Neo Cryptocurrency was established back in 2014 by eminent Chinese programmers, Da HongFei and Erik Zhang, but under a different name. Back then it was formerly called AntShares and people used to refer to it as an “Ethereum of China” due to its similarity.

The current name, Neo was given in 2017. This term originates from the Greek word “νέο“ which means something “new, modern and young”. This new name matched the idea that the founders wanted to represent in a project. 

Neo is a blockchain-based platform that supports its own cryptocurrency and gives the opportunity for the development of digital assets and smart contracts. In that sense, it looks like the Ethereum network.

The full definition is stated on their website and goes like this: “Neo is a non-profit community-based blockchain project that utilizes blockchain technology and digital identity to digitize assets, to automate the management of digital assets using smart contracts, and to create a “smart economy” with a distributed network.” They define the smart economy as:

Digital Assets + Digital Identity + Smart Contract = Smart Economy.

A total of 100 million Neo were created in the Genesis Block. 50 million Neo were sold to early investors through an initial coin offering in 2016 that raised $4.65 million, with the remaining 50 million Neo locked into a smart contract. Each year, a maximum of 15 million Neo tokens are unlocked and used by the Neo development team to fund long term development goals.

As you can see from our infographic, Neo is ranked at 34th place on the crypto market with the highest price of $140.37 and the lowest price of $12.43. And the trend for this crypto is looking very good. Since the beginning of this year, its price has increased from $14.39 to $42.19 which is a remarkable result in just a seven months period.