What is NEO?

The NEO token is a governance token of the NEO protocol. The protocol is sometimes referred to as the ‘Chinese Ethereum’. Like Ethereum, their mission is to create the best open decentralised network for the new Internet economy. The project was started in 2014 and was initially known as Antshares. The project has been consistently evolving and recently relaunched as NEO 3. With the new launch, there is a suite of new features including smart contracts, DeFi protocols (Flamingo), decentralised file storage, digital ID solution, built-in oracle, and cross-chain interoperability. The rich amount of features is part of NEO’s strategy to be the all-in-one blockchain platform that gives developers both a great experience and rich feature set to build their applications on. The multi-language capability of the platform also means that developers can create their applications on the NEO blockchain in whichever programming language they prefer. The key selling point of the NEO protocol is that they are completely built from scratch, claiming to have not borrowed the code-base of Ethereum like most other platforms; which they claim means also inheriting the flaws of Ethereum. Another differentiation is the decentralised file storage built on the NEO protocol is that there is no reliance on traditional service companies such as AWS like there is on other protocols. There are two tokens within the protocol, the other is GAS which is used to pay fees for the transactions on the network.