Neo — For 3PT
Ticker(s): $NEO, $GAS
Website: https://neo.org/ , https://github.com/neo-project , https://www.reddit.com/r/NEO
# of Coins Issued: NEO 50 million circulating, NEO 100 million total, GAS 8–10 million circulating, 100 million GAS total
Best Exchange to Trade $NEO (for now): Bittrex, Binance. Bittrex trades in BTC/ETH/Tether pairs. No real place to trade GAS currently (Binance only real option).
Update 9/9/2017 — Be aware with China cracking down on coin offerings, NEO’s immediate use case gets immediately hammered. Either collect the GAS dividend and hold or move onto other investments.
Opinion
Still has room to run up price wise — think upside being a market cap closer to ETH than it is now since it sidesteps some ETH issues, but without the rabid, low IQ following. I’d try to build a position, dollar cost averaging my way down if possible, buying dips, scalping, etc where I end up with a lot of NEO that I won’t need to sell for several years. One of the more extreme “might be holding this a while” coins in crypto which makes sense since if you day trade NEO, must keep NEO on exchanges and then you can’t claim your GAS. Not knowing Chinese & lurking Chinese forums may put traders at an information asymmetry disadvantage so another reason to trade this using longer time frames. Some of the tech is ambitious, seems like at least another year away from what I would call “mature”.
Summary
Currently nicknamed “The Chinese Ethereum” (which is good branding IMO, but may be limiting). Used to be something called Antshares. Same general ideas as Ethereum — digital assets (two types — global and contract) on the blockchain plus throw in the ability to assign physical, real world items (say like a deed to a house) through digital identity where you go through multiple steps to identify yourself. Smart contracts work pretty much the same as Ethereum except NEO will support many developer languages. Has something called Digital Identity which is basically verified KYC info about users & it’s this identity that allows for the tying of the physical world to the blockchain. Can build dApps just like ETH. NEO doesn’t divide into decimals because it isn’t a currency, more a governance token (Proof of Stake), GAS will serve the other purposes.
Economic / Price Stuff
ICO was performed under Antshares. Two phases — October 2015 & September 2016. Raised 2,100 & 6,119 BTC respectively. ICO used a weighting factor so exact price varies per investor.
October 16, 2017 — the 50 million NEO managed by NEO Council is unlocked. They state it will not be sold on exchanges, but this will have to have some impact in the ecosystem right? OTC dries up?
GAS dividend — pretty much one of the more important parts of holding the NEO tokens. If you hold NEO, as people pay GAS to use the network, NEO holders are given a GAS dividend. The more the network is used, the more you get. GAS generation — 16% Year 1, 52% after Year 4, 80% after Year 12. 8 GAS per block in Year 1 divided by all NEO holdings (minuscule amount). The “extra service charges” that will be given as a dividend in GAS to NEO holders isn’t defined currently.
NEO will facilitate it’s first ICO on September 1st for Red Pulse. If ICO craze hits NEO, might see the same type of bullish run ETH saw until the economics don’t make sense anymore and price corrects.
Look for NEO to get listed on bitFlyer (Japanese exchange) some time soon is my guess and I think the price will go wild in anticipation.
Tech Stuff
Has its own blockchain so it isn’t piggybacking off one of the pre-existing bigger chains like BTC or ETH. Blocks every 15–20 seconds. Scaling — 1000 transactions per second is easily achievable, comparison Bitcoin will need a fully functioning Lightning Network to compare but currently doesn’t come close, ETH doesn’t even have a real clear path to this yet (sharding? plasma.io / babychains? Raiden? will need another hard fork?). Can actually build private / alliance chains using NEO with enough machines to develop a consensus.
Built with C#.Net (Microsoft language). Basic idea is to allow developers of many different programming languages to create smart contracts (current support for Assembly, Java, .Net, Go, Kotlin I believe). I assume this is to hopefully help widespread adoption. There’s a compiler for each supported language. The compiler takes the code you wrote in one of the supported languages, and creates a file for the Neo Virtual Machine (an .avm file). It’s a three step process — load the Neo framework/class for the language you’re working with, convert the code into something Neo will understand, write the .avm file.
Consensus mechanism — dBFT or Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerant aka proxy voting. You vote by picking a “bookkeeper” you support.
2 “core” devs. A few other “devs”, community growing. A little worried their roadmap is too big for their current dev team, but let’s see these things can change quickly. NeoX, NeoFS, NeoQS still in development, still a lot to do / test / secure.
