The NEO project was originally launched in 2014 as AntShares with development resources provided by founder Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang. They later also founded Onchain to provide blockchain consulting services.NEO rebranded from Antshares to NEO in June 2017. In March 2018, parent company Onchain distributed 1 ontology (ONT) token for every 5 NEO held in a user's wallet which will be used to vote on system upgrades, identity verification, and other governance issues on the NEO platform.