Neo for Newbies: What makes Neo so unique?

Recently, Dogecoin’s value once again shot up again after Elon Musk, Tesla’s founder, tweeted his support for the meme-based coin. While his tweet attracted strong attention to the blockchain sector, would it be accurate to say that blockchain technology is the same as cryptocurrency? Certainly not — blockchain technology goes far beyond cryptocurrency and represents the future of the Internet. The future is represented by Neo.

Neo is the most feature-complete blockchain platform for building decentralization applications. As an open-source community-driven blockchain platform, Neo leverages smart contracts to enable developers to digitize and automate the management of assets while also delivering powerful native infrastructures such as decentralized storage, oracles, and domain name service. With its optimized infrastructure and powerful features, Neo is set to become a pillar of the next-gen Internet.

Unlike Bitcoin, Neo and Ethereum are Turing-complete blockchains, meaning anyone can build their smart contracts on the latter two while Bitcoin functions more as a kind of property that can store value, but nothing more.

However, what makes Neo N3 unique from all other competitors is its comprehensive array of native infrastructures which are designed to empower developers to build decentralized apps(DApp). Built to last, Neo N3 will deliver a streamlined UX/DX system along with powerful tools such as decentralized storage, decentralized identity, oracle protocols, and a domain name service.

These functions will only become more important as blockchain-based applications become increasingly sophisticated. Unlike its competitors, all developers are welcome to develop on Neo regardless of their preferred language, and the platform’s comprehensive functionalities ensure that developers are never boxed in, making it the most developer-friendly network.

By opening the doors to blockchain to any and all who are interested, Neo N3 is responding to the needs of blockchain developers, representing a wake-up call for the industry at large.

Blockchain possibilities and capabilities

Let’s use dAirbnb as an example. A decentralized application, dAirbnb stores data on home listings through a set of smart contracts that are stored on the blockchain. Through an intuitive interface, owners can upload information and pictures showing their property while the platform displays both renters’ and owners’ ratings for improved transparency.

If someone is looking to book a listing, dAirbnb then scans and filters the blockchain for all the listings that meet your criteria (e.g., ten miles from the Eiffel Tower, two bedrooms, four-plus star ratings only). There is no difference in terms of user experience between using dAirbnb and Airbnb — except that your information is not stored in a centralized platform. As dAirbnb enables peer-to-peer interactions, only you and the property owner are privy to information such as your messages. You could even swap phone numbers with the owner, thus enabling you to directly contact the owner for any future needs. With blockchain, dAirbnb enables you and the owner to directly communicate and complete the transactions, all on-chain. blocks to preserve future revenues. On dAirbnb, you and the owner can communicate and complete the transaction on-chain.

As demonstrated by this example, blockchain provides several advantages, namely:

• Reputation: Due to blockchain’s transparent nature, transactions will be recorded on the chain, and reviews will be made transparent, thus motivating both parties to maintain honesty to avoid the risk of negative reviews. Moreover, someone with a positive reputation can benefit from it across various platforms as users’ identity remains consistent across multiple Dapps.
• Identity verification: Rather than verify each user’s identity through a centralized mechanism, smart contracts from “VerifyID”-type applications — represented by NeoID on Neo N3 — can be called up to confirm each user’s real-world identity and ensure security.
• Privacy Protection: Unlike traditional mechanisms, VerifyID applications cannot track or store all transactions in a database, thus ensuring user privacy. Rather, VerifyID applications simply return a TRUE or FALSE answer upon receiving a verification request, but it will not be involved in the transaction process itself, thus further optimizing user privacy and security.
• Risk Reduction: On the blockchain, homeowners will no longer be required to hand over their data to centralized platforms, which can be hacked and exposed. By switching to a peer-to-peer interaction format, homeowners will be better protected against potential data leaks along with subsequent limitations and liabilities.
• Smart Locks (IoT device): To further ensure security, blockchain technology can be integrated with smart locks to bolster efficiency. Upon payment, a smart lock connected to the blockchain will be notified and will open once the user has arrived and signed off with their public key as proof of payment. Thus, owners will no longer be required to drop off keys or visit properties except in cases of emergencies.

Nowadays, the blockchain industry is currently dominated by decentralized finance protocols (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT).DeFi platforms allow people to lend or borrow funds, speculate with a range of assets, trade cryptocurrencies, insure against risks, and earn interest in savings-like accounts. As of July 7, 2021, Aave, the largest DeFi project, has locked USD11 billion in total. Meanwhile, NFTs — that is, a crypto asset that can be owned as a digital item on the blockchain e.g. image, video, text — have boomed in the past year or so. tIn March of 2021, an NFT digital art that was created by a digital artist was sold for USD69 million at Christie’s.

