In my opinion, NEO is one of the most undervalued projects in the entire crypto market. The team is experienced, has lofty goals, and intends to make it the #1 blockchain by the year 2020.
Plenty in the community are confident that NEO could be a moonshot in both valuation and adoption. Within 5 years, NEO’s market cap is poised to rise and land it in the top 5 coins. This would put it at a valuation of around US$5 billion, increasing its price by about 4-5x.
NEO has an outstanding team and an assortment of high quality dapps in sectors like AI, music streaming, advertising, and travel. It is also one of the best sources of passive income, accumulating 3-4% interest per year.
Currently, NEO’s market cap sits at just US$1.2 billion, giving it a lot of room for growth. Thus, the project’s market cap could potentially grow to rival the coins currently in the top 5 positions.
NEO’s team and overall project is outstanding. Da Hongfei, the co-creator of NEO, is one of the most impressive members in the blockchain community. Dais a figure similar to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who uses the strategy of community outreach to fuel NEO’s development through worldwide meetups. NEO is co-chaired by Erik Zhang, the CTO of Onchain.
NEO Basics
NEO was founded just 4 years ago in 2014, by Da Hongfei. It was originally named Antshares, but on June 22, it rebranded itself as NEO.
During the rebranding, NEO also made upgrades to its smart contract system, as well as its technical documentation.
The NEO project has the ultimate goal of building a functioning smart economy which integrates digital assets, verifiable digital identities, and smart contracts. The smart economy would function as a peer-to-peer network, eliminating the middleman in transactions like asset “transfer, trading, clearing and settlement.”
One important feature of NEO is its consensus algorithm called delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT). This protocol was created by NEO co-founder Erik Zhang and is thought to have far better scaling capabilities than other types of consensus protocols. dBFT allows NEO to potentially maintain a transaction speed of 1,000 TPS, which is quite a bit faster than Ethereum’s current speed of 15 TPS.
NEO has also introduced unique features, including a cross-chain protocol (NeoX), quantum-resistant cryptography, distributed storage (NeoFS), and a secure communication protocol.
Another benefit to NEO is that it runs a virtual machine which allows developers to code in commonly used programming languages like C#, Java, and Python.
The project has a large community with programmers from around the world contributing to NEO’s development. It was first open sourced on GitHub in mid 2015.
10 Features That Make NEO a Potential Moonshot
NEO has 10 features that make it a particularly strong investment choice. These features run the gamut across practical usage, dapps, and its community. Together, they attest to a project with a solid foundation, a lot of upward momentum, and the potential for high returns.
Let’s take a closer look at these features.
1. 66 High-Quality NEO Dapps and Counting
There are currently over 66 dapps being built for the NEO ecosystem. These dapps will cover various sectors, including blockchain gaming, identity verification, IoT, advertising, Wi-Fi sharing, and music.
The cost to launch a smart contract on the NEO blockchain is 500 Gas, which is higher than with Ethereum. However, this higher cost will likely maintain the quality of the projects on the NEO blockchain.
Ethereum has a higher number of dapps, but more are of low quality. These low-quality dapps could potentially clog up an already overtaxed system with transactions.
2. Blockchain Gaming
With their domain NEO.Game, NEO provides a platform and reward pool for blockchain game development.
The NEO team has allocated over $30,000 in rewards for blockchain games. Currently, there are over 30 game titles that have been built for the NEO blockchain.
Blockchain gaming will be very different from traditional gaming. Blockchain gaming focuses on the collection and earning of virtual assets, which can be traded or sold to other players.
It’s likely that gaming will be the utility that leads NEO towards mainstream adoption. One new game on the NEO blockchain, released April 23, is called CryptoGalaxy. In this game, users can explore and even buy planets.
Users will soon have the ability to sell these planets for fiat, or other cryptocurrencies. Other upcoming games on the NEO blockchain include Hashpuppies and Nachomen.
3. Smart Contracts in Common Programming Languages
Another benefit of the NEO protocol is that its smart contracts can be written using the most common programming languages.
