What is NEO?
In this NEO review I will cover both the blockchain network and the native coin in detail. So, what is NEO? It is a non-profit community driven blockchain project that utilizes smart contracts and digital identity technology to manage digital assets. It uses a distributed network with the aim to create a Smart Economy. The maximum supply is 100 million NEO coins with 65 million currently in circulation. The maximum supply is expected to be reached within 4 years.
Advantages
Recently, NEO has been getting even more security from regulators, making it one of the main features of the network. Here are some of the other benefits:
- Passive income – it is gained by just holding NEO in GAS tokens and an airdrop is coming soon
- Trading counterpart – Binance started and will expand the list of NEP-5 tokens for which NEO will be a trading counterpart
Disadvantages
One of the biggest drawbacks of NEO is its slow synchronization with the wallet. Some of the other shortcomings are:
- Unfriendly interface
- As the project is based in China, there are some regulatory uncertainties and concerns
History and Evolution
The NEO project was launched under a different name back in 2014, which was AntShares. The development resources were provided by the founder Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang, which later founded Onchain to provide the blockchain with consulting services. AntShares was rebranded to NEO in June 2017 and in March 2018, parent company Onchain distributed 1 ONT token for every 5 NEO held in a user’s wallet. These tokens were used in the voting systems when decisions were made for future updates and other governance issues on the NEO platform. The team are currently in Q4 of the roadmap, which is implementing Composite Smart Contracts to the network.
NEO’s Future
NEO holds a lot of potential and because of this it is a great investment option when compared to other cryptocurrencies. This whole year has been great for the NEO network and if you would like to stay ahead of the updates, you can check out their official roadmap.
NEO Blockchain
The NEO blockchain is a decentralized peer-to-peer network that is community driven. The consensus mechanism that it uses is called delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT), which can support up to 10,000 transactions per second. In order to achieve such lightning fast consensus, book keeping nodes are selected in a random manner to validate transactions based on overlapping networks of trust in a similar manner to Stellar. Systems that adopt dBFT cannot fork into two separate chains as the network relies on a 2 out of 3 majority rule to operate. The average block time is between 15 and 25 seconds with no real set limit in its size, but the usual block size is between 2 and 10 kb.
NEO Nodes
In every blockchain network, the nodes are the backbone of the system. A node can be any device operating in the blockchain. In the NEO network there are standard light nodes that are representing those devices on the network and there are also Consensus nodes.
- Consensus Node – these nodes are elected by the NEO holders and vote on the validity of the transactions. During validation of blocks, these consensus nodes can take one of the two roles: Speaker or Delegate. The Speaker is responsible for transmitting a block proposal to the system and there can be only one speaker. The Delegate nodes, which can be multiple, are responsible for reaching a consensus on the transaction.
Additional Features
One of the more notable additional features of the NEO network is the adoption of Smart Contracts. They can be created in the major program languages, which makes them easy to work with. The NEO network also supports dAapps like smart funds, AI-assisted legal smart contracts and decentralized exchanges.
How to Get NEO
NEO is an unminable coin, so the only way to obtain it is buying it via exchanges. Alternatively, someone could send you the coins.
Where to Buy NEO
Not a lot of exchanges support buying NEO coins with fiat (real life) currency. Most of the platforms offer crypto pairs like BTC to NEO etc. If you would like to buy NEO with fiat currency, Binance would be your best bet.
Let this not deter you, though. The NEO cryptocurrency provides great Return of Investment (ROI) numbers and the main factors that push a cryptocurrency further like core fundamentals, it has plenty of them. Also, as I mentioned earlier, you can just hold NEO coins and you will get a passive income of GAS just because you are holding it.
Wallets for Neo
If you would like to be able to hold and trade NEO coins, you will definitely need a wallet. Wallets are software programs that are used to store two types of keys – private key and public key. With the private key, you can access your funds in the blockchain network. The public key on the other hand is used for receiving coins.
The NEO cryptocurrency has its own official wallet that is supported by the development team. You can go ahead and download the official GUI wallet from their website. Please be aware that it is supported only by Windows 7 SP1 or newer versions. Please make sure that you have the newest updates of .NetFramework and Visual C++ 2010 Redist x64/x86 at least. In order to speed up the synchronization process, you can download an offline package of the blockchain data up to a certain block height.
You can find an installation guide for windows here. Please do not forget to back up your wallet as that adds another layer of security for your funds.
Alternative Wallets
So, what are alternative wallets? They are wallets developed by third parties like corporations and offer a wide range of features that official core wallets do not possess. These additional features can be anything from an improved user interface to the possibility to support multiple types of currencies and connect to an exchange directly.
Desktop Wallets
Web Wallets
Hardware Wallets
Staking NEO
Currently NEO is not stakeable, but you can receive a passive income in GAS tokens while just holding it. It is commonly misinterpreted as staking, but it is not, and you cannot run a masternode. Holding NEO for GAS can be controlled from the official wallet.
Network Security
Since the coin is quite new, there are no major security issues or breaches for now.
News and Useful Weblinks
If you would like to stay in touch with all the latest news regarding NEO, the best places to start are on their official webpage, where you can follow the roadmap and announcements page, as well as following their official twitter account @NEO_Blockchain.