NEO, often dubbed the “Chinese Ethereum,” is a blockchain platform that allows users to register and transfer assets using digital identities.
NEO seeks to create a distributed network for the smart economy, in which all assets are digitized and can be exchanged.
These things include physical property, financial instruments like loans or stocks—and even intangible assets like intellectual property rights and voting shares for an organization.
NEO’s Core Features
NEO’s core features include:
- Smart contracts: NEO supports smart contracts, which are stored on the blockchain and only act when triggered by an external event such as a payment or transfer of assets.
- NeoVM: The Neo Virtual Machine is a lightweight virtual machine designed specifically for executing smart contracts on the NEO network. It supports multiple programming languages such as C# and Java, making it easy for developers who use these languages to build dApps on top of NEO’s blockchain.
- Automated testing & debugging tools: This project is especially noteworthy because of the time and effort they devote to testing their code.
How to Use NEO
NEO uses its own proprietary token, called GAS, which is generated by staking NEO tokens.
When you hold NEO, you’re essentially earning passive income in the form of this token–and if you hold enough GAS, then it could be worth more than what you originally paid for your NEO.
The GAS Token is not just a passive income token, but also a utility token that is used to pay for transactions and deploy smart contracts on the NEO network.
Advantages of NEO
- Ease of use – The NEO platform allows for the easy creation and deployment of dApps—just learn some basic programming languages like JavaScript or Python.
- Security – The way that NEO uses Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) as its consensus mechanism makes it far more secure than other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which rely heavily on miners’ participation in order for transactions/blocks to be created successfully every 10 minutes or so.
- Scalability – The high transactional throughput per second (TPS) of this network allows users to send funds between wallets quickly, without compromising on security.
- Interoperability – The Trinity Protocol, provides a way for communication between different blockchains such as Ethereum and Tron.
Disadvantages of NEO
- Centralization: NEO is a centralized cryptocurrency, which means that it’s controlled by the NEO Foundation. This can be seen as both a disadvantage and an advantage. On one hand, it means that there’s no need for mining (which requires energy) or staking (which requires money). On the other hand, it means that if something happens to this foundation then your investment may be at risk.
- Limited use cases: NEO only has one main use case – digital assets management. While this trend is not necessarily good news for NEO investors, digital assets are becoming increasingly popular and their liquidity levels, compared with traditional stocks/bonds, makes it possible to sell them quickly if needed.
How to Buy and Store NEO
To buy NEO, you’ll need to use an exchange. Some of the most popular exchanges are Coinbase, Binance, and Bitfinex.
Once you’ve bought some NEO, it’s important to store them in a wallet. This is a piece of software that stores your private keys on your computer or smartphone so no one else can access them.
NEO’s Future
NEO is poised to become more widely used as a result of continued expansion of its capabilities.
NEO has formed partnerships with other blockchain projects, such as Ontology and Elastos. These relationships have strengthened NEO’s ecosystem. These collaborations could potentially lead to increased interoperability and functionality for NEO.
NEO’s focus is also on developing decentralized finance applications, which could contribute to its growth and adoption such as NNS (NEO Name Service) and Switcheo (a decentralized exchange).
NEO has also expressed a commitment to regulatory compliance, which could help to increase institutional adoption and investment in the platform.
Ultimately, the NEO smart contract platform has established a solid foundation that could enable it to grow into a stronger and more attractive platform.