What’s NEO?

Neo is a decentralized software network created by Da Hongfei and Erick Zhang in 2014, initially launched as Antshares before being rebranded in 2017. It is often referred to as the “Ethereum of China” due to its similarities with Ethereum in terms of its ability to support the creation of decentralized products and services, such as decentralized exchanges, prediction markets, and social networks, among others.

One unique feature of the Neo network is its governance system, called Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerant (dBFT), which is used as its consensus mechanism for the computers that run its software. The network also includes a decentralized file storage system, an identity system, and an oracle system for feeding external information to it, such as price data.

Central to running operations on the Neo blockchain are two native cryptocurrencies, NEO and GAS. NEO is used for voting on protocol changes, while GAS is used to pay for computation on the network. The dBFT consensus mechanism works by using a real-time voting system to determine which computers running the software can create the next block on the Neo blockchain.

Developers can use Neo’s software to create smart contracts and design new programs, called NeoContracts and dapps, respectively. NeoContracts can be developed using a variety of popular existing programming languages like C# and Java, making it attractive to a larger pool of developers seeking to create dapps or support existing ones.

To keep up with the current development status of Neo, users can follow its official blog for up-to-date details.