Unlike Ethereum, which uses Solidity, NEO developers will not have to learn a new language to program on the platform. The first languages NEO supports are: C#, VB.Net, F#, Java, and Kotlin.
Soon, more languages will be supported for NEO’s development, including C, C++, Golang, and JavaScript.
4. NEO’s Large Developer Community
NEO is focused on creating development tools, organizing meetups worldwide, providing tutorials for hopeful developers (as seen above), as well as giving financial support to help build out its smart economic network.
Da Hongfei aims to build a strong open-source community, which is essential to achieving NEO’s overall vision. He is becoming a well-known figure in cryptocurrency space, especially in China. The NEO team travels to conferences worldwide in an attempt to encourage development for new dApps to run on the NEO blockchain.
To become more involved with the NEO community, check out their Twitter, Reddit, and Telegram.
5. Cross-Chain Interoperability
Cross-chain interoperability is a feature that is implemented by the NeoX protocol. This means that it allows cross-blockchain contracts inside a single smart contract.
NeoX fuses the concept of atomic swaps with smart contracts. This means that other blockchains can be compatible with NeoX, if they support simple smart contract functionality. This feature is currently being built, and the team has not made clear when it will be implemented.
6. Distributed Storage Protocol
NeoFS is NEO’s distributed storage protocol. It utilizes Distributed Hash Table (DHT) technology.
DHT allows smart contracts to split up and store large data files across nodes in the network. It also provides users the ability to access these files through their proven digital identity. Files can be stored for free if have low reliability requirements. If a smart contract has a high reliability requirement, it will require a fee.
7. Governance Mechanism
Governance is an important aspect of decentralization.
Some have criticized NEO for the centralization of its nodes, since most are controlled by developers of the project. Recently, they have made a commitment to slowly decentralize the nodes, with a public campaign and election by 2019.
NEO token holders will have the ability to manage, as well as to govern the network through voting. Governance on the blockchain is called onchain governance.
Onchain governance will allow the project to change and adapt to the needs of the stakeholders of NEO.
The NEO project is also governed off-chain by the NEO council, which is made up of members from its core developers.
8. Transaction Per Second
NEO has the potential to reach 1,000 TPS, and a maximum theoretical potential TPS of 10,000.
NEO outperforms by far the current abilities of Ethereum, which only hits 15 transactions per second, which has driven many projects to build on other newer blockchains. This may change in the future, with Ethereum’s implementation of sharding, but for now NEO has the more modern, streamlined technology.
9. NEO Virtual Machine
NeoVM is a virtual machine, which is similar to the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and the Windows .NET Runtime. It has the ability to use smart contracts which are written in common programming languages.
NeoVM is very suitable for smart contracts, which can be ported to non-blockchain systems, or integrated with the IDE to provide a better development experience.
10. NEO Partnerships
NEO has important partnerships with venture capital funds, like Fenbushi Capital and NEO’s own NEO Global Capital.
NEO Global Capital, a company that invests in blockchain startups, has backed important projects on the NEO blockchain including Zilliqa, Ontology, and Bluzelle.
Recently, NEO has been developing partnerships within the gaming community, and are working with a company called Parsec Frontiers. Parsec Frontiers is building a blockchain-based massive multiplayer online (MMO) game, which uses the NEO blockchain for its infrastructure and digital assets.
NEO and Elastos have also come to an agreement to explore common technologies and applications, which will lead to the development of a functioning smart economy.
Conclusion
NEO is setting itself up to be one of the top blockchains in the entire crypto-space by 2020, and it has the team to pull it off. With a strong community, excellent technology, intelligent leadership, as well as dapps that are poised for mainstream adoption, NEO’s price is ready to soar.
If you are going to chose a long-term project to invest in, which will also supply you with passive income, it’s well worth looking into the NEO project.
Related: How Will the Proposed NEO 3.0 Upgrade Affect the Cryptocurrency’s Future?