NEO Co-Founder: 'dBFT Will Become Best Consensus Mechanism for Blockchains'

[Magician]

Erik Zhang, the co-founder of NEO, one of the leading blockchain-based platforms for developing decentralized applications (dApps) and issuing smart contracts, recently revealed that he “doesn’t care about NEO’s price and market capitalization at all.”

Zhang, a self-taught computer programmer and graduate of Shanghai University, explained that his main role at NEO is to work on the blockchain-enabled platform’s ongoing development. His comments came during an interview with CCN (published on January 14th) in which he clarified that Da Hongfei, NEO’s other co-founder, focuses on “promoting” the platform.

Not Concerned About Prices

As one of the leading core developers for NEO, Zhang said he is mainly interested in improving the platform’s functionality. In December 2018, he reminded his followers (via Twitter):

NEO’s vision is to serve the smart economy and support large-scale commercial applications, which has never changed. The smart economy is based on the digital economy, which is an economic system that digitizes assets and transfers, pays, and trades them on the Internet.

During his CCN interview, Zhang stated that he wasn’t interested in prices because his goal is to develop “a blockchain project instead of playing a capital game.” When questioned about his views regarding Ethereum (ETH), Zhang acknowledged that it is a “great project” but he wants people to know that NEO is very different from Ethereum.

NEO uses the delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerant (dBFT) consensus protocol, which is similar to the basic proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. However, dBFT’s developers have made modifications to the first version of PoS (introduced in 2012) in an effort improve it.

Trying To Create A Better Version Of Proof-of-Stake

Meanwhile, Ethereum is scheduled for its Constantinople upgrade which is expected to be activated in the next few days. Although Ethereum will also transition to a PoS-based consensus algorithm when Ethereum 2.0 goes live, the platform’s developers don’t intend to make this change anytime soon.

In addition to using a fundamentally different consensus algorithm than Ethereum, NEO’s #DevelopmentTeam  has placed more emphasis on regulatory compliance. Although both Ethereum and NEO allow users to issue digital tokens or coins, the latter requires investors to verify their identities. After completing ID checks, NEO’s software system assigns users a unique digital identity.

As crypto enthusiasts know, China’s government had launched a nationwide crackdown on crypto-related businesses towards the end of 2017. The nation’s regulatory authorities had heightened their scrutiny of projects or firms dealing in digital currencies due to the large number of scams carried out under the guise of initial coin offerings (ICOs).

NEO Is A Global Project, Not Restricted To China

NEO’s China-based #DevelopmentTeam  has been working to ensure that their platform complies with the appropriate regulatory requirements. However, Zhang pointed out: “Although it was initiated by two Chinese people, I believe that the founder’s nationality is not the nationality of the project.”

Going on to elaborate on the main differences between Ethereum and NEO, Zhang noted:

NEO and Ethereum both have their own tokens. They can all run turing-complete smart contracts. But they also have a big difference. First, their consensus mechanisms are different. Ethereum uses a PoW algorithm, while NEO uses the dBFT algorithm.

He continued:

Second, their smart contract development languages are very different. Ethereum uses a domain-specific language called Solidity, while NEO uses general-purpose languages with a large number of developers, such as C#, Python, Java, Golang, JavaScript, etc.

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