NEO: The Path Forward
The meteoric rise of NEO, formerly known as the cutely named AntShares, over the last year has certainly been exciting to watch. With so many competitors in the cryptocurrency space, NEO and it’s team have broken the mould to deliver a project that is both scalable and lightning fast.
The project uses Distributed Byzantine Fault Tolerance as a consensus mechanism, meaning less nodes are used to gain consensus. A node will add a block to the blockchain, and this will either be confirmed as correct or incorrect. Another node will suggest its own version of the blockchain if the block is incorrect.
Project founder, Da Hongfei, a highly respected player in the crypto-space and also the founder of OnChain has now announced at the NEO DevCon in San Francisco that NEO is set to be able to handle a massive 100,000 transactions per second by the year 2020 without the use of sharding.
Sharding involves the validation of a blockchain, where a small number of network nodes will validate each transaction on the network. Sharding allows people using expensive or inexpensive equipment to all have a chance at validating transactions. The workload of verifying transactions is split up among multiple networks, and these shards allow for many more transactions. It seems likely that NEO’s recent investment into High Performance Blockchain (HPB) is related to this exciting bit of news, but there have been no announcements regarding HPB at NEO DevCon as of yet.
So why is this such a significant step forward? For one, it brings NEO to the forefront of speedy transactions. Bitcoin can handle a maximum of just 7 transactions per second in the most optimal conditions, IOTA handles between 500–800 per second, and Ripple hits above 12 per second. Meanwhile, services like PayPal can process about 115, and VISA handles 2000 per second.
In short, NEO, who can support an impressive 1,000 transactions per second right now, are setting themselves up for long term success and viability in the crypto-space. Hongfei has announced that NEO’s ultimate goal right now is to be the number one blockchain by the year 2020, and it certainly seems attainable if they keep progressing the way they are now.
