NEO vs Ethereum cryptocurrency

Ethereum proved itself as a big deal in the crypto environment and the second significant investment during the last ten years after Bitcoin. It’s not surprising that the competition emerges to outperform the blockchain that introduced a pretty promising and bold concept of financial services. This is why actually nowadays we’re having the NEO vs Ethereum rivalry. 

NEO is frequently called a Chinese counterpart of Ethereum. But is it really the same? Experts say smart contracts differ significantly. To be specific, NEO’s ones outshine the ones of Ethereum in terms of programming languages used by developers when creating them. Does the whole thing seem confusing right now? Don’t worry. Keep on reading, and we’ll make all things clear about the two most powerful blockchains in the crypto realm nowadays.

What is NEO

NEO vs Ethereum looks pretty similar in the concepts. Back in 2014, in China, Da Hongfei and Erik Zhan started a company and called it AntShares. Three years later, it got a new name – NEO. It represents a blockchain-based platform exploiting its digital money and specializes in the creation of digital assets and smart contracts. 

The business strives to automate completely all digital assets-related processes through the implementation of smart contracts. In order to achieve this, they envision a shared, open, and public network-based smart economy system.

As for the latter, it is positioned as the combo of digital assets, digital authentication, and smart contracts. Users can painlessly digitize assets on the blockchain. They can operate with them in a clear and transparent way without third parties and relevant fees. NEO suggests using physical assets as an analog and promises their protection. They are simply registered on the website and get an approved digital validation. 

As for digital authentication, which speaks for itself, this is a kind of information that identifies a participating individual or an organization. It must be easily verified. This point actually distinguishes NEO in this Ethereum vs NEO debate. The whole venture tends to be accounting and compliant.

Lastly, smart contracts are a free bridge that allows any interaction between the sides, excluding the participation of legal systems and financial institutions. Users build smart contracts with the codes programmed within the network. 

The benefits of such coding are compelling: complete trackability, integrity, and irrevocability of processes. The good news is that programming is allowed here in every popular language. Thus, a giant crowd of developers can easily do their job on the platform. 

What is Ethereum

Ethereum came out due to a strong desire to help developers build and establish smart contracts and shared apps in favorable conditions. The latter suggests all the issues arising from the intermediary of third sides. Users might stumble upon fraud, downtime, or any other risk-related interference. 

The team calls the venture ‘the world’s programmable blockchain’. It claims to function as a marketplace for apps, commercial services, and games and deliver safe haven for them (no fraud, scam, or censorship). This can be paid for in its own cryptocurrency.

ETH vs NEO do not differ when it’s about using their own cryptocurrency within a network. Nowadays, ETH is exploited as a payment method by many product merchants and service distributors. These are Overstock, CheapAir, Shopify, etc. 

The project’s team boldly declares that the platform is able to program, decentralize, guard, and sell literally everything. For example, last year Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) partnered up with ConsenSys to establish a network of data hubs constructed on the Ethereum infrastructure. 

NEO vs Ethereum price

Let’s have a look at ETH vs NEO through the lenses of the price. The present-day prices of the platforms are around $13 and $250 respectively. ETH is mainstream, mainly due to well-known dApps like MakerDAO. This factor obviously affects its price.  

Let’s dive deeper into the price trends. Ethereum comes right after Bitcoin with a market cap of $68.17 billion. But it’s a leader when it comes down to the smart contracts development, which secured him support from backers and developers. 

A few years ago, the dynamics were the following in NEO vs Ethereum price: in early 2017, the worth of ETH increased from $9 to $1,389 over the year. It makes up a whopping 17,000% annual return. Such a success! For instance, let’s find out the NEO price movements.

NEO is backed up with good technology and got the Chinese government’s support at a time. Thus, the value climbed from $0.16 in early 2017 to around $162 in January 2018. The surge is hair-raising. 

The market cap of NEO vs ETH is $4.96 billion. Obviously, Ethereum is a champion here, with an enormous following of supporters, developers, and devotees. The platform seems to be the most integrated. However, NEO excels in various aspects compared to its opponent. One of them is scalability. 

