NEO is supposed to be China's ETH - they've called it that themselves.
NEO is also supposed to surpass BTC and ETH, according to NEO founder Da Hongfei. Anyone worth their salt in this space knows; any asset that says it's going to overtake BTC should be called out on their claims because that's just not likely.
If NEO was going to be the Chinese ETH of the future, why doesn't China buy it?
Daily I watch coins - and track their buying patterns - at least for high yield high attention assets. Binance is the primary exchange for Chinese investment, only 24% of their traffic is from China, but nearly all the exchange buyers in China use it as their primary Exchange. Binance only accounted for 24% of NEO/BTC 3 weeks ago, then it averaged 21%, now it's under 20% regularly, averaging 18.5% on the dailies.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo/#markets
Moreover, NEO/USD is the primary mover for NEO value. If this is China's ETH, shouldn't it be a NEO/CNY pair? Why isn't there a pair yet? Regulatory issues could be the answer, or perhaps the play here is to wash currency back into China from all the Yuan that's exiting the country through BTC.
It's important to note that NEO is a circular Yuan ecosystem, meaning you can't use NEO to wash Yuan out of China. Anyone who's taken longer than 5 minutes to read into the Chinese consumer-base for cryptocurrency can easily tell you the primary motivator for a vast number of Chinese investors is to loophole Capital Flight.
Wouldn't Chinese buying be down across the board?
So, let's analyse the Chinese buyers. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/hshare/#markets
HShares is great, no one really talks about it; but the Chinese consumers love it. HShares are primarily bought by Chinese investors. It went through a standard "new coin" pump cycle when it first hit Binance, but after that it just became pretty steady - for weeks, actually. Unlike the interest and volume in NEO by the same exact buying demographic.
In fact, if you dig around for Chinese-centric cryptocurrency assets that aren't in the Western-world social media shill bucket, you see pretty much what you'd expect. Decent volume, good buying patterns, and a generally healthy market overall.
Cross over to hyped assets like NEO and OMG, and you get a different picture all together. NEO is dangerous and the risk associated to NEO is high as hell. The customer-base for their target demographic (region) is outright bleeding, and it's being propped up by non-Chinese buyers and pumpers claiming it's going to moon-shot lambo them to the next universe or whatever. I'd be wary. Trade with caution, and DYOR - but you won't like what you see.
