TIBA AMA Recap #3 — NEO
This post was originally published on blog.thu-tiba.org
On the 4th of September, TIBA held the third event of its #AMA series. We are going to host regular ask me anything sessions with fascinating blockchain projects from China and around the world. We’d like to give the international community direct access to these projects and a chance to ask whatever you’re interested in. Scan the QR code below to get invited to the TIBA #AMA WeChat group and find out more!
Our guest this time was John Wang, Head of Eco Growth at NEO Global Development (NGD). Founded in 2014, NEO is a well-established public chain project, often called the Ethereum of China, despite the significant differences between the two projects. The main takeaway of this AMA is that NEO has a strong focus on developers — people who build the dApps and infrastructure necessary for mainstream adoption.
Reacting to the comparison with Ethereum, John suggests we should not focus on the similarities in smart contract capabilities — we should focus on the whole ecosystem. One way NEO has been putting more effort into its ecosystem is their program called EcoBoost. As John shares: ”Our Seattle office is now focusing on boosting developing experience.”
Building infrastructure and making dApp development streamlined is key to blockchain adoption — as the infrastructure is not yet ready to support even 100k daily active users. Through this program, NEO provides full life-cycle support to projects of all sizes. This means supporting multiple languages for development, and also providing SDKs, APIs, multiple testnets, and other tools. John believes that offering a good platform for developers will bring dApps that are truly needed by the markets, which will in turn drive growth.
In its current dApp ecosystem, one of NEO’s main use case is gaming. There are multiple decentralized games running on NEO, with up to 4000 daily active users each, providing around 10k transactions a day.
So why do we need blockchain in gaming? The simplest use case is payments: With cryptocurrency payments integrated directly into the game, purchasing game items becomes seamless. The second example is Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) — these are game items whose uniqueness and ownership is guaranteed by the blockchain. A crypto kitty is an NFT; you could, however, imagine more complex uses cases, with items that are transferable between different game worlds. Finally, smart contracts can be applied in more complex ways to make the game logic itself decentralized.
To gain a leading edge in crypto gaming, NEO also partnered with gumi Cryptos, who might also provide assistance with NEO’s potential expansion to the Japanese markets.
Talking about long-term vision, NEO’s current focus is what they call NGI — Next Generation Internet infrastructure. This will keep and extend on NEO’s original vision of a Smart Economy based on digital assets, digital identity, and smart contracts. The second of these is the focus of Ontology — a project closely related to NEO.
When asked about regulators, John was cautious. He stressed that NEO is non-profit and that regulatory compliance was one of its main goals. This, in turn, will provide more security to dApp developers, as well.
To learn more about our upcoming TIBA events and join the discussion, scan the QR code below!
This article was written and edited by Péter Garamvölgyi.
