Building its reputation as the most trusted source for dapp data, DappRadar has added support for dapps running on the NEO blockchain.
Now celebrating three years of mainnet operation, the project often colloquially labelled China’s Ethereum (much to its founders’ chargain), originally launched as AntShares back in 2014.
Renamed in 2017, NEO now describes itself as the “open network for the smart economy”, and is keen to stress its focus on real-world applications.
Many of NEO’s key features — notably single block finality — arise from its choice of a delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerant (dBFT) consensus model. Single block finality means that once a block is created, it can’t be bifurcated, and hence recorded transactions can’t be reversed. This also means NEO can’t generate orphan blocks, providing it with a high level of stability.
More generally, NEO offers high throughput of more than 1,000 transactions per second with a 15 second block time. It uses the NEO cryptocurrency to enforce its consensus model, while its GAS cryptocurrency is used to deploy dapps and make transactions, and is paid to nodes for maintaining the blockchain.
What’s next?
NEO recently upgraded to what it calls its dBFT v2.0 consensus model. This is in preparation for the release of NEO v3.0 — labelled NEO3 — which is currently available on testnet and expected to launch via a hard fork in mid-2020.
The goal of NEO3 is to create a faster, more robust and open blockchain with the features and capabilities to support very large scale commercial applications such as YouTube, Alipay, or WeChat.
In addition to the new consensus model, NEO3 will include an oracle system with one block finality; launch with an integrated decentralized object storage platform called NeoFS; and have a decentralized ID protocol called NeoID.
To encourage dapp developers, NEO3 will substantially reduce the deployment and execution costs of its smart contracts, and feature a new virtual machine. This will be decoupled from the blockchain itself, enabling easy integration with standard development tools and even other blockchains.
You can find out more about the NEO blockchain via its website. Developers can also gain support for NEO Global Development’s $100 million NEO EcoBoost fund.
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