What is NEO and NEO price?

Started by a blockchain research company called Onchain in 2014, the project originally called antshares was rebranded as NEO in 2017. NEO focuses on the verification of digital identities, and smart contracts (contracts built from code that execute and run themselves with rules on how funds can be transferred). Calling itself a distributed smart economy network, NEO is powered by gas in the same way that ethereum runs on ether.

In other words, a separate token known as gas is needed to run smart contracts, depending on the computing power used. The price of NEO and the price of NEO gas are listed as two different assets on the coin market cap charts.

Coded in common programming languages, there’s no need to learn special coding skills such as those required to write ethereum projects, which are developed using the Solidity language.

NEO consistently ranks near the top ten of cryptocurrencies by market cap. In December 2017, the NEO price hit an all-time high of $196.85, and will have a maximum supply of 100,000,000.

Why is NEO important?

Since NEO projects can be coded in common programming languages such as C#, Python, and Java, one of NEO’s biggest features is accessibility. The multiple languages opens many doors to new developments within the ecosystem, with lower barriers to entry, and a more inclusive approach to collaboration on the project platform. This is important to any cryptocurrency platform allowing ICO’s, such as NEO, Ethereum, and Stellar, where other projects can release their own cryptocurrency on the underlying blockchain built by NEO.

With connections to both Chinese tech giant Alibaba, as well as potential good standing with a skeptical Chinese government, NEO is poised to address the Chinese market. It also features partnerships with Agrello, Bancor, and Coindash. The team behind NEO is also working with Fadada and Microsoft to collaborate on a project called Legal Chain, seeking to modernize and address the shortcomings of the legal system through digital applications.

NEO doesn’t allow forks and instead makes use of a special consensus mechanism known as dBFT (Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance), which we’ll dive into. Transaction volume is another key component of NEO — up to 10,000 transactions per second are possible.

NEO also has some future-proofing components baked into its core components. More specifically, the blockchain is being developed to be “quantum resistant,” which will become increasingly important as quantum computers are developed that may be fast enough to crack encryption.

How does NEO work?

As mentioned earlier, NEO runs on GAS (and the price of NEO and the price of NEO gas are two different things), the companion cryptocurrency required to compensate participants for the computing power necessary to execute activities on the network. Eventually,100 million GAS will exist, which unlike NEO, can be subdivided into smaller units. Consensus nodes called “bookkeepers” validate transactions on the network in reward for GAS. Stakeholders — people who hold NEO — get GAS in return for holding on to NEO and their participation in the network. Each NEO holder gets a vote, based on ownership amounts, on what happens in the NEO ecosystem — if stakeholders don’t like what a consensus node is doing, for example, they can vote to remove the authority of that node, taking it off the network and out of the ecosystem. Using this method, NEO has built a thriving community based on participation.

Technically speaking, NEO developers are tackling a number of problems at once, while providing a number of features. Numerous different types of digital assets can be registered, transferred, and traded on the NEO platform. Digital certificates offer full legal protection of assets and they can bet can be exchanged peer-to-peer, without needing an intermediary or third party exchange to facilitate trade. Turing-complete smart contracts enable the platform the possibility to solve just about any computational problem. Blockchain-based platforms like NEO and ethereum have designed a way for the “world’s computer” to function, distributing computing power to potentially solve the world’s biggest problems.

Like ethereum, NEO features virtual machines — a virtual computer composed of software instead of physical parts — known as NeoVM (NEO Virtual Machine). These virtual machines feature shorter startup times, efficient execution, and unlimited theoretical scalability, all made possible by the dBFT (Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance) which is basically just a mechanism through which the network is able to reach consensus and ensure finality of transactions.

Some of the other features that the NEO community are actively working on include: NeoFS for decentralized file storage, NeoX provides for transactions and smart contracts that can cross blockchains, and NeoQ offers the encryption we mentioned earlier that can’t be solved by quantum computers.