Formerly known as Antshares and sometimes described as the ‘Ethereum of China’, Neo describes itself as a ‘non-profit community-based blockchain project’. It uses blockchain technology and digital identity to create digital assets which can then be used to automate processes using smart contracts and enable a ‘smart economy’. Recently, Neo held its Neo DevCon where workshops and talks were held to discuss projects in the Neo space. Thomas Leiritz, CTO of Blockpass, was in attendance and kindly agreed to answer some questions about the event, Neo and blockchain technology.
MW: Could you give a brief overview of the aim of the Neo DevCon and your overall impressions?
TL: It’s the first developer conference of Neo, organised in San Francisco. I believe it gives a strong signal to the international dev community: Neo is not only for China.
The introduction speech of Da Hong Fei was quite inspirational. Neo is clearly trying to take Ethereum’s place in Dapps ecosystem.
MW: What made Blockpass decide to consider Neo as a potential users of its identity protocol?
TL: Blockpass is currently built on Ethereum mostly because it’s the only Blockchain ready for real world Dapps. Ethereum provides good documentation, mature tools and community. Lately Neo is getting more and more attention. Several projects launched their ICO on the Neo platform exclusively (theKey, Apex, Redpulse,…).
If Blockpass wants to be a compliant crypto protocol for identity, we will follow the trends and offer a cross-blockchain service. However, the cost in human resources and time to port Blockpass to another chain is such that the choice must be analysed extremely carefully. That’s the reason why I wanted to attend this DevCon.
Neo is clearly the closest competitor to Ethereum and Neo provides a gateway to the Chinese market. It has smart contracts that can be written in different programming languages (whereas Ethereum is enforcing a specific language). They advertise faster transactions per seconds and smart contracts usage does not cost anything to users.
Despite this, Neo is very much centralized, although they are trying to improve that. Additionally, and cost of deploying a smart contract is expensive and can go up to 25 000 USD.
— Thomas Leiritz, CTO of Blockpass
MW: How will Neo handle the issue of scalability?
TL: It’s hard to tell exactly what is going to happen when Neo becomes as popular as Ethereum. Theoretical speed is different than practical speed. Da Hong Fei said that they are aiming at 100 000 transactions per second in 2020 without sharding but did not disclose the solution.
MW: What was the most interesting topic/talk at the conference from a technical point of view?
TL: “Efficient Confidential Transactions Using Bulletproofs” by Prof. Dan Boneh from Stanford university — a short non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs that require no trusted setup. Compared to SNARKs, Bulletproofs require no trusted setup but verifying a Bulletproof is more time consuming than verifying a SNARK proof.
MW: What was the most interesting topic/talk at the conference from a use-case point of view?
TL: The Neo ecosystem needs more practical tools to reach mainstream usage. NeoAuth is a clone of MetaMask browser extension for Neo login.
Another interesting project was “Neo Smart IoT”. Their idea is to have smart contracts sending instructions to IoT devices using MQTT queue. It’s only one way though. Blockchain can interact with devices but devices cannot interact with the blockchain.
MW: Was the subject of regulation of cryptocurrency and blockchain raised and if so, how was it viewed by speakers and the audience?
TL: Regulation was discussed in almost all speeches. Ontology, THEKEY, PTS, Imusify: they all mentioned the need of verified identities. It’s clearly an important topic of conversation in this space.
MW: Much of the bad press that cryptocurrencies have received has been a result of exchanges being hacked. What did the talk on NEX say about this and did they propose a solution?
TL: Decentralized exchanges are the solution proposed.
MW: Zilliqa spoke about its blockchain and use of sharding. Can you explain how sharding works and its potential to deal with current scalability issues?
TL: Basically, sharing is splitting the blockchain into different pieces, validations happen in parallel and transaction are eventually added to a block.
The main benefit is a reduction of the amount of data that nodes need to store and less transactions to process.
MW: Other alternatives to sharding have been proposed. How do they compare and which is most likely to prove best?
TL: Trinity presented an off-chain scaling demo. The user deposits a certain amount for each recipient, for example, 100 USD. They can then send any amount to this recipient with total amount always less than original deposit. Only the final transaction will be processed on the chain.
MW: Blockchain was initially focussed on financial services but has since branched out to many other industries. What industries were represented at the conference?
TL: Healthcare, IoT, music copyrighting and streaming, project management and video rendering were all in attendance.
MW: As blockchain technology becomes known for its security and immutability, it is being looked into for integration with IoT and AI. Was this covered at the conference?
TL: The IoT industry was represented at the event. For AI: DeepBrain, Artificial Intelligence Computing Platform provides a low-cost, private, flexible, secure, and decentralized artificial intelligence computing platform for AI products.
— By Matthew Warner, Blockpass Researcher (with input from Blockpass CTO, Thomas Leiritz)
