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What is the NEO

What is NEO?

NEO is a blockchain network built for the automation of digital assets’ storage and exchange, this is achieved with the use of smart contracts bringing to life a smart economy with a distributed network. A digital asset is practically anything in a binary format which can be "used" by a software. Digital documents, songs and movies are digital assets that can be stored on electronic devices such as computers or smartphones.

What is a smart contract?

The computer scientist Nick Szabo first introduced the concept of smart contracts in 1994. Smart contracts are self-executing agreements, the terms between the buyer and the seller are written into lines of code in the decentralized blockchain network. As such, smart contracts allow for transactions and agreements to be made among anonymous users without the need of a central authority.

What are the differences between NEO and NeoGas?

There are two digital tokens in the network, NEO and NeoGas. Neo is not meant for transactions. It is a management tool giving users voting rights, so they can decide on network changes and on the verification of transactions contained in the blocks. A company can either register or change its assets on the network using NeoGas. The networks’ designers created NeoGas in order to prevent owners of big amount of tokens the power to influence the network’s purpose of use, such as in Ethereum.   

Both NEO and GAS have a 100 million tokens cap each, this is expected to be reached in a bit more than 20 years from now.

Who is behind the NEO network?

The Shanghai based company OnChain developed the NEO network which was originally named Antshares, it was renamed to NEO in 2017. The company has been founded by Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang, in 2017 it was listed in KPMG’s Top 50 Fintech Companies in China. OnChain has been funded by two crowdsales.17.5 million NEO tokens were sold for $550,000 in October 2015 and the remaining 22.5 million tokens were sold for a total of $4.5 million in August 2016.

The network uses a consensus algorithm called Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) and can support up to 1,000 transactions per second.

NEO’s smart contract system is called NeoContract, its strongest feature is the easy integration with the current ecosystem developers are using. Meaning that developers don’t need to learn new programming languages in order to create smart contracts, they can use basic languages such as C# and Java.

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