Are we still bullish on NEO ?

6 min readNov 25, 2018

A few days go there was a popular post on reddit asking “Are we still bullish on Neo?” .

Below is my response split into a few categories. Any views displayed below are those of my own. I hope to answer a few of the main FUD questions I see flying around Telegram / Twitter / The camp fire. Sources are either linked directly or found at the end of this document.

Developer activity:

I’m not too sure how this one started or where this FUD came from but it’s very easy to see activity within the NEO GitHub and disproved in a few clicks.

It’s very easy to jump in the GitHub and look at the recent commits and activity levels. Not only are the Devs delivering consistent updates they are increasing over the last 6–8 months!

Some projects are known for having high level of commits but this doesn’t mean much without solid work. The CHANGE LOG is an amazing place to see some more detail on what the team are working on.

https://github.com/neo-project/neo-cli/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Summary of recent releases:

NEO [2.9.0] —Release September 15th — 2018
NEO [2.9.1] — Release October 18th — 2018
NEO [2.9.2] — Released November 16th — 2018

Hackathons/ Workshops:

Whilst they do not yield immediate results the WORLD tours and workshops are spreading NEO awareness to developers who may have never thought about utilizing the NEO network. Projects take time to develop, with the workshops being active over October / November we should start to see some projects emerging in the next few months.

Russia — Saint Petersburg in the next few days!

Decentralization

There is a popular article written by Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum that has come to be the standard of Decentralization (very smart dude). He Splits it into Three sections, Logical, Architectural and Political :

Architectural: how many physical computers is a system made up of? How many of those computers can it tolerate breaking down at any single time?

As of the time of writing this we have (Active responding) 58 nodes
Asia — 19
Europe- 17
Americas — 22

Logical: Can we split the system in half and continue to operate ? if NEO lost half the network can it operate independently or is there a single point of failure ?

Yes. Loss of a up to 50% of the consensus or edge nodes would not result in failure of the network. It’s likely we will see larger block times but this is expected if any network is cut in half.

Political: how many individuals or organizations ultimately control the computers that the system is made up of?

Political decentralization is well under way and making amazing progress . “ Zhang Yuwen : Decentralization is of course the goal of NEO”
7 Active consensus nodes. “Book keepers”
Ownership split between Neo Foundation, CoZ and KPN
“ the consensus nodes running on the test network are: Royal Dutch Telecom (KPN), Swisscom (Swisscom, etc.), and NEO will fully open consensus node voting and elections next year.” (Full document here)
Most recently KPN was elected a Consensus node, this is a multi-billion dollar Dutch Telecom company. https://neonewstoday.com/general/dutch-telecom-company-kpn-voted-in-as-neo-mainnet-consensus-node/

dApps / Real world Usage:

This the MOST important point in my eyes. NEO is perfectly positions to lead the way in real world usage dApps. You can look at http://ndapp.org/ to get an overview of some of the dApps NEO has to offer but it goes so much deeper than this.

The ecosystem is deep and complex but one stand out for myself is the NEX and nOS link. nOS is a dApp browser that will integrate many apps along including NEX used for FIAT exchange.

Using “Automatic Token Conversion” you will automatically be able to switch to the native token of the app you wish to use. No longer do you need to hold 100x different tokens to use each application on your phone. You can seamlessly and easily convert into any application you want to use.

Imagine a world where you do some free lance work using the THOR app and decide you want to take a holiday ? (Theoretical)

Too easy, using the nOS token conversion just switch your THOR tokens for some AVA and enjoy that beach!

I’ve personally just booked my second hotel stay using Travala.com (Part 1 and Part 2 here)

There are however many other application you can check out in my previously mentioned link. If you prefer to play Toy Ferrari games than spend time on the beach that’s cool.

Another cool application I like that is on the App stores right now is Guardium, it’s a essentially a decentralized emergency system, there are millions of people in rural areas that don’t have access to Police etc.

Wallet and easy usability:

I’m a huge fan of the wallets being produced at the moment, NEON and O3 get a special mention in my eyes but there are many more.
A really cool recent feature is the NNS / NEO NAME SYSTEM. I’ve registered a few names using this for myself and my Girlfriend. We both have our firstname.neo alias reserved. I’ve got a few setup on my mobile wallet. No more remembering long complex names, I can just send something straight over to “John-Smith.neo”.

NEO 3.0

GitHub showing this at status 38% . https://github.com/neo-project/neo/milestone/1

We are still quite a few months off the Launch of 3.0 but we can see it’s actively being perused and worked on.
Once again the community and devlopers are very active in this. All opinions from many smart individuals are being considered.