A PROJECT WITH HUGE TECHNICAL POTENTIAL AND A BIGGER MARKET

Cryptocurrencies are crashing left and right. The bottom has fallen out of the crypto market, as Bitcoin slides beneath 10,000. The coin of the moment, Ripple, is sinking like a lead balloon. But a lone survivor is holding strong, as NEO has shot up 16% in the past week. NEO was a project we shortlisted within our premium, members only Coinist Insiders Network and we made great profits on.  To be increasing strongly when the crypto markets are a black hole is a testament to Neo. The momentum and technology behind the so-called “Chinese Ethereum,” are the reasons you should familiarize yourself with it.

Neo was formerly known as Antshares. The coin rebranded in 2017 as Neo, and went on a rampaging bull run up to $50 a coin. Now holding steady around $150, Neo has big plans for 2018. Neo offers an improved version of Ethereum, hailing from China. Strong technology and an experienced development team, as well as China’s history of preferring home-grown products, make for a lot to be excited about. Per the company website, “NEO firmly believes that it is an irreversible trend that real-world assets become digital and programmable.” Automating daily transactions and making them doable through the internet is the future. An example is Estonia, where citizens can pay taxes or get marriage certificates online through the company’s internet. Neo has the technology to make their concept a reality.

SMART CONTRACTS 2.0

For those unfamiliar with smart contracts, they might be cryptocurrency’s single-biggest contribution to the world. Smart contracts are digital versions of real contracts, operating through a blockchain and executing when set conditions are fulfilled. A smart contract could send a user goods after they pay money to a website. Or it could refund a user’s money, if someone else didn’t fulfill their agreed-upon conditions. Smart contracts have huge B2B implications, giving cryptocurrency the potential to be more than just a currency or store of value.

Neo is here to upseat Ethereum with the new-and-improved Neo Smart Contract 2.0. Neo has put together an easier-to-use platform. Ethereum smart contracts are codeable in Solidity, which many prospective users may not have experience with. Neo supports C#, Go, and Java, which are more commonly used. This makes it that much easier for new programmers to pick up the tools and get to work. It’s not quite as easy as deploying smart contracts on the Hukaii blockchain, but it’s much easier than using the Ethereum blockchain. Neo also employs a lightweight VM. This boots up faster and consumes less resources on a computer. Internally, Neo VMs are optimized for smart contracts by interpreting cryptographic algorithms more efficiently. All this adds up to make Neo smart contracts optimal. Ethereum may have introduced the idea to the crypto world, but Neo made significant improvements.

BUILT WITH SCALABILITY IN MIND

Neo has also employed technical tools to handle scalability in the future. Bitcoin flagged in the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, partially because of an inability to scale. Bitcoin’s internal turmoil over transaction fees reached a boiling point in 2017, as the currency actually split into two different coins. Neo has learned from the lessons and drama of Bitcoin and is ready to ramp upwards as usage grows.

Neo employs a distributed storage protocol called NeoFs. This utilizes what’s called Distributed Hash Table technology. This divides up big files to be stored across many different nodes at once. Nodes can release old data if necessary. This greatly speeds up Neo. It’s capable of handling thousands of transactions a second. Neo has taken even more steps to being user friendly by allowing use of common languages like Python for its compiler.

Neo could also see a boost for being an easy platform to launch an ICO, or initial coin offering on. ICOs were popping up left and right in 2017. However, this is up in the air, since China has been hovering on the edge of banning cryptocurrency altogether, and South Korea is embroiled in its own drama.

NEO FLAWS

That leads us to some of the flaws of Neo. Neo has some of the most promising tech in the business, and got a lot done in 2017. But the team’s big plans for 2018 might be hindered by the fact that are only around half a dozen developers in the team’s Shanghai offices. Per a Reddit AMA, there are only two full-time core developers. Some users have wondered if the team will need more boots on the ground to construct their technologically ambitious product.

The Neo network can handle 1000 transactions per second, with a 15-20 second confirmation time. That’s respectable for now, but if developers are going to be building significant applications, the Neo network will need to speed up.

Lastly, China is a dicey spot for crypto right now. In 2017 the Chinese government closed the door on all Bitcoin exchanges. This year, they’ve talked about banning Bitcoin altogether. The People’s Bank of China is notorious for banning anything that might affect the yuan, and a decentralized unregulateable electronic currency could be interpreted as a threat. Neo could be torpedoed if China drops the hammer.

CONCLUSION

Risks aside, Neo is a project with huge technical potential and a bigger market. This is one of the reasons NEO made the cut as one of our hand-picked tokens within our members only Coinist Insiders Network. However, we still need more time to see how things unfold. China has a long history of preferring home-grown products and technology over foreign-made. And with a billion potential customers and an improved recipe for smart contracts, Neo could flourish from use in China alone. Ethereum rocketed up in 2017. It could be Neo’s turn in 2018.