Profiling the Elevatyr Core 12: How Neo will revolutionize trade
Founded in 2014, Neo, formerly AntShares, was the first public blockchain project to come out of China.
Neo is focused on how their blockchain platform and the connecting ecosystem of decentralized applications, they call the Smart Economy, can be the foundation for how assets are exchanged in the future.
Neo’s Smart Economy is separated into three categories; digital identity, digital assets, and smart contracts. They break down the core characteristics of every transaction, digitizes them, and uses the NEO blockchain to conduct trade in a way that is fair, safe and easy to use.
Digital Identity
How do we know who’s who online?
The average internet user has no way to tell who’s behind the online identities of others. While government agencies can use the data they collect to connect our online actions and real-world identities, users of the internet can never be completely sure who they are interacting with.
The same goes for websites and purchases. There are malignant fishing websites that are almost identical to the original and there’s always that sense of fear not knowing whether what you’re buying online is there in the real-world.
Neo aims to use a third party trusted identity service to verify the companies, people, and assets on its blockchain. Neo won’t build this themselves, it will likely be a decentralized application that runs on Neo’s blockchain and is partnered with the project.
This kind of identity service would allow users to control the amount of information on their public profile’s and verify that all of the information is correct. With the legally validated connection between real people and digital identities, space opens up for tightening the relationship between the physical and digital worlds with digital personas being able to show ownership of own real-world items.
Digital Assets
Every item in the physical world has the ability to be owned and throughout history, humans have come up with many ways of proving ownership.
In the case of bearer bonds, they’re owned by whoever is physically in possession of them, the county clerk’s office keep record of who owns homes, and street racers exchange ownership of cars with a pink slip of paper. These forms of tracking ownership are slow and involve dealing with middlemen, lawyers, and government bureaucracy, but they are trusted.
The system we’ve built for ourselves is entirely dependent on trusting that the notes of ownership we’re given by powerful organizations represent real tangible assets. This is why people keep gold bars in their safes as a hedge against investment tools like securities, which represent the ownership of something but have no way of redeeming the underlying asset.
In an increasingly digital world, we should expect to see these methods for proving ownership online.
In June of 2000, Congress signed the ESIGN Act into law in a move to increase the internet’s ability to complete a vast amount of transactions and contract executions that are legally binding, and China followed with a similar bill in 2007.
These laws lay out the guidelines for how digital contacts must be formatted to carry legal weight and give us the ability to sign for things on the internet, approve transactions and essentially draw the lines for a legally binding connection between digital and physical worlds.
Ownership of real-world assets that are registered online through a validated digital identity service, the decentralized applications on Neo, are now protected by law. Meaning that with the success of the project we will have the ability to tokenize any of our physical assets and that the digital ownership rights of those assets carry the same weight in the eyes of our government as being in possession of a physical item.
Smart Contracts
At their core, smart contacts are an exchange between two parties, dependent on certain conditions, and in this case blockchain technology makes sure that these contracts are immutable and safely executed.
Smart contracts operate very similarly to regular contracts. Let’s say you and your boss agree on your salary and hours per week. On your day to be paid the contract will check that you’ve clocked the necessary hours and that your boss has deposited the necessary funds to pay your salary. If both of the conditions are met, the contract will execute, you will be paid, and your bosses debt to you will be erased.
These contracts are executed by the third party trustless system of Neo, but with the ESIGN act, the digital signatures on smart contracts can now be legally binding as well.
Neo’s smart contracts are different than those on other blockchain systems in their development flexibility. While Ethereum smart contracts, for example, can only be written in their proprietary language, Solidity, a new language few developers are experienced in, Neo contracts can be written in Java, Javascript, Python and many others. This opens up the Neo ecosystem for increased interest in the development of applications on their blockchain and makes their platform far more approachable for businesses without the capital to hire a Solidity developer team. Neo has positioned itself as a vanguard in the DApp (decentralized app) revolution.
Smart Economy in Action
Let’s say that I made an agreement to send a friend two hours of drive time in my car in exchange for him completing my online survey. To make the agreement official I use a decentralized application on the Neo platform to create a smart contract.
The Smart Economy gets involved during the writing of the contract. It begins with our identities. The digital identity aspect of Neo’s platform allows myself and the other party to verify who they are entering into a contract with and have no doubt of its validity. This way I can be sure that I’m not sending hours in my car to a stranger and my friend knows that he isn’t taking a survey that should be in his junk mail.
The second part of the process involves getting time in my vehicle tokenized. Not something Neo is specifically responsible for, but one of the projects that will likely be built by someone else on their blockchain. A similar identity service to the one that made sure both parties were who they claimed to be will verify that I have the car I’m claiming to have and turn the hours of time in my car into a tokenized asset.
I now have a digital token that represents the hours of time in my car, whose ownership is connected to my verified digital identity, and I have the ability to send that token to whomever I choose. Because of the ESIGN Act, the owner of that token has the legal right to use my car for the allotted time and in theory, the government would be able to intervene if there were some breach of contract that occurred in the physical world.
Once the survey is completed, the contract will execute. I will automatically receive my completed survey my friend will receive two tokens, each representative of one hour of driving in my car. The transaction was completed to both users specifications without a bank, middleman or any of the legal counsel often needed to execute a deal that involves contract law.
Neo can be traded on select cryptocurrency exchanges, and will be available for trading via Elevatyr, which will be entering an early access period in July. Visit https://www.elevatyr.io/ to sign up for the closed beta waitlist, and to learn more about how Elevatyr is the simplest way to intelligently trade cryptocurrencies.
For those interested in learning more about Neo, you may visit Neo’s website at https://neo.org/
Disclosure: This article does not represent an endorsement of the Neo cryptocurrency as an investment, and is for informational purposes only. Trading decisions should be made on an individual basis, and be informed by independent research. Elevatyr makes no recommendation as to trading behavior that should or should not be taken. The author of this article owns a small stake of Neo cryptocurrency.
