The Chinese blockchain platform NEO (NEO) announces at a conference in Seattle that the company will open a new office in Seattle. The company also shows a number of new functionalities of NEO 3.0.
NEO is also known as the Chinese ethereum (ETH), a label that co-founder Erik Zhang himself is not a fan of. Zhang says about the new office in Seattle:
Seattle has a huge source of developers and a strong atmosphere of innovation, and NEO has always attached great importance to technological development.
During the conference, the upcoming NEO 3.0 was also discussed. Although Erik Zhang himself was not present, he showed a film with some of the new functionalities of NEO 3.0. He says that the blockchain has been in development for 10 years and that the goal is to enable large-scale communication applications:
No blockchain currently supports large-scale communication applications.
And that will also apply to NEO for the time being. The next five new features of NEO 3.0 will probably not be seen before 2020:
- Native contracts
In addition to smart contracts, NEO 3.0 will also support native contracts. This should provide for faster verifications in transactions as well as the possibility for unlimited storage.
2. All assets must be created in smart contracts
According to Zhang, most assets are in any case created as contract assets and, by doing everything via smart contracts, the system would run better.
3. Access to internet resources
Users gain access to internet resources via URLs in smart contracts. This ensures higher transaction speeds.
4. Improved DBFT consensus mechanism
Additional steps are added to the consensus mechanism that removes errors in the network; especially important if a node has been offline.
5. NEOFS
At the moment NEO smart contracts can hardly store any data, the costs are extremely high so it does not offer a workable solution for companies. NeoFS is a new network for distributed data storage with low costs for large companies.
NEO 3.0 therefore had to offer mainly higher transaction speeds, more stability and more support for smart contracts. It is still unknown when it will be launched.
At the time of writing, NEO trades for around $ 8.4, which is a growth of 4% in the last 24 hours, but still a 95% decrease from the peak in early 2018. With a market capitalization of approximately $ 550 million, NEO currently the 16 largest cryptocurrency.