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First NEO Meetup for Europe takes place in Dublin
NEO, dubbed the ‘Chinese Ethereum’, is coming to Dublin for its first meetup in Europe on Monday 8th January. However, such is the interest that the Meetup is already full (160 going) with people queueing on the wait list.
Guest Speaker Malcolm Lerider, senior R&D manager with NEO, attributes the interest to, funnily enough, regulation. ‘I think the interest in NEO comes from what our platform is trying to do,’ he says. ‘A big difference is though that while other blockchain platform aim to avoid regulation, we are building a platform to work alongside regulation, to achieve our vision of Smart Economy.
‘On technical side, we also have a number of advantages. Our platform is already much faster than our competitors; thousands of transactions per second. Our Smart Contracts can be written in most familiar languages: C#, Python, Java, Javascript, Kotlin, with more to come.
‘Blocks never branch, so all transactions are 100% final directly after the first confirmation. We are building this platform to fulfil business demands, instead of forcing businesses to adapt,’ claims Lerider.
This is the first Meetup tour around Europe. Lerider sees Dublin as a tech and blockchain hub which is the reason for the first stop. Afterwards, the tour will continue to visit London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Zurich. January will end with a large two-day DevCon in San Fransisco.
Lerider is the guest speaker at the Meetup. He is the Senior R&D Manager at NEO, having spent 6 years in the IT industry across Europe and in China. He is based in Shanghai and works as a link between the team in China and the global development community.
Neo is a “non-profit community-based blockchain project that utilizes blockchain technology and digital identity to digitize assets, to automate the management of digital assets using smart contracts, and to realize a “smart economy” with a distributed network.”
Neo’s main aim is to be the distributed network for “smart economy”.
Neo was developed by Shanghai-based blockchain R&D company “OnChain”. Onchain was founded by CEO Da Hongfei and CTO Erik Zhang. Research on Neo started around 2014. In 2016, Onchain was listed in the Top 50 Fintech Company in China by KPMG.
The Neo Project was funded by two crowdsales. The first crowdsale took place on October 2015 lasting for 10 days during which 17.5 million NEO tokens were sold for $550,000. In the second crowdsale, the remaining 22.5 million NEO tokens were sold for $4.5 million.