All About NEO Blockchain Ecosystem You Ever Wanted To Know !

With the advent of world’s first decentralized digital currency Bitcoin a totally a new kind of smart digital economy is sweeping this world’s market and has taken everyone by storm. Now many more Altcoins

Altcoins are the alternative cryptocurrencies launched after the success of Bitcoin. They are more a kind of a better substitutes to Bitcoin which being a first P2P digital asset, has kind of laid down the way for others alternate coins to follow the path. Many altcoins are trying to target any perceived limitations that Bitcoin has and come up with newer versions with competitive advantages. Some of the popular examples of altcoin include Litecoin, Dogecoin, Peercoin, Feathercoin, Zetacoin, Novacoin, etc. Litecoin is seen as the closest competitor to Bitcoin.

And other alternative digital currency and the blockchain transaction platform has risen up, all to fuel our current digital economy to make it super efficient and smart.

I feelThis current digital economy powered by Blockchain technology is going to transform the way we use to transact and in collaboration with IoT & AI, it will make this current generation and upcoming generation the most smartest generation ever.

Today we will discuss more about NEO: An open network of smart economy also popularly known as the Ethereum of China. We will uncover this Popular Blockchain platform in the following phases

1. What Is NEO After All ?

2. NEO’s Concept Of Smart Economy

3. NEO Tokens & Its Economic Model

4. NEO System OverView

5. NEO’s Distribution Model

6. NEO Dapp’s

What Is NEO?

NEO is the Blockchain powered platform to digitize assets using digital identity and it uses smart contract to self-manage digital assets, thereby providing a distributed network of all stakeholders to benefit from this smart economy comprising the power of:

1. Digital Asset
2. Digital Identity
3. Smart Contract.

It was formerly called as Antshares and has evolved with recent iteration on existing Ethereum’s smart contracts and by using a unique Blockchain algo that improves upon Ethereum’s model. It is also known to close loopholes that have caused some Ether contracts to be vulnerable to hackers.

NEO’s Smart Economy Concept

As discussed above NEO has been created with a vision to shift our market from being a traditional economy to being a Smart economy using the power of decentralized blockchain mechanism. In order to materialize it NEO has conceptualized it in the following way.

NEO wants to integrate digital assets, digital identity, and smart contracts into its platform. When the company rebranded themselves from Antshares and upgraded to NEO 2.0 it introduced new features, such as cross-chain protocol, quantum-resistant cryptography, a distributed storage protocol and a secure communication protocol.

It Says:“We hope the platform can be used for different front end scenarios, such as the Digital asset wallet, Forum, Voting, Profile management and Mobile applications. The platform also features an open API that can be used for integration with other systems.source

1. Digital Asset:

NEO blockchain platform allows user to register, trade and transact multiple types of digital asset.

So what are Digital Assets Actually ?

Digital assets are programmable assets that exist in the form of electronic data.

NEO blockchain platform enables users to create their profile, engage in trading and to manage multiple types of digital currency(assets). It helps in the decentralized digitization of their assets in highly secure & reliable environment, which is free from any third party intervention.Assets registered through a validated digital identity are protected by law.

Types Of Digital Assets NEO Provides:A: Global Assets:

It is accessible & identifiable by all smart contracts and clients and can be recorded in the given system space

B: Contract Assets

These assets types are recorded in the private storage area of the smart contract and require a compatible client to recognize them. It has to match to certain pre-defined protocols and standards in order to achieve compatibility with most clients using it to transact.

2. Digital Identity-

To maintain digital identity has become a must to have requirement in many social platforms & in many business related transactions. Our current tech and infrastructure to manage user identity is obsolete and is quite inefficient, error prone, insecure and expensive, resulting in bad customer experience. So it has become a critical for the businesses to have some reliable mechanism for identity management in the digital world. NEO’s Digital identity feature refers to the identity information of individuals, organizations, and other entities that exist in electronic form.

