By
Temitope Olatunji
April 16th, 2024
AntShares, China’s first open-source blockchain platform, announces their development plans, including rebranding of the platform from Antshares to NEO, entering into new partnerships and introducing of smart contracts 2.0.
AntShares, China’s first open-source blockchain platform, organized a meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters in Beijing, China, to announce their development plans. Several major potential investors, industry specialists, Blockchain enthusiasts, and representatives of the Chinese financial and mainstream media attended the meeting.
The Chinese blockchain platform announced upcoming rebranding of the platform from Antshares to NEO, by changing key elements like logo and UI of the platform.
Another key topic of the meeting was the announcement of NEO’s new partnerships with such prominent blockchain platforms as Bancor, Agrello, Coindash, Binance, and Nest Fund.
According to NEO’s plans in the context of the blockchain technology’s future, decentralised commerce, digital identities and digitisation of different assets will become a reality with the new smart contracts code.
It is believed, that AntShares/NEO is trying to position itself as the country’s version of the widely-known Ethereum. Still, there are some differences between them.
Smart contracts based on Ethereum use its own programming language, called Solidity. NEO’s smart contracts 2.0, in their turn, will use conventional languages like Javascript, Go, Python etc. Acting like this the NEO team is hoping to attract a wider audience of developers for potential NEO based apps. One more upcoming feature of the NEO platform is the ‘Nest Fund’, similar to Ethereum’s ‘The DAO’, which will allow NEO users to create their own decentralized autonomous organizations. One more similarity of Ethereum and Antshares/ NEO is their ability to combine gas or fees, smart contracts and possibly even DApps.
Despite the Antshares has already obtained millions of dollars in funding, and has the capability to continually advance its technologies, it is interesting to see if this will really make it China’s Ethereum.
The project has created quite a massive network of partners, which include:
- Innospace, which announced collaboration between his company and the NEO project, and a ¥200 million CNY ($29.3 million USD) incubation fund towards the project;
- Agrello announced a partnership with NEO to develop smart contracts for automation, self-execution, accuracy and transparency;
- Coindash has partnered with NEO to provide Nest Fund’s investors with advisory and prediction tools;
- Binance, the new digital exchange, which first traded digital currencies are going to be Bitcoin, Ethereum and NEO.
At the moment, most prominent partner of NEO is software giant Microsoft, representatives of which describe the project’s founder Onechain as one of the top 50 startup companies in China.
Meanwhile:
- Hyperledger Fabric, the open source distributed ledger project from Hyperledger, recently released Fabric 1.0 believing its code to be ready for implementation;
- Belarus, small country ruled by A. Lukashenko, takes lead in world’s blockchain development;
- Kazakhstan aims to become regional centre for blockchain startups by providing favorable jurisdiction for cryptocurrency projects.
- We are pleased to announce a new partnership with Po.et, under which we expect to leverage the benefits of the blockchain technology to ensure the security of our digital content.