NEO was established in China in 2014 by Da Hongfei and Erik Zhan under the name AntShares and rebranded to NEO in June 2017. It is a blockchain-based platform that supports its cryptocurrency and enables the development of digital assets and smart contracts, similar to the American-based Ethereum blockchain network.
NEO aims to automate the management of digital assets using smart contracts, ultimately creating a distributed network-based smart economic system. NEO is an open-source, community-focused blockchain platform. It offers developers the digitalization and automation of asset management through smart contracts while providing strong decentralized storage capabilities, expertise, and domain name services, laying a secure foundation for the next-generation internet.
Known as the first-class smart contract platform, NEO was founded as Antshares in 2014 by Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang. Its original source code was published on GitHub in July 2015, and its MainNet was launched in October 2016, supported by a global developer community advancing the blockchain. In 2017, Antshares integrated smart contracts 2.0 and rebranded to NEO, leading to aggressive global development as hundreds of new developers joined the blockchain. NEO administrators began distributing NEO tokens as gifts to groups and individuals supporting the platform's growth. Groups such as COZ, NEOEconoLabs, and O3 Labs are known as early joiners within NEO.
In 2021, NEO was upgraded to its 3.0 version, known as NEO N3. Initiated in June 2018, N3 represents the most significant development in NEO's history, aiming to bring the first all-encompassing blockchain development experience to the industry with strong native features like distributed storage, expertise, and name service. Compared to its predecessors, NEO N3 supports more advanced management and economic models and simpler, more modular systems. NEO is considered a pioneer in the blockchain industry's early days, not only as the first public smart contract platform established in China but also as the first chain to use a token model and implement a BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) style consensus mechanism. Additionally, NEO is the first and only token sale to return all original funds to participants when they reach a certain level of assets.

As NEO's Shanghai-based operation expanded from under a dozen to over fifty, the organizational structure matured. The number of groups dedicated to advancing NEO's technology increased. Today, developers from around the world, including graduates from companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Samsung, Dell, and Seagate, contribute to NEO's core development, infrastructure, and tooling.
The main groups working on NEO are listed as follows:

For idealists, NEO's most inclusive goal is to be a decentralized and open network for the smart economy. However, pragmatists realize that some centralized coordination is necessary for this goal to materialize over time. To this end, the NEO Foundation was established as a strategic guide for the NEO platform, setting general project goals and providing funding for other self-governing groups to achieve organization-contributing objectives.
NEO also recognizes that the blockchain industry cannot bypass current legal systems or wholly incompatible solutions with existing business frameworks. Instead, it advocates for collaboration in building the future of the smart economy. NEO has addressed this issue by forming various industrial groups or joining them, designing standards for infrastructure access, and educating legislators. With the release of NEO N3 in 2021, NEO will take its biggest step forward in decentralization. NEO holders will have the right to vote in the NEO council, responsible for managing the blockchain, running consensus nodes, and adjusting critical blockchain parameters like transaction fees.

Considering the restrictions imposed by the Chinese Government on the transfer of cryptocurrencies, NEO has the potential to emerge as the preferred cryptocurrency in countries with strict regulations and possibly worldwide. NEO's Onchain technology has been designed from the outset to be regulator-friendly with a centralized approach, distinctly different from most cryptocurrencies. This approach helps it survive and thrive even in China, where government regulators are increasingly wary of the financial risks created by cryptocurrency speculation and the significant electricity consumption of large cryptocurrency mining operations that threaten the country's environmental goals.

Theoretically, the NEO smart economy system can be explained as digital assets + digital identity + smart contract = smart economy.
Assets can be digitalized openly, decentralized, reliably, traceably, transparently, and independently of intermediaries and costs. Users can register, sell, exchange, or circulate various assets.
The NEO platform allows for the linkage of digital and equivalent physical assets on its network. NEO also supports asset protection. These assets, registered on its platform, are given a valid digital identity and protected by law. Smart contracts allow for the execution of transactions and agreements between different parties without any legal system or centralized mechanism. The implementation of such contracts is based on the network's programming code, ensuring the traceability, transparency, and irreversibility of transactions.
NEO supports two cryptocurrencies: GAS and NEO. It facilitates contributions from a broad developer community by supporting programming in all common languages, including C#, Java, Go, Python, and Kotlin.

