Neo Part 2 — Meetup in Amsterdam
Catch up on NEO Part 1 — A brief history of ICO’s here
TL;DR:
- Fantastic meetup, with some truly inspirational speakers.
- The project I am most excited for so far in 2018 is NEX.
- NEO has several advantages that have ensured a high quality of ICOs (so far).
After the success of these early NEO ICOs, I wanted to find their secret, so I travelled to Amsterdam, to attend the NEO Meetup. After the wild west feel of some Ethereum ICOs, each project with it’s own goals and motivation, NEO’s defined vision of a Smart Economy is refreshing. NEO is a non-profit community-based blockchain project, but the development of its ecosystem is also supported by City of Zion (CoZ) and NewEconoLab (NEL). This ecosystem, such as through CoZ’s d’App competitions, has fostered a truly exciting line-up of projects. Fortunately I got the chance to see some of these project owners present their visions for the future.
The first project to present was Qlink, who launched a successful ICO last month and are led by Susan Zhou, who laid out an exciting vision for the future of wireless internet, not only making the internet cheaper and faster, but also increasing accessibility in remote and under-served locations. I was also lucky enough to meet with some of the team in the hotel lobby the next morning and get the chance to share some of my thoughts with them.
The second team to present was Zeepin, a distributed creative economy, who launched their ICO on the 18th of January. Zeepin are aiming to bring about a d’App ecosystem aimed at the creative industry. However while the team has some experience, they are aiming to raise a not insubstantial $50m and are yet to produce an MVP or demo.
Next to take to the stage was Michael de Wal, the Founder of Moonlight and CoZ developer. “Moonlight is a distributed workforce and analytical project management platform featuring a global public ledger of contributor work experience and a new match-making algorithm to effectively fulfill project needs.” What this means is that they will provide a platform where (initially) projects can hire blockchain and smart contract developers. While the idea is simple, the way that they are looking to overcome several challenges is certainly interesting.
“Moonlight will initially concentrate on three issues, with the first being access to critical resources. It is currently very difficult to find resources for projects within the blockchain space.
The second issue is effective staffing on projects, to which the solution also resolves the first issue. “Moonlight will feature a trustless mechanic to guarantee the skillset and experience of potential contributors in concert with a matchmaking search function.
This also addresses the third issue, which is difficulty in establishing confidence in project teams.”
https://neonewstoday.com/development/moonlight/
Having worked previously in the psychometric assessment industry, the use of blockchain applications to increase the understanding of both individuals’ and teams’ abilities and experience is definitely needed. While there is relatively little information available on this project at this time, I will definitely be following this project closely and will keep you all updated.
Dean van Dugteren, again a CoZ Developer presented his new project, VDT.Network. The website gives very little away about this project apart from a e vague connection to Vidato (“a Cloud Render Service & Application [which is] currently in closed beta testing phase.”); considering the competition, such as Golem and SONM, I was interested to see how VDT.Network would differentiate itself. However I learned that Vidato is in fact a working product with clients such as Trap City — 9 million youtube followers, which is looking to pivot from cloud to distributed rendering in order to reduce costs and increase scalability. While it is still early stages for this project, I will again be watching how it progresses closely.
The next project to present was OKWAVE, a Japanese project that is essentially Quora, but with blockchain and incentives. While the popularity of these platforms in undeniable, I found it difficult to see the need for a blockchain alternative
DeepBrain Chain, NEO’s second ICO and a project I have written about before was also in attendance. This a very exciting project and has already done extremely well on the exchanges, but is also one that I plan to follow long term.
The inclusion of the QRC Group into the NEO ecosystem (https://www.reuters.com/brandfeatures/venture-capital/article?id=23048) is interesting. As stated by Da Hongfei, “Compliance is inevitable after the blockchain industry matures to a certain stage,” and it is in the area of compliance, via incubation and funding of projects (such as Coinfirm) that QRC will aid the NEO ecosystem. Compliance is a highly controversial issue within the blockchain community. Unlike today, many within the early Bitcoin community were drawn to it, for price increase, but either due to the technology or it’s anarchistic nature. It will be interesting to see if increasing institutional money and involvement within the space will cause a new shift towards compliant blockchains compared to their anti establishment birth.
As mentioned in Part 1, Red Pulse was NEO’s first ICO. Red Pulse is a market intelligence platform covering China’s financial markets, providing clients with the knowledge and context to make informed business decisions. Jonathan Ha, (CEO of Red Pulse) who is a fantastic natural presenter, really sold me on the Red Pulse vision of providing “context” as well as “information” and made me reassess my earlier “quick flip” mentality.
Last, but certainly not least, the one that everyone (at least that I spoke to) was waiting for; Neon Meta Exchange (NEX).
NEX is “built on the NEO blockchain, proposes a combination of off-chain trade matching, smart contract execution and a global asset cross-chain payment service, combining the performance of centralised exchanges with the trust and security properties of decentralised exchanges.”
Just some fancy words for a decentralised exchange, or so I thought before I saw Fabian Wahle’s presentation. I strongly suggest you watch it, as I am unable to go into depth here, however for me the most exciting aspects mentioned were:
- The Mixing Engine, which will also allow cross chain trading
- Smart Contract based (decentralised) banking
- Token staking (profit sharing)
In short I believe that NEX will be one of the hottest ICO’s and most exciting projects of 2018.
I have come away from the NEO meetup feeling inspired for the future. What is exciting is that the meetup wasn’t just about visions for the future,but also what is beginning to be accomplished. In terms of the secret for success that NEO ICO’s have had so far, I believe they are:-
- Shared vision of the future of the NEO platform and cohesion between the projects.
- Large ecosystem of developers and funders to support early stage projects.
- Increased barriers to entry (cost to launch a Smart Contract).
- Increased willingness to cooperate with governments and industry (compliance).
However with only three projects currently trading, it is still early days for the NEO platform. I am therefore heading to NEO DevCon at the end of this month to find out more about NEO’s plans for the future and the projects that will form part of this future. I will keep you all updated of my findings and if anyone else is attending, please let me know, as it would be great to meet up.
