DBFT) algorithm – This is a consensus mechanism
• NeoX – This system will create the ability to execute and operate across various Blockchains
• NEO Contract – Is the mechanism for creating smart contracts seamlessly in scalable, high performance environments that integrates pre-existing codebases (e.g. C#, VB.Net, F#, Java, Kotlin)
• NeoFS – This is a service which allows decentralized storage (like a peer to peer Dropbox)
• NeoQ – A lattice-based cryptographic mechanism which creates problems that cannot be solved by quantum computers and ensuring being quantum-proof.^[5]

NEO Roadmap:

Roadmap for Q4 2017:

• Decentralization of consensus nodes P2P Network Optimization (2017Q4) Voting Algo. Optimization (2017Q4) Candidates List Website (2018Q1) NEO Council Consensus Node < 2/3 (2018Q1)
• Universal Data Format for Wallet/Node Prog. NEP2 - Private Key En/Decryption (2017Q4) NEP3 Universal Data Format (2017Q4)
• Promotion/Ecosys Globally Legal Token-raising Framework (2017Q4) NEO DevCoin 1 (2017Q4) CoZ Funding (2017Q4) Seed Projects (2017Q4) Distributed ID Distributed Exchange