Neo is a distributed network that combines digital assets, digital identities and smart contracts.

To become a decentralized open network serving an intelligent economy.

1. The single currency governance mode of the mainstream public chain in the current market has high cost and can not be guaranteed. 2. As blockchain-based applications become increasingly complex, users' demands for good functions and technologies will also continue to increase.

NEO enables users to manage smart assets quickly, efficiently, safely, and legally by combining a range of technologies, including point-to-point networking, Byzantine fault tolerance, digital certificates, smart contracts, superconducting transactions, and cross-chain interoperation protocols.

NEO's smart contract system consists of three parts: 1. NeoVM - General blockchain virtual machine: NeoVM is a lightweight general-purpose VIRTUAL machine whose architecture is very similar to that of JVM and.NET Runtime. It is similar to a virtual CPU. It is responsible for reading and executing the instructions in the contract in order and carrying out process control, arithmetic operation and logic operation according to the function of the instructions. With good startup speed and versatility, it is ideal for small applications such as smart contracts, can also be ported to non-blockchain scenarios, or integrated with ides to provide a good development experience. The function of NeoVM can be extended to introduce JIT (just-in-time compiler) mechanism to improve the execution efficiency of instructions. 2. InteropService - Interoperable service: used to load blockchain ledger, digital assets, digital identity, persistent storage and other underlying services. They are like virtual appliances for virtual machines, enabling smart contracts to access these services at run time for advanced functionality. With this low-coupling design, NeoVM can be ported to any blockchain or even non-blockchain system, which greatly expands the application area of smart contracts. 3. DevPack - Compilers and IDE plug-ins: DevPack includes high-level language compilers and IDE plug-ins. Because NeoVM's architecture is highly similar to that of the JVM,.NET Runtime, etc., these compilers in DevPack can compile intermediate languages such as Java Byte Code and.NET MSIL into NeoVM instruction sets. Java/Kotlin, C# developers don't need to learn a new language to start writing smart contracts in familiar IDE environments like VS and Eclipse. This greatly reduces the cost of learning smart contracts and enables the establishment of a rich NeoContract smart contract ecology. NeoContract can build a call tree of smart contracts through static analysis before running smart contracts. With deterministic call trees, NEO nodes can dynamically shard smart contracts, achieving theoretically infinite scale and overcoming the "downtown congestion effect" caused by static shards in other blockchain systems.

NEO can be used as payment for network fees on the NEO blockchain, smart contract deployment fees, dAPP interactions, and voting for the NEO Board to participate in governance.

The SHA256 Algorithm is used. SHA256 is one of the Secure Hash algorithms (SHA). Its abstract length is 256bits, that is, 32 bytes. The SHA series of algorithms are a series of cryptographic hash functions designed by the NATIONAL Security Agency (NSA) and published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), including variations of SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512.

Neo is unique in that it is the first blockchain platform to adopt a two-token mechanism. It separates governance from network access and provides the means by which fuel tokens can be obtained. 2. Digital assets: NEO supports a variety of digital assets at the bottom level. Users can register their assets on NEO, trade and circulate them freely, and solve the mapping relationship with physical assets through digital identity. Assets registered by users through compliant digital identities are protected by law. There are two forms of digital assets in NEO: global assets and contractual assets. Global assets can be recorded in system space and can be recognized by all smart contracts and clients; Contract assets are recorded in the private storage area of the smart contract and can be identified only by clients that are compatible with the smart contract. Contract assets can be made compatible with most clients by referring to some agreed standard. 3. Digital identity: In NEO, an X.509-compliant digital identity standard can be implemented. This digital identity standard, in addition to compatible x.509 hierarchical certificate issuing mode, will support the Web Of Trust type point-to-point certificate issuing mode, and through face, fingerprint, voice, SMS and other multi-factor authentication to achieve real identity comparison between the issuing phase and the use phase. At the same time, blockchain will replace THE OCSP protocol to manage and record the CRL of X.509's revocation list.

NEO employs DBFT, a Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanism that enables large-scale node participation through proxy voting. DBFT provides f=⌊(n-1)/3⌋ fault-tolerant capability for a consensus system consisting of N consensus nodes. This fault-tolerant capability includes both security and availability, and can resist both general and Byzantine faults, and is applicable to any network environment. DBFT has good finality, a confirmation is final, blocks cannot be forked and transactions cannot be reversed or rolled back. Under NEO's DBFT consensus mechanism, a block is generated every 15 to 20 seconds, and the measured transaction throughput can reach about 1000tps, which has excellent performance in the public chain. With proper optimization, it is capable of reaching 10,000 TPS and can support large-scale commercial applications. DBFT combines digital identity technology to enable bookkeepers to be real-name individuals or institutions. This makes it possible to freeze, revoke, inherit, retrieve, judicial decision transfer and other unconventional operations. This facilitates the registration and issuance of compliant financial assets in the NEO network. NEO Network plans to support such operations when necessary. 2. NEO adopts the lightweight NeoVM (NEO Virtual Machine) as the execution environment of its smart contract. It has a very fast startup speed and occupies very small resources, which is suitable for short programs like smart contract. Using JIT (Just-in-time compiler) technology to statically compile and cache hot smart contracts can significantly improve the execution efficiency of virtual machines. NEO uses the Distributed storage protocol. NeoFS is a Distributed storage protocol that utilizes the Distributed Hash Table technology. NeoFS indexes data by file content (Hash) rather than file path (URI). Large files are divided into fixed-size data blocks distributed among many nodes. NeoFS will be one of the InteropService interoperable services under NeoContract, enabling smart contracts to store large files on the blockchain and assign access to these files. NeoFS can be combined with digital identities so that digital certificates that record digital identities can be issued, transmitted, and revoked point-to-point without the need for centralized servers to manage them. Old block data can be stored in NeoFS, allowing most full nodes to release old data for greater scalability and historical data integrity.

The total quantity is constant at 100 million

Neo is a pioneer in the blockchain industry. It is not only the first open smart contract platform born in China, but also the first open network to use the two-token model, and the first blockchain to use the BFT-like consensus mechanism.

Users are rewarded for voting: NEO generates five GAS for each block, and 80% of the new GAS is proportionally distributed to voters. The more votes, the more GAS they get.

NEO attracted many supporters in the early stage, but as more and more public chain competitors began to emerge, a new generation of public chains began to emerge. NEO with a first-mover advantage failed to show sufficient competitiveness in terms of technical performance and DApp ecology, and now there are few new voices.

The risks of NEOs are mainly policy factors and the possibility of serious technical accidents.