Is NEO blockchain truly a failure?
Why hasn’t it succeeded as a new DAPP platform?
What is NEO blockchain and how does it differ from Ethereum?
We suppose that some, or maybe most of you have asked themselves these questions. The opinion about the lack of popularity and uses has its roots to the core of the platform, and that has to be changed. Let’s start with some stats that can be seen with a naked eye.
According to the DAPP listings there are currently around 2000 decentralized applications running on Ethereum and only around 75 DAPPs on the NEO blockchain despite the fact that NEO has been initially released 1,5 years before Ethereum.
Cost
To deploy smart-contract in NEO you will need 490 GAS which is around $2940 according to your favorite CoinMarketCap, while deploying smart contract on Ethereum costs a few dollars. At the first glance it sounds pretty illogical, but it has a very certain reason. Such price enables project filter that helps avoiding scams and let only worthy projects into the net.
Moreover, NEO Council is funding the projects that it finds suitable to create.
The controversy is rising even more here: every project could become a game-turner and a single person can be really biased.
This fact has so many aspects and so many opinions that we recommend you reading this Reddit post and decide for yourself. We have already chosen our side and we want to bring NEO to the higher levels of adoption and create a fully-loaded ecosystem with every kinds of ideas to show the true benefits of this blockchain to the world, but with a huge respect to NEOs initial philosophy.
The solution we have created is based on the radical change of the token creation model.
To create a classy NEP-5 token you need to deploy a contract, but is there a way to avoid it? By creating a master token contract which contains multiple tokens inside we want to suggest the ability to create your digital asset by calling createToken function. Fee model states that calling a function will cost much less than a contract deployment. Goal reached!
But, there is a problem — how do you distinguish the tokens inside the contract and call the functions for separate ones. Contract supports each NEP-5 function, but with addition of the tokenID parameter to solve this issue.
Such approach will decrease the cost more than 10 times! Now, we want to push it as a NEP standard, so every developer that wants to explore NEO will have a rocket launchpad to start the project and start the crowdfunding campaign.
We invite you to join the discussion on the Pull request page in the NEO Repository
Keep in mind, that such approach is intended to only be the entry point for the developer. Once the needed funding is raised and the project is ready to deploy their personal NEP-5 contract the multitoken contract is ready to help with the deprecation function. It will block this token on the multitoken contract and migrate all users to the standalone NEP-5 one in a way that developer will decide.
We see a huge potential in the NEO ecosystem and we are sure that with such standard it can grow bigger and spread with more complex and useful DApps all over the digital space. This words are not just flattering, we have had a rich history of interaction with the NEO blockchain. Apart from the aforementioned standard we are pushing another one with which we want to include highly usable by the developers mint and burn functions into the NEP-5 standard. While NEP-5 covers most use cases such as value transfers, balance retrieval and token info (name, symbol, decimals, total supply), it is often the case that the owner of the token implements mint/burn methods to control token distribution e.g. during an ICO. These methods directly affect total token supply and may be helpful for users to understand possible changes in token value and distribution.
The history with NEO goes back even more. Let me list the solutions we have brought earlier:
- Fixing incomplete docs and errors in TypeScript definitions for neon-js
- Building NEO bytecode disassembler to extract parameter values instead of reading not working events on the node
- Checking failed transactions returns manually through NEOVM logs, because failed ones could be pushed into the blockchain and no value came back
- Creating our own NEO explorer instead of failing NEOSCAN
We have more plans for this platform in future, but the nearest one is deploying one part of our own multichain DUC token to the NEO blockchain to create the first of its kind interoperability between three major DApp platforms (ETH, NEO, EOS)
NEO blockchain is a highly perspective platform with the innovative approach they have came up. But, the adoption rate is highly critical for any chain now and we want to bring it to the proper level. Join the discussion about token cost decrease and mint/burn extension at NEO Github.