The competitive advantages of developing on Neo N3

Blockchain technology has evolved tremendously over the past few years. Public blockchains, in particular, have remained the most important domain, with fierce competition between different platforms across multiple fronts, including Layer 1 performance, developer experience, infrastructure, and ecosystem — among others.

Building a world-class protocol and all the required infrastructure for developers is a daunting task, especially without substantial community backing. It’s only natural then that the majority of competing for smart contract platforms today are predominantly forks of Ethereum, the most dominant player in the space. By borrowing the Ethereum codebase or even just the EVM, projects can bootstrap their ecosystems and applications with existing Ethereum-based tooling, avoiding the need to construct original solutions.

As more and more platforms have discovered, this shortcut does not come without drawbacks. Inheriting from Ethereum also means inheriting its existing flaws, and places them in direct competition with it for developer mindshare. Although the inherent weakness of Ethereum’s PoW-based Layer 1 has opened the door to its would-be successors, Ethereum’s own pursuit of perfection in its upcoming 2.0 iteration and the maturity of scalability solutions means that the window of opportunity for copycats is rapidly closing.

Since it was first founded, Neo has opted for the path less traveled. Not content with the compromises found in other platforms, and the resulting poor developer or user experiences, Neo has sought to provide only the best-in-class across every possible category. With its pioneering consensus mechanism, original codebase, and multi-language developer-friendly infrastructure, Neo accepted no compromise.

Here are the features of the Neo N3 blockchain:

Smart contracts

Neo strives to be the most developer-friendly blockchain. It achieves this with full-stack development tools for multiple programming languages. Neo believes in bringing blockchain technology to developers, rather than forcing developers to learn new languages or tools.

• Multiple programming languages are supported.
• A set of new functionalities to make programming contracts easier, such as dual-level permission setting, NEP17 token standard, customed logic
• The gas fee is lower on the Neo N3 blockchain.

NeoFS

NeoFS is a distributed, decentralized object storage network. Used to its fullest potential, NeoFS can act as the host infrastructure for an entirely new class of truly decentralized applications.

• An open market for everyone who can join in as a storage node, be elected to manage the network, and earn rewards.
• The service can be customized for every node.
• Native developed, so easier to interact with other Neo components

NeoID

Apply for the situation where the verification only needs several specific attributes. And prevent Sybil attacks from seizing control of the organization.

Oracle

Offering a trusted source of real-world data. Contracts deployed on Neo can invoke the native oracle contract to trigger a data request, specifying a target URL and a filter. Oracle nodes, elected through the Neo Council, will work together to guarantee the truthfulness and reliability of the results.

Neo Name service

Used to map human-readable domain names to different types of data, such as IP addresses, aliases, or other strings.

• Help next-generation users manage their accounts by aliases, other than the complex and unrememberable Hex numbers.
• Improve retrieval speed by using aliases for stored containers, configuring GeoDNS for the NeoFS CDN.
• Each domain can be represented by an NFT, enabling NNS users to freely transfer the ownership of domain names.

dBFT 2.0

dBFT requires a ⅔ majority agreement between validators called consensus nodes before new blocks can be committed to the blockchain.

• The blockchain will never fork, and every transaction is permanently settled as soon as it is included in a confirmed block.
• Governance voting by Neo stakeholders ensures all participants are economically aligned in a shared interest to safeguard the blockchain and its growing ecosystem.

Interoperability

Can interact with other public chains through Poly Network.

Developer experience

One-stop-shop smart contract and dApp development frameworks are also provided to quickly bootstrap developers and get them up and running as architects for the next-generation Internet.

• Tools like NEO-ONE, NEO Compiler Eco, and Neo Playground are accessible directly from within a browser.
• NGD Enterprise created a Neo Blockchain Toolkit for VS Code, allowing developers to easily deploy private Neo networks then create, deploy, and interact with smart contracts coded in any language.
• An expandable testing framework, Neo Debugger, is provided to debug the program.

Base on all this, there is no hesitation to build on the Neo N3 blockchain. The Neo team offers a series of quick starts and technical workshops to make it easy to build with the Neo ecosystem.

Welcome to the new era with Neo N3 blockchain.