• Erik ZHANG , Founder & Core Developer at NEO


• 30.10.2018 10:19 am

An interview with Erik Zhang, Founder of NEO

Financial IT: How long will it take to implement the NEO Smart Economy project? What do you see as being its major pillars?

Erik Zhang (EZ): There’s no concrete schedule for implementing the NEO Smart Economy, as it’s a daring and grand project. It is a continuous progress that requires unremitting efforts.

The three major pillars that underpin the development of NEO Smart Economy are: digital assets; digital identities, and; smart contracts. Technically, NeoContract, which runs on NeoVM, is the backbone of NEO. Since NeoVM is very user-friendly, NeoContract is thus easy to operate. This is the key to its attraction as a public blockchain.

Financial IT: What are the main challenges that NEO faces today? How do you address them?

EZ: The NEO 3.0 was released recently, which highlights our continuous efforts in addressing challenges like increasing transactions per second (TPS) and improving NeoContract. 

There is no doubt that we must work together with the community to overcome these challenges. The NEO global community is very large, represented by, among others, CoZ, NEO Research, and NEL. There are millions of members continuously making contributions to NEO’s development.

Meanwhile, we will keep holding programming events across the globe to involve more interested people in NEO’s development, with the goal of realizing NEO Smart Economy and NEO 3.0 as fast as possible.

Financial IT: What is the competitive advantage of NEO that enables it to stand out among such players like EOS, Cardano or Lisk?

EZ: NEO’s competitive advantage lies in its active community, superior design features of its economic model, and its user-friendly NeoContract. Because of these advantages, we have never treated our relationship with our peers as a competitive relationship.

The common prosperity of a variety of public chains will sustain the development of blockchain technology and industry, which is exactly what blockchain evangelists expect.

Financial IT: How should cryptocurrency and blockchain technology be regulated, from your point of view?

EZ: Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology are not entirely the same concepts.

Each country/region or jurisdiction may have a different attitude towards the future of cryptocurrencies.

The disruptiveness and scalability of blockchain technology should never be ignored.  

Compliance is where blockchain technology has the greatest potential heading forward. One of the most significant aspects of blockchain from the compliance standpoint is its immutability mechanism: as soon as data is added into the chain, it cannot be modified or deleted. It leads to reduced cost of audit and regulatory compliance with better transparency.

NEO’s digital identities and digital assets are directing blockchain technology into the policy sphere and casting that technology in a different way. NEO is a compliance-ready blockchain and will be guiding the industry to be more compliant.

Financial IT: What is next for NEO?

EZ: Shortly, it is NEO 3.0. To summarize, we have the following tasks on our roadmap:

• Increasing TPS
• Adjusting the economic model and the system pricing model
• Improving the user experience of NeoVM

Erik is NEO co-founder and core developer, author to dBFT consensus mechanism, expert on blockchain technology and computer security and a certified information system auditor (CISA). He was employed by Shanda Games and www.huobi.com where he was engaged in information security and R&D in the digital currency.

NEO

NEO is a non-profit community-driven blockchain project. It utilizes blockchain technology and digital identity to digitize assets and automate the management of digital assets using smart contracts. Using a distributed network, it aims to create a "Smart Economy". NEO was founded in 2014 and was open sourced on GitHub in June 2015. NEO believes that community development is its top priority. NEO has a huge developer community around the world, such as CoZ, NEL and NeoResearch, who continuously contribute to NEO development.