NEO 3.0 will be the biggest upgrade to the Chinese smart contract blockchain yet. Here’s what to expect.
It all started with a simple question asked in the aes4 Telegram channel: “Anyone know when NEO 3.0 is coming out?”
To really answer that, I think it’s important for people to know just how long that question has been out there. Briefly, some backstory and history…
In a Distant Bull Market, Far, Far Away
NEO was actually created in 2014 by co-founders Da Hongfei and Eric Zhan under the name Antshares. In 2017 Antshares was rebranded to NEO and the journey began.
NEO quickly became known as the Chinese Ethereum because of its similarities with the use of smart contracts. It’s a reference the NEO team doesn’t like as they feel Ethereum is Ethereum and NEO is a step above. Regardless, people still refer to NEO as the Chinese Ethereum and the team doesn’t bother wasting time anymore trying to alter how people perceive them.
The main focus at NEO is on creating the vision of the NEO Smart Economy Ecosystem. And more importantly Next-Gen Internet. But that’s a story for another time; today we’re focused on NEO 3.0. Note that it’s 3.0, meaning there was a 2.0. NEO 2.0 is what many people in crypto currently know and will remember as a failed lacklustre blockchain that wasn’t able to achieve what its creators had in mind. There are numerous articles out there for you to peruse and learn more about that chapter, but as far as NEO are concerned, that was the past and although they acknowledge it, they prefer to look forward to 3.0. So that’s what we will do too.
A New NEO Emerges
Going back one last time to 2018, Da Hongfei and the team decided that NEO, although still making great progress, had fallen short of what they wanted the project to be. They recognised that the current blockchain would not be able to perform to the standards and ideas that lay ahead. It was then decided that NEO would develop a fresh blockchain starting with a new genesis block to create NEO 3.0.
For me personally, this announcement solidified my position in NEO. At the time, many other projects had fallen short of their promises but still tried to play things off by drawing focus to smaller victories. NEO didn’t try to blow smoke up people at all. They stated exactly what the public was saying and that is that NEO was not achieving what was being promised. So they simply decided to start over again and get it right.
Enter the bear market crash, granting the NEO team’s undivided attention to starting over. The results are the NEO 3.0 blockchain. The amount of “offtime” work NEO has put in isn’t hard to see with a multitude of partnerships and collaborations being released, one of which being the newly formed Poly Network.
Interoperability on Steroids
In brief, Poly Network is a cross-chain interoperability protocol that supports Ethereum, NEO, Ontology, Cosmos-SDK and will eventually include the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing interoperability and atomic cross-chain transactions. This is important because it sets up the next move.
On September 23, 2020 NEO will have another key piece of the NEO economy being launched in the form of Flamingo. In a nutshell, Flamingo is NEO’s entrance into the defi realm but with a twist. Because of the newly created Poly Network already announced that allows cross-chain interactions, Flamingo will allow users to not only use NEO assets in the pools but also various Ethereum-based options among others. This opens the door for a much broader user base and brings extra exposure to what is shaping up to be a very exciting new chapter in NEO’s history books. And best of all, we haven’t even gotten to 3.0 yet.
3.0 was set to be released earlier this year originally, but they aren’t going to release anything this time until it meets the team’s rigorous standards. As a result, the release has been pushed back to Q4, 2020. It’s been hinted that the launch could even fall into Q1 2021, but at the time of writing 3.0 has been listed as 90% complete so we will see.
The important thing is that NEO are focused on being at the top. I expect there to still be issues with 3.0, because let’s face it, all of this tech is so new and cutting edge that being absolutely perfect out of the gate is rarely ever achievable. But I’m encouraged with how NEO has handled the shortfalls of 2.0 and have no doubt, should there be any major deficiencies in 3.0, they will not be accepted and a fix or even a 4.0 wouldn’t be out of the picture.
If you’re looking for a quick overview of what has been happening with NEO, head over to NEO.org and check out the August monthly update. More and more people can’t help but take note of NEO’s new surge as they are steadily making moves up the charts of CoinMarketCap and are currently sitting in 17th. Further moves upward are expected as more news is released and we inch closer to the full release of NEO 3.0.