In their own words, “Neo is an open-source, community driven platform that is leveraging the intrinsic advantages of blockchain technology to realize the optimized digital world of the future.”
Originally launched in 2014 under the name “Antshares”, NEO is a smart-contract platform (and smart economy) that allows developers to build on it. NEO uses a Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) consensus mechanism.
Once dubbed the “Chinese Ethereum”, the platform is currently powering over 100 dApps.
It basically has three components that it aims to embrace within the ecosystem:
Smart Contracts Digital Identity DigitalAssets
You can learn more about NEO in the official whitepaper here:
I. NEO Bragging Rights: a. dBFT 2.0: A Consensus algorithm with high stability, high TPS, and single block finality b. NeoVM: A lightweight, cross platform, and scalable virtual machine. c. Smart Contract: A cross-platform, multi language, supported smart contract system d. NeoID: A customizable, decentralized, self-soverign identity protocol e. NeoFS: A distributed object storage solution for on-chain data applications f. Voting Mechanism: A voting mechanism that enables participation of on chain governance g. Dual Token: An innovative dual token economic model that optimizes on chain governance and utility h. Oracle: A built in oracle component enabling smart contracts to access external resources
II. NEO Token Details: NEO is different to other cryptocurrency projects as it has 2 native tokens, NEO and GAS. The NEO token is a NEP-5 token.
Most Proof of Stake platforms will allow you to stake the native token and receive that same token as rewards. When you “stake” your NEO (by holding it in the NEON wallet for example), you’ll be able to earn GAS tokens.
According to coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo/ there’s a total supply of 100,000,000 NEO and a circulating supply of 70,538,831 NEO.
III. How To Store & “Stake” NEO: There are many wallets that support NEO as you can see from the official NEO wallets page: neo.org/wallets.
My personal preference is to download the NEON wallet, and use your Ledger hardware wallet to access your NEO holdings in combination with the NEON wallet.
Once you have your NEO in the NEON wallet, you automatically start to accrue GAS and you can login and manually claim these GAS tokens at any point you want.
IV. Where To Buy NEO:
NEO is available on many large exchanges including Binance.com, Binance.US and Kucoin. For a full list of exchanges go here: coingecko.com/en/coins/neo
V. Potential Dangers Of NEO: NEO shares the regular dangers that all cryptocurrency projects have: there’s always the danger of laws and legalities that could put a pause (even permanently) on the project, team members, failure to create the vision, running out of funding, failing to achieve adoption and so on and so forth.
VI. My Personal Opinion About NEO: I’ve bought and held some NEO from the early days when it was still known as Antshares. While I do like the project, the fact that they’ve been around since 2014 and are working on “NEO 3.0” (which seems to have an 80% completion rate and target to launch is q4 2020 or q1 2021 but nothing is set in stone), so far the NEO project hasn’t seemed to make the progress that many people were hoping for.
However, the project seems far from dead.
“Neo is investing USD $100 million through its EcoBoost program to accelerate the realization of large-scale commercial blockchain solutions by empowering developers and projects in the ecosystem.”
It is too soon to say whether it can live up to the moniker or not, but the biggest advantage that it has over Ethereum is the relatively low barrier to entry. Since the developers don’t have to learn a new language to create smart contracts it can definitely look appealing. How it fleshes out in the future remains to be seen.
I am not sure whether it will “kill” Ethereum or not, but what I do know is that it presents an amazing platform for developers to add to the ever-expanding cryptosphere.
NEO does have a fixed supply of 100M coins which gives it the advantage over Ethereum of being a sound storage of value.
They also do release their financial reports which is really refreshing to see in the cryptocurrency space, and something that should be rather reassuring for any NEO token holders. The NEO team also publishes regular updates on their blog, and you can see how much was done in their latest May 2020 report here.
Taking into consideration that the GAS yield on holding NEO tokens is rather low at this point in time (under 3% it seems), and the multiple to get back to ATH is nominal in comparison, I do feel like there are better opportunities to deploy my capital than in NEO tokens.
I do believe that the NEO project has potential for success, and that maybe in the next bull market the price will revisit or even exceed the ATH once again. A more realistic price target would be $250 by 2025 which is still a little more than 6x ROI.
So in conclusion, I personally do like the NEO project and will likely hold a small bag of it for a few years as a “moonshot”, but I’ll avoid being too heavy in NEO (nothing more than a 2% of my portfolio overall).
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