NEO

NEO is a smart contract platform founded in 2014 under the name Antshares and rebranded to NEO in 2017. It was China's first significant open-source blockchain project and is often described as an early platform for what its founders called the smart economy, meaning the combination of digital assets, digital identity, and smart contracts.

How NEO works

The network uses delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance, a consensus mechanism in which token holders vote for consensus nodes that produce and validate blocks. This gives one-block finality, meaning transactions are irreversible once included, and it avoids chain reorganisations entirely. Unlike many platforms, NEO uses a two-token model: NEO itself represents ownership and governance rights in the network and is indivisible, while GAS is generated by holding NEO and is used to pay transaction and contract execution fees.

Total supply is fixed at 100 million NEO with roughly 70.5 million in circulation; no maximum supply beyond that is published separately in the available data. NEO supports smart contracts written in several mainstream programming languages, which was one of its early differentiators against platforms requiring bespoke languages.

Role in the ecosystem

NEO was among the most prominent smart contract platforms of the 2017 period and has continued development through subsequent versions of the protocol, including a substantial upgrade to NEO N3. Its focus on digital identity and regulatory-compatible design distinguished it from platforms that prioritised permissionless anonymity, and it retains a recognisable position among earlier-generation Layer 1 networks. The two-token model also means NEO holders accrue GAS passively, so holding the asset produces a yield in the network's fee token without any staking action.