It offers a secured mechanism to store, transact and authenticate the digital identity which is efficient and quick, it employs Public Key Infrastructure(PKI)X.509 digital identity standards. NEO’s verification of identity when issuing or using digital identities includes the use of facial features, fingerprint, voice, SMS and other multi-factor authentication methods.NEO’s Digital Identity mechanism replaces the OCSP(Online Certificate Status Protocol) with the Blockchain tech to make it a more trusted platform to maintain digital identity.

3. Smart Contract:

Nick Szabo first introduced the world with Smart Contract in 1994 which,

he said:When a pre-programmed condition is triggered, the smart contract will execute the corresponding contract terms.What is Smart Contract ?It’s a piece of software that has its own protocols for negotiating the contract terms, verifies the contract automatically and executes the agreed terms between two parties involved.source

Smart Contract A Blockchain Innovation for Non-Techies

NEO has an independent, smart contract system Called NeoContract.

The NEO Smart Contract 2.0 includes the following features: certainty, high performance, and expandability. The contract types include: validation contracts, function contracts, and application contracts.

This Smart Contracting feature of NEO is one of the prominent offerings by NEO’s smart ecosystem for aspiring developers, they can program it in the language they know like c#, Java or other programming languages of their choice. NeoContract is supported in all familiar IDE’s like Visual Studio, Eclipse etc for smart contract development, debugging and compilation.

NeoVM a virtual machine is extremely reliable, scalable and highly concurrent to be employed by techie’s around the globe in smart contract development.

We will cover the tech part later in our next article NEO For Techies to showcase how you can harness NEO’s Blockchain Platform for developing your own product idea.

3. NEO’s Token & Economic Model

NEO offers two native tokens

• NEO — formerly known as Antshares (ANS).
• GAS — formerly known as Antcoins (ANC).

The NEO Token:

NEO token is the investment token of NEO blockchain ecosystem. It has a total supply capping of 100 million token to be used in blockchain creation, decentralized network management, voting for bookkeeping, to manage network related changes and others consensus based requirements.

These 100 million tokens were all pre-mined during the genesis block creation and represents the right to manage the network. The minimum unit of NEO is 1 and tokens cannot be subdivided.

GAS Token:Capping : 100 million similar to NEO token

It is the fuel to empower the network resource control of NEO blockchain.

Smallest Unit: of GAS is 0.00000001.GAS is divisible by a factor of 1/1⁰⁸, and it was not pre-mined. 100 million GAS tokens will ultimately be generated through a decay algorithm in about 22 years.Usage:

• Resource allocation & charging network related activities like running Dapps, smart contracts
• Incentivizing stakeholders for maintaining the blockchain network.

As per neo.orgThe NEO network will set a threshold by voting to exempt GAS from a certain amount of transfer transactions and smart contract operations to enhance the user experience. When a large amount of spam transactions occurs, NeoID can be used to prioritize transactions and smart contracts with qualified identities. Transactions and smart contracts with no qualifying digital identities can get priority by paying GAS.NEO Network Summarized-Credit: Noam Levenson Src: Hackernoon

4. The NEO system includes:

• Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (DBFT) algorithm — This is a consensus mechanism (instead of the traditional proof of work/stake) that allows the system to resist the Byzantine Generals problem and maintains consensus even if some nodes bare malicious intentions
• NeoX — This system will create the ability to execute and operate across various Blockchains
• NEO Contract — Is the mechanism for creating smart contracts seamlessly in scalable, high performance environments that integrates pre-existing codebases (e.g. C#, VB.Net, F#, Java, Kotlin)
• NeoFS — This is a service which allows decentralized storage (like a peer to peer Dropbox)
• NeoQ — A lattice-based cryptographic mechanism which creates problems that cannot be solved by quantum computers and ensuring being quantum-proof

5. NEO’s Distribution Mechanism:

A: NEO Token Distribution

As we discussed above that the hard cap of NEO token is 100 million. This number has been divide into two portions one portion has 50 million tokens to be distributed proportionally to all NEO crowd funders and the second one has remaining 50 million NEO tokens which is directly managed by NEO Council to support the NEO ecosystem development & growth keeping current and future in perspective.The NEO in this portion had a lockout period of 1 year and is now unlocked after October 16, 2017. This portion will not enter the exchanges and is only for long-term support of NEO projects.

