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Given the restrictions on cryptocurrency transactions imposed by China’s government, NEO has the potential to emerge as the cryptocurrency of choice in the heavily regulated nation, and perhaps across the globe. Since its inception, NEO’s Onchain technology was designed to be regulator-friendly with a centralized approach that is quite different from that of most cryptocurrencies.
That may help it survive and thrive even in China, where government regulators have been casting an increasingly wary eye on the cryptocurrency world. The government is concerned about the financial risks of cryptocurrency speculations. And, its vast cryptocurrency mining operations have become such a drain on the nation’s electricity supply that they are threatening the nation’s environmental goals.
What Is NEO?
NEO was founded as AntShares by Da Hongfei and Erik Zhan in China in 2014 and was rebranded as NEO in June 2017. It is a blockchain-based platform that supports its own cryptocurrency and enables the development of digital assets and smart contracts. In that respect, it resembles the U.S.-based Ethereum blockchain network.
NEO aims to automate the management of digital assets through the use of smart contracts, with the eventual aim of building a distributed network-based smart economy system.
Digital Equivalents on the NEO Platform
NEO theoretically describes its Smart Economy System as (Digital Assets + Digital Identity + Smart Contract = Smart Economy).
Assets can be easily digitized on the NEO blockchain in an open, decentralized, trustworthy, traceable, and transparent manner that is free of intermediaries and their costs.
Users are able to record, buy, sell, exchange, or circulate various kinds of assets. The NEO platform allows for linking the physical asset with an equivalent and unique digital avatar on its network. NEO also supports the protection of assets. Those assets registered on its platform have a validated digital identity and are protected by law.
Digital identity enables verifiable key information about participating individuals, organizations, and other entities that exist in the digital context.
Smart contracts allow the execution of transactions and agreements among different parties without governance by any legal system or central mechanism. The execution of such contracts is based on the programming code of the network, and the coding allows traceability, transparency, and irreversibility of transactions.
NEO supports two crypto coins, NEO and GAS. It supports programming in all mainstream languages including C#, Java, Go, Python, and Kotlin, which facilitates a large community of developers to easily contribute to its platform.
Focus on Regulatory Compliance
NEO maintains a clear distinction from other standard blockchain platforms in its focus on being regulatory-compliant. While digitized assets and smart contracts are popular on other blockchain platforms like Ethereum, the third key feature of what it calls its “digital identity” separates NEO from the rest.
Every individual, business, or other entity operating on the NEO platform is required to have a unique digital identity that can be verified. People, businesses, and projects have the option to transact among themselves only if the other party has the required identity, which makes the NEO network regulatory-compliant.
Even the various nodes on the NEO network may need to have identification before they can contribute to the transaction verification and other activities like accounting and bookkeeping.
Enter Onchain
While working on NEO, the cryptocurrency’s founders, Da Hongfei and Erik Zhan, won the interest of various enterprises looking for private blockchain solutions. That led to the creation in 2014 of Onchain, an independent technology company that works with the necessary financial and legal frameworks and provides blockchain solutions to various enterprises.
While NEO works like Bitcoin and Ethereum, Onchain focuses on the creation of private and consortium blockchains to meet the specific needs of the industry.
Onchain’s major product, Distributed Networks Architecture (DNA), uses digital asset applications to help businesses by creating private and public blockchains. DNA is believed to be the blockchain platform that can be customized to address all sorts of different problems in the private and public sectors.
How NEO and Onchain Differ
NEO and Onchain are separate entities that exist independently, and neither owns the other. NEO targets the business-to-consumer (B2C) segment —where the “C” can refer to a customer or even a community—while Onchain focuses on business-to-business (B2B) enterprise services.
NEO is funded by a public community, while Onchain is backed by China’s largest private conglomerate, called Fosun.
When asked why he chose Fosun as an investment partner, founder Da Hongfei said: “The three major arms of their portfolio include finance, medical science, entertainment, and lifestyle, which has good synergy with blockchain tech. This is why we chose Fosun Group as an investment partner, because we highly value the Enterprise resource that Fosun provides, a platform for Onchain to display blockchain technology.”
NEO and Onchain: Their Vision
The common founders of NEO and Onchain envision that they will be able to achieve cross-chain interoperability in the future. That is, a mechanism will be developed to connect and share information between blockchains, whether they are public like NEO or private such as those operated by businesses.
As the number of blockchain-based systems continues to grow in both the public and private domains, there will eventually be a need for interoperability among them. The teams at NEO and Onchain hope to fill this gap through their ongoing work.
However, to enable such interoperability, trust and identity become important. That gap will be filled by the intrinsic Digital Identity feature which is an integral part of the NEO blockchain platform.
Essentially, NEO and Onchain may pave the much-needed middle path between completely decentralized, unregulated, and anonymous blockchain systems like Bitcoin and the conventional KYC-compliance of today’s bank accounts and credit cards.
By taking an all-inclusive approach that attempts to involve and serve the needs of all parties—individual users, network contributors like miners, transacting participants, private businesses, and even regulators—NEO and Onchain may be best placed to provide a holistic solution to the ongoing rift between closed-economy regulators and open-system cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
A Solution for China?
The NEO platform acts as the foundation of Onchain’s DNA concept. NEO provides decentralized, public blockchains while OnChain’s DNA fills the need for private blockchains. Linking these systems may enable the best of both worlds.
Onchain has already received an endorsement for DNA from the government of Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province of Southwest China.
Despite its hard stance on the various decentralized cryptocurrencies and ICOs, rumors are swirling that the government may be looking for an alternate solution and it remains open to working with companies that are willing to play by its rules. Being local Chinese ventures, NEO and Onchain would be the top contenders if this is true.
If the promising Onchain technology can be accepted and integrated with the Chinese government and businesses enabling an all-inclusive solution, it will greatly increase widespread adoption of NEO.
Investing in cryptocurrencies and Initial Coin Offerings (“ICOs”) is highly risky and speculative, and this article is not a recommendation by Investopedia or the writer to invest in cryptocurrencies or ICOs. Since each individual’s situation is unique, a qualified professional should always be consulted before making any financial decisions. Investopedia makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy or timeliness of the information contained herein. As of the writing date of this article, the author owns no cryptocurrencies.