What is NEO?
NEO is hailed as China’s Ethereum. What this means is that it offers smart contracts. It plans to be the future root chain that applications with mainstream use will be built off of.
NEO is extremely popular in China. The co-founder Dong HongFei and his team recently changed the project's name to NEO. It used to be called Antshares. When they changed the name they changed a lot of tech as well. They moved focus to smart contracts.
What sets them apart is that they are allowing smart contracts to be written in many already established languages. NEO is open source and they have two core developers. They also have done a lot of work with digital assets.
Pros
With all of this interest in smart contracts, it is a major bonus for NEO to have strong development in this field. They also have had success in developing digital assets that being their focus in 2016 when they were called Antshares.
NEO does have corporate collaboration and governmental collaboration as well. This will prove to be beneficial when legislative challenges start affecting crypto currencies. A huge pro for NEO is that they are established in China. China is the largest cryptocurrency market and they have the largest amount of exuberance for cryptos.
Cons
Currently, everyone is fighting to be root chain. Now, there can be several root chains. I don't think there needs to be just one going forward but there is not going to be 20 root chains in the future. Most companies and services will decide to use one and adopt it. This means that NEO could be thrown to the side if no one decides to build on it.
Legislative unknowns should make NEO be approached with caution as well as all currencies built in the very strict governmental system of China. Anything that takes away power from governments is going to have friction.
The biggest con going forward would probably have to be what can it do that other crypto currency can’t. What we are learning with all these new updates to each currency is that cryptos can evolve to be whatever. There is nothing really exclusive right now. So without partnerships, NEO will be nothing.
Conclusion
Neo has recently stolen ADX from ETH and that is a huge statement. What is really going to set any alt currency ahead is the partnerships they make. NEO is doing just that. I also see NEO as a very good investment because of the location. China is the largest market and they will be more apt to support NEO than ETH. NEO is still pretty low if you were to consider its value to ETH. I am really bullish on NEO and think it is the first true and ready competitor to ETH; besides of course BTC.
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