NEO vs Ethereum fees

The commissions are super important when regarding transactions on the blockchains. No one wants to break their bank account. Most transactions on NEO are free, except for a few types. Besides, users can add a transaction commission to accelerate the process at a time of heavy system congestion. Yet, basic ones do not impose mandatory fees.

For the record, on Ethereum users pay commissions with ETH, while NEO asks fees in GAS. In the NEO fees vs Ethereum fees context, all the processes on Ethereum are not free. What’s more, its average procedure commission hit a high price point during the period of intense usage.

NEO has definitely a competitive advantage when it’s about transaction fees as any user won’t want to pay extra each time they do something on the platform. It especially makes sense when transaction commissions are bigger than the procedure itself.

NEO vs. Ethereum History

The NEO blockchain’s history dates to 2014. AntShares (later renamed as NEO) came out as a result of Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang negotiations with Chinese organizations on the destiny of apps within a blockchain. Both had a solid background in technology development and blockchain at a time. So, they also launched a company OnChain, specialized in delivering blockchain expertise to corporations. 

In fact, Ethereum vs NEO had pretty similar intentions behind the business. NEO’s ‘first name’ was AntShares. Then the rebranding happened. The founders planned to go public with a blockchain and introduce plenty of payment methods through smart contracts and decentralized apps to the private business sector. 

Since the roll-out, NEO has grown into a top ten crypto and the second biggest player in the smart contracts ecosystem. NEO’s offers like smart contracts and dApps look similar to Ethereum’s ones. But they do differ in terms of scalability, programming, and conception. 

When it’s about Ethereum, everyone knows who’s behind it – a young brainiac Vitalik Buterin. Bitcoin became his interest at a very early age, and he also was a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. He and his squad started Ethereum six years ago. Since then, crypto and blockchain experts have listened to him as a leading voice in a domain. 

He and his team forwarded Bitcoin’s technology leveling up in functionality. Up till now, they are constantly innovating to deal with the technological issues Ethereum encounters from time to time. Some early co-founders (i.e., Charles Hoskinson) have left the project but current ones strive to make the platform a star.

Top-5 NEO facts

First and foremost, it’s pivotal to address the smart contracts subject in this NEO vs ETH discussion. We’ve already outlined crucial points about them in the intro. The most significant difference about it is that developers are more empowered and motivated to set smart contracts here. Why? They are able to use familiar coding languages. 

NEO vs Ethereum Classic is not that different. The Classic type is simply the result of the original Ethereum forking to get back the lost holdings. Yet, at a time, this attack proved the dangers of forming smart contracts with unknown tools. 

Now, what about dApps? Ethereum carries a well-known dApp MakerDAO, the most compelling DeFi dApp. It has already resulted in more than $10 million.  NEO dApps have way fewer users and transaction performance. To address this, the team claims it is now more focused on being user-friendly in the first place. 

The speed of transactions – namely the number of transactions per second – is another important aspect. The blockchain market strives to have a $60 billion cryptocurrency volume by 2024, making transaction speed a key factor of any platform’s success. NEO is a winner here with 33 transactions per second, while Ethereum carries 15 ones per second. Yet, both platforms should do a better job when it’s about speed as Visa, for example, can handle about 1700 transactions per second. 

Scalability makes NEO blockchain vs Ethereum different. The Chinese counterpart is made with scalability in mind. Its consensus mechanism, dubbed Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance, does not suggest forking within the network. The feature is dubbed finality. 

It works by the following principle: all nodes have to agree to a novel block, and when it’s formed, any new one cannot lay on the previous one. Simply put, nodes inside the network retain the history of the latest blocks and not the entire chain. The size of the block has the potential to extend to meet the needs of the system. Some trials show that NEO can deal with up to 1 thousand transactions per second with no segmentation at all.

Top-5 ETHEREUM facts

As we addressed scalability for NEO, let’s do the same thing for Ethereum. Actually, this is not the subject of boasting. At present, it’s just 15 transactions per second. With such a huge popularity, the inconvenience represents a significant bottleneck. When the platform is experiencing huge interest, miners charge considerable fees to insert someone else’s contract to the following block. Otherwise, it might take hours or even days for the contract to be completed.  

