In a meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters in Beijing, China, AntShares, China’s first open-source blockchain platform, announced their future development plans.
The Meeting
In late July the AntShares team hosted a conference at Microsoft’s headquarters in Beijing, China. 200 people from different organizations, including investors, industry specialists and representatives of the Chinese financial and mainstream media attended the event.
Founded by Onechain, the Chinese blockchain platform announced major plans to rebrand the platform from Antshares to NEO, by changing key elements like logo and UI of the platform. Da Hongfei, the founder of NEO, also announced that NEO will be partnering up with certificate authorities of China, in order bring real-world assets to the next level, by integrating them with smart-contracts.
Another major point of the event was the announcement of NEO’s new partnerships with prominent blockchain platforms Bancor, Agrello, Coindash, Binance, and Nest Fund.
The New Tech
NEO’s core developer, Erik Zhang, revealed smart contracts 2.0, the next step of smart contracts. Ethereum based smart contracts use Ethereum’s own programming language, Solidity. NEO’s smart contracts 2.0 will use ordinary programming languages like Javascript, Go, Python etc. With this move, the NEO team is hoping to attract a wider audience of developers for potential NEO based applications. Another upcoming feature of the NEO platform will be the ‘Nest Fund’, similar to Ethereum’s ‘The DAO’, it will allow NEO users to create their own decentralized autonomous organizations.
With this move, the NEO team is hoping to attract a wider audience of developers for potential NEO based applications. Another upcoming feature of the NEO platform will be the ‘Nest Fund’, similar to Ethereum’s ‘The DAO’, it will allow NEO users to create their own decentralized autonomous organizations.
Major support for NEO
Without a doubt, NEO’s most prominent partner is the software giant, Microsoft. Skrikanth Raju, Developer Experience & Evangelism and Chief Evangelist, Greater China Region, Microsoft, expressed his support for the NEO platform and even described OnChain as “One of the top 50 startup companies in China.”
What are your thoughts on Antshares’ rebranding? Do you think that NEO will be China’s own Ethereum? Let us know in the comments below!
Images courtesy of Pexels, NEO