NEO is an open-sourceblockchaindecentralized application platform founded in 2014 by Da HongFei and Erik Zhang. Since its rebranding to NEO from Antshares in 2017, the project's vision is to realise a "smart economy" by utilizing blockchain technology and smart contracts to issue and manage digitized assets. The network runs on a proof of stake decentralized Byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanism between a number of centrally approved nodes, and can support up to 10,000 transactions per second. The base asset of the NEO blockchain is the non-divisible NEO token which generates GAS tokens. These GAS tokens, a separate asset on the network, can be used to pay for transaction fees. The inflation rate of GAS is controlled with a decaying half life algorithm that will release 100 million GAS over approximately 22 years. A total of 100 million NEO were created in the Genesis Block. 50 million NEO were sold to early investors, with the remaining 50 million NEO locked into a smart contract. Each year, 15 million NEO tokens are unlocked which are used by the NEO development team to fund long term development goals. The core of the NEO feature set revolves around tools that allow developers to efficiently deploy and scale smart contract applications on the NEO blockchain. X.509 Digital Identities allow developers to tie tokens to real world identities which aids in complying with KYC/AML and other regulatory requirements.
History
In 2014, Antshares was founded by Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang. In the following year, it was open-sourced on GitHub and by September 2015, the white paper was released. NEO was officially rebranded from Antshares in June 2017, with the idea of combining the past and the future. The word “neo”, originates from the ancient Greek prefix, “νεο-“, meaning ‘new’, ‘modern’, and ‘young’. The vision of building a “smart economy” was developed along with the rebranding. In March 2018, NEO's parent company Onchain distributed 1 Ontology token for every 5 NEO held in a user's cryptocurrency wallet. These tokens will be used to vote on system upgrades, identity verification mechanisms, and other governance issues on the NEO platform.
Organizational structure
In 2018, Da Hongfei announced the adoption of a new organizational structure. The NEO Council was to be reorganized into the NEO Foundation, co-chaired by Hongfei and Erik Zhang, and two operational units funded by the NEO Foundation: NEO Global Development and NEO Global Capital. NGD is dedicated to the research and development, community operations and marketing and will be executing strategies outlined by NEO Foundation. In April 2018, the first NGD office was set up in Shanghai and a year later, the second NGD office was opened in Seattle.