This distribution mechanism is listed on NEO offcial site as given below

- 10 million tokens (10% total) will be used to motivate NEO developers and members of the NEO Council- 10 million tokens (10% total) will be used to motivate developers in the NEO ecosystem- 15 million tokens (15% total) will be used to cross-invest in other block-chain projects, which are owned by the NEO Council and are used only for NEO projects- 15 million (15% total) will be retained as contingency- The annual use of NEO in principle shall not exceed 15 million tokensB. GAS distribution:

Initial amount of GAS token is zero and every time with a new block creation GAS is generated As per neo.org, the total limit of 100 million GAS will be achieved in about 22 years. The interval between each block is about 15–20 seconds, and 2 million blocks are generated in about one year.

neo.org says:Each year around 2 million blocks will be generated and the initial generation will be 8 GAS per block. There will be an annual reduction of 1 GAS per block, per year, to coincide with the passing of every 2 million blocks. The reduction will continue down to just 1 GAS per block and will be held at that rate for around 22 years. After the 44 millionth block the total GAS generated will have reached 100 million and from this point there will be no further generation of GAS from new blocks.

6. Dapp’s:

NEO platform aims to provide a rich and powerful system for visinories & aspiring techies to build their own unique Decentralized apps using NEO blockchain ecosystem and publish it for the masses and businesses. Being an open source community based project NEO encourages many tech enthusiasts to create their app and list on their platform as a solution.

What Is Dapp ?

DApps means decentralized (i.e. D-Apps) applications, but every app can’t be a Dapp to be called Dapp it has fulfill following given criteria like,

1. It Should Be An Open Source — All the programming source code is publicly available
2. It Should Be Decentralized — Uses a blockchain-like cryptographic technology.
3. Has to Have Some Incentive — App has crypto-tokens/digital assets for fueling itself.
4. Algorithm/Protocol — Generates tokens and has an inbuilt consensus mechanism.

NEO Dapp’s Possible Use Cases

NEO powered ecosystem has listed on neo.org many use cases of its platform to fuel Decentralized app development which will cover many dimensions of current and upcoming technology driven market, across the globe making the economy a smart economy full of opportunities for all .

Possible use cases listed are(src : neo.org/)

• Smart fund
• AI-assisted legal smart contract
• Social networking
• Automated tokens liquidity providers
• Decentralized exchange
• Secure communication protocol
• Data exchange market
• Intellectual property trading market
• Prediction market
• Advertising market
• Hashpower market
• NeoGas market

On NEO platform you can find many such dapp’s at ndapp’s(Neo Dapp’s) : http://ndapp.org/

Some of these dapps are

1. NEX
2. Moonlight
3. Red Pulse
4. AdEx

and many more…

What Next?

Next in the series on NEO Blockchain Ecosystem we will uncover the technology behind NEO’s powerful platform and how techies can exploit it to build apps which can be a game changer and which can empower this digital economy to reach new heights.

Summary :

NEO ecosystem with its own currency, smart contract and being an open source platform will play very crucial role in disrupting the digital world and its economy.

I Feel As A Tech Visionary :

Blockchain is a real innovation everyone who wants to build a tech of future must adopt and should start investing if not done yet. Identity management, digital transaction, secure authentication and many more such apps has already came into existence and many more innovative solution will popup as economy will become more favorable globally for such Decentralized apps. I have no doubt that it will happen across the globe with the time, yes challenges will be there but it all comes to foster this kind of new innovations, and no market can deny blockchain powered tech, if they want to be really growing and to remain consumer friendly in the coming future. Market punishes who are not quickly adapting and who are not open to new things which world has to to offer.

On this positive note i would like to leave you all with this excellent compilation on Blockchain Project Ecosystem: by Josh Nussbaum

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All About NEO Blockchain Ecosystem You Ever Wanted To Know ! was originally published in codeburst on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.