What is NEO?
NEO can be said to be an Ethereum alternative, and for good reasons. Both of them are blockchain-based and offer smart contracts, albeit with some programming differences. With Ethereum, you will need to learn Solidity, while in NEO, there a special API that allows DApps to be coded in almost any language.
Within the NEO platform, there are two tokens. NEO and GAS. NEO confers ownership rights, while GAS is used as a form of payment when for example, a smart contract of a DApps is a run of the platform. It utilizes a special protocol called delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol, dBFT, for transaction verification. To make transactions fast, the NEO platform has specially selected nodes called bookkeepers who are paid in GAS.
To actually this, NEO utilizes what is known as Digital Identity; without it, smart contracts cannot work. Through it, assets can be digitized, tokenized, and managed on an open-source blockchain platform enabling the creation of a Smart Economy.
NEO is the first project of this nature in China. The benefit of this is that it provides a more efficient and quicker way to register, issue, and circulate their assets. E-contracts refer to contracts on which records of transfer of digital assets are kept. For every contract completed, a digital token is created as a result.
Founder(s): Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang
Release Date: 2014