The problem hides in the mechanism – the proof of work. It just permits a restricted block size. A new coming node has to download the whole history of the blockchain for the purpose to identify if the procedures are legit. Thus, a block size needs to be restricted so the transaction logs do not widen too fast. 

Luckily, the work is in progress on the blockchain that strives to migrate to the proof of stake. It will change the ways and power that are vital to produce a novel block. Additionally, to boost throughput, sharding and processing specific smart contracts off-chain need to be tackled. This will define its future success for sure. 

Now, what about the Ethereum vs NEO cryptocurrency? On Ethereum, the elaboration of novel cryptos is regulated by the ERC-20 protocol, making most new tokens ERC-20 ones. They are secured with huge support, can be easily integrated into different wallets, platforms for exchange, etc. 

NEO has its standard as well – NEP-5. It works by the same principles, but obviously it is backed up with the NEO blockchain. Now on, ventures that aim at releasing dApps on NEO are able to generate their own NEO-native cryptos. Ethereum still leads the pack in the new token creation though. Nevertheless, it’s good to watch NEO moving toward standardization. 

Philosophy is another aspect that distinguishes the two. Ethereum has been dubbed “the world’s decentralized computer”. A giant number of dApps and contracts are currently held on Ethereum. The whole thing looks like a powerful processor of apps, regardless of the source. Any kind of solution that the blockchain advances confirms this mission. Brainiacs behind business aim to evolve scalability and decentralization. They strive to provide developers with more technical power, herewith, making sure all the transactions are safe on a shared, accessible blockchain. 

NEO declares that it creates the ecosystem for a smart economy. It is interconnected where diverse apps and entities coexist. NEO considers dApps as partners and participants of the community. But the feature of scale differs. Ethereum is way larger. Thus, it is more complicated to regulate it and ensure a seamless performance.

Also, NEO has the purpose to digitize physical items and assets, turning the entire economy into a live, on-chain one. It will become useful when the market demonstrates an elevated demand for the interconnection between dApps, private chain representatives through OnChain, and control regulations from the Chinese state. If it gains ground as a compliant, organization-oriented dApps network, NEO holds promise to stand out from the crowd and leave Ethereum’s shadow. 

We’ve already addressed the matter of programming languages. The only language that works on this blockchain is called Solidity. It complicates the forming of smart contracts. The easier the development is, the more opportunities the system has as smart contracts keep a lot of money in the form of cryptos. Besides, establishing composite apps that are backed with unknown languages turned out to be risky as seen with this DAO hack. The latter cost a $50 million loss to the business.

Finally, a few words about dominance. Ethereum definitely took the lead. Its implementation, endorsement, and market share are undeniable here. But NEO is focused on the Asian market, which is a big deal. When the Chinese government implied punishment over the whole domain, the NEO’s founder still had negotiations with the state officials on elaborating and applying regulations. 

NEO has great backers, but Ethereum boasts strong evangelists that spread the word about the platform worldwide. The list of such evangelists aka companies is huge and makes up an impressive Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. 

Conclusion

Now, what’s the NEO vs Ethereum future? The Chinese alternative provides less value at present.  But it, herewith, functions better technically as a platform. For example, it’s easier to build smart contracts. It enables more transactions per second, and they are free of charge in most cases. 

With NEO, users can make passive crypto income through NEO staking. Ethereum only allows to store holdings and expect when the value is up. However, it has all the chances to change when it migrated to the proof of stake. 

However, Ethereum has a competitive advantage – the quantity of people using it for dApps development. Its future looks brighter at present. Herewith, NEO opened an office in the States’ biggest tech hubs and hired an ex-Microsoft exec John deVadoss who can move the needle. 

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that the content of this article is not financial or investing advice. The information provided is the author’s opinion only and should not be considered as direct recommendations for trading or investment. Any article reader or website visitor should consider multiple viewpoints and become familiar with all local regulations before cryptocurrency investment. We do not make any warranties about reliability and accuracy of this information.