The Chinese crackdown on Bitcoin miners is perhaps only helping NEO and the techies are exploring off shore locations where they are more than welcome. Canada, for instance, is an attractive location for bitcoin miners since it fulfils nearly all requirements for mining bitcoins/altcoins.
Apart from abundant and cheap electricity, the weather is naturally cold and that is a huge help when it comes to cooling down the overheated computer systems employed in mining the coins. Quebec province in particular is attracting altcoin/bitcoin miners with a surplus electricity production of 100 terawatt hours hydropower over the next 10 years. One terawatt is equivalent of 114 Mw of sustained power per year. Already 35 organizations engaged in mining cryptocurrency have sought information from the local power business HydroQuebec.
United States could be a winner at the expense of China
China’s potential loss from crack down on Cryptocurrencies could also turn out to be a huge gain for the United States. Bitcoin mining is already experiencing a boom in Washington which enjoys cool temperatures and abundance of hydropower. A CNBC report further suggests that a small town in the state of Washington is already home to about a dozen biggest miners from the bitcoin community and requests have been received from 75 more. Bigger cryptocurrency exchanges can also gain from reduced network latency when the bitcoin mines are proximate. With more bitcoin nodes connected to a single block, transactions become faster and orphan blocks are less likely to be received.
NEO’s transition from AntShares
NEO which was originally known as AntShares is a Chinese blockchain platform that appears to be successfully weathering the Chinese clampdown on digital currency. Rebranding has also helped NEO with investor interest surging. However, some of the recent events such as the Korean crackdown did impact NEO briefly though with a bout of upward movement, before succumbing eventually to the overwhelmingly downward movement of all cryptocurrency markets. Experts hold the view that the strong momentum is a positive sign for NEO and the growth between December, 2017 and mid January, 2018 has been pretty impressive.
NEO and Blockchain 2.0
NEO is also among the several new cryptocurrencies that also doubles up as a platform for running smart contracts and dApps or decentralized applications. This additional functionality offered by these blockchains compared to their predecessors has also earned them the title ‘blockchain 2.0’. dApps have the ability to add functionality to the blockchains in a manner similar to the mobile applications adding functionality to the smartphones. As of now, Crypotkitties remain the most popular among dApps. A dApp that was running on Ethereum network even allowed users to buy, sell and even breed digital cats. Ethereum is also NEO’s predecessor and that has earned it a nickname ‘Chinese Ethereum’.
Crowd Sourcing
As most of us do know, crowdsourcing is a very popular mode of fundraising in the cryptocurrency world and popularity of this model has lead to the ICO craze in 2017. Several hundred companies launched new ICOs in 2017 raising in excess of $4 billion CAD. The Ethereum network had hosted most of the ICOs. Recently, NEO also began hosting ICOs on its own for companies in China. DeepBrain was one of the interesting ICO launches on the NEO network that was pretty interesting. The strong price movement of NEO has possibly resulted from the network rising to this stage of development.
Many investors are seeing plenty of potential in this blockhain 2.0 digital currency technology. NEO and Ethereum are not alone in plans for hosting ICOs. Icon, Lumens, Cardano and Stellar all have the blockchain 2.0 platform and have plans to launch ICOs. This wide range gives many start-ups the option of choice between platforms while deciding on launch of their ICO.
NEO fuelled by GAS
dBFT or Delegated Byzantine-Fault tolerance is used by NEO to offer network consensus. Users staking NEO in their wallets are also rewarded with another digital currency known as GAS at about 5% every year. GAS is in fact the actual fuel for NEO’s network. When you are sending NEO to another user or address you are actually using GAS than NEO for paying transaction fees.
Future of NEO
Recently, NEO has also launched a new mobile wallet allowing users to access their NEO on the go. The wallet can be downloaded from iOS and Android app stores.NEO is also planning to hold a developer’s conference between 30 and 31 January 2018 in San Francisco and we can look forward to more updates on NEO’s roadmap at the conference. Microsoft is sponsoring this event.
Da Hong Fei, the CEO at NEO recently addressed a huge audience of digital currency enthusiasts in Korea. His address was optimistic on what lies ahead for blockchain technology, notwithstanding the Chinese crackdown and potentially one in Korea. The Cryptocurrency world is avidly waiting to see the result of the ongoing battle between Chinese blockchain innovation communities and regulatory action from governments.