NEO distinctly sets itself apart from other standard blockchain platforms in terms of legal compliance. Although digitized assets and smart contracts are popular on other blockchain platforms like Ethereum, NEO's third fundamental feature, termed 'digital identity,' differentiates it from the rest.
On the NEO platform, every individual, business, or other legal entity must possess a verifiable unique digital identity. Transactions can only occur between parties if the other side possesses the required identity. This requirement makes the NEO network compliant with legal regulations. Various nodes on the NEO network, even those contributing to transaction verification and activities like accounting and ledger-keeping, must have identities.

In working on the NEO cryptocurrency, its founders Da Hongfei and Erik Zhan attracted the interest of various businesses seeking blockchain solutions. This led to the establishment of Onchain in 2014, an independent technology company operating within the necessary financial and legal frameworks to provide blockchain solutions to various businesses.
While NEO operates similarly to Bitcoin and Ethereum, Onchain focuses on creating private and inter-business blockchain networks to meet specific industry needs. Onchain's main product, the Distributed Networks Architecture (DNA), uses digital asset applications to assist businesses by creating private and public blockchains. DNA is believed to be a customizable blockchain capable of solving any variety of different issues in both the private and public sectors.

NEO and Onchain exist independently, in other words, one does not own the other. While NEO targets the Business to Consumer segment, where “C (Consumer)” can refer to a customer or even a community, Onchain focuses on enterprise services based on Business to Business. While NEO is funded by a public community, Onchain is backed by China's largest private conglomerate called Fosun.
When asked why Fosun was chosen as an investment partner, founder Da Hongfei said, “Their portfolio includes lifestyle with good synergy with the three main branches of finance, medical science, entertainment and blockchain technology. "For this reason, by choosing Fosun Group as an investment partner, they highly value the Enterprise resource that Fosun provides, a platform for Onchain to showcase its blockchain technology."

The co-founders of NEO and Onchain predict that they will be able to achieve cross-chain collaboration in the future. In other words, a mechanism will be developed to connect and share information between blockchains, whether public like NEO or private like those operated by businesses. As the number of blockchain-based systems continues to grow in both the public and private sectors, there will ultimately be a need for collaboration across sectors.
Working groups at NEO and Onchain hope to fill this gap with their ongoing work. However, to achieve such interoperability, trust and identity become important. This gap will be filled by the core digital identity feature that is an integral part of the NEO blockchain platform. NEO and Onchain appear to be able to open the much-needed middle ground between fully decentralized, unregulated and anonymous blockchain systems like Bitcoin and the traditional KYC (Know Your Customer) compliance of today's bank accounts and credit cards.
NEO and Onchain take a multi-service approach that seeks to accommodate and serve the needs of all parties such as individual users, network contributors such as miners, transaction participants, private businesses and even regulators, closed economy regulators and open system cryptocurrency investors. These are the areas best created to provide holistic solutions to ongoing disputes between them.

The NEO platform acts as the foundation of Onchain's DNA (Distributed Networks Architecture) concept. While NEO provides decentralized, public blockchains, DNA's Onchain caters to the need for private blockchains. Connecting these systems will ensure the "best" of both worlds.
Onchain has already secured the necessary approval for DNA from the government of Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province in Southwest China. Despite strict stances on various decentralized cryptocurrencies and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), the government is seeking alternative solutions and has shown a positive outlook on working with compliant companies. As local Chinese ventures, NEO and Onchain will be significant competitors. If Onchain's promising technology is accepted and integrated by the Chinese government and solution-providing businesses, it could significantly boost NEO's widespread adoption.

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