Everything you need to know about NEO

Born in China as Antshares, and then renamed, NEO is a blockchain platform based on the concept of intelligent economics. The project is focused on the digitization of assets with blockchain technology and digital identities as well as automate the management of these assets through intelligent contracts.

NEO formally started in 2014 under the direction of the OnChain company in charge of the veteran in the world of cryptocurrencies Da Hongfei. The project starts with the purpose of research, design and development of blockchain technology.

Technology implemented

Digital assets, smart contracts and digital identity make up the concept of smart economy that NEO promotes.

In the first place, digital assets are conceived as a way of transforming them into electronic data for easy and free trade, generating high transparency and eliminating untrustworthy intermediaries.

Intelligent contracts, on the other hand, are developed under an environment of multiple programming languages, which is beneficial for developers who wish to quickly project their contracts.

NEO's smart contract system consists of three parts:

• NeoVM - Virtual Machine of Universal Block Chain: it is a lightweight and general-purpose virtual machine whose architecture is very close to the JVM and the .NET Runtime, similar to a virtual CPU that reads and executes instructions in the contract in sequence.
• InteropService - Interoperable Services: used to load the ledger of the block chain, digital assets, digital identity, permanent storage area and other services.
• DevPack - Compiler and IDE plug-in: DevPack includes the high-level language compiler and the IDE plug-in.

Finally, the touch of digital identity, based on the X.509 standard used by NEO in its key infrastructure, generates trust in the multiple transactions carried out in its network.

Characteristics of NEO

This cryptocurrency has the particularity of using two tokens, in addition to other relevant qualities.

• NEO, is the main token with approximately 100 million units.
• GAS, is the second token of the network used for internal transactions and which results as a dividend for the amount of NEOs that are maintained, as long as they are in an official wallet that has the characteristic.
• Both tokens are indivisible, this means that their acquisition is only done in round numbers (Example 1, 2, 5, 10) and although it is possible in some exchanges to buy fractions of NEOs, when withdrawing funds to a wallet these must be go in its entire form.
• Unlike Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that use the Proof of Work algorithm technology, NEO works with the Proof of Stake system or Proof of Participation giving greater voting power to those users who have more units, achieving consensus in the transactions when they are approved by more than half of their owners.
• This last feature maintains a certain level of security in the network, preventing it from being infiltrated with malicious information by any other user, since this in theory would have to buy most of the supply to acquire the power of decision in the network.

NEO in relation to other cryptocurrencies

Some of the characteristics of NEO make it very similar to the Ethereum cryptocurrency, placing it directly as its direct competition, and even positioning itself as its replacement due to the great factors and advantages that accompany it.

NEO as well as Ethereum are cryptocurrencies focused on intelligent contracts, ICOs and DApps (Distributed Apps), both have cryptoactives in their network, GAS in the case of NEO and Ether in the case of Ethereum, which feed their block chain. This with the addition that both are open source projects with an active community and great support.