The Nascent NEO Ecosystem

DApps (decentralized applications) were little more than a dream in the early days of cryptocurrencies but became a reality with the Ethereum explosion of 2017. That ‘platform coin’ market is now dominated by Ethereum with more than 90 percent of all ICOs and DApps built on Ethereum. But markets tend not to stay like that. It’s Ethereum’s market to lose.

There are alternative platforms for applications – NEO, EOS, Waves (WAVES), Counterparty (XCP), Cardano (ADA), Lisk (LSK), among others. The underlying narrative has been that one or more of those platforms would at some point compete for that platform ecosystem market share. Thus far, there have been plenty of apps built on alternative platforms, but no platform has developed an entire ecosystem the way Ethereum has. It is highly likely, however, that the situation will change in 2018.

NEO has long been known as the ‘Chinese Ethereum.’ It was developed in 2014 as AntShares and rebranded as NEO in 2017. Its central theme is The Smart Economy — a decentralized economy built around smart contracts, decentralized apps, and digitized assets and identities. NEO’s ecosystem was largely quiet in 2017. It consisted mostly of NEO itself and its transaction token GAS. But towards the end of the year the beginnings of that Smart Economy appeared. And in the first few months of 2018, we’ve seen a number of significant ICOs with dozens more coming out in the upcoming months. Furthermore, NEO-related projects like Loopring (LRC) and Elastos (ELA) have been creating strategic partnerships, and others like AdEx (ADX) have been adding support for NEO.

These projects appear to be in targeted industries or functions, with a focus on business applications — payment solutions, workforce platforms, marketing, privacy and identity, important infrastructure like a stable coin, scalability projects, and NEO-focused exchanges. All this means that the NEO Council is coordinating a complete DApp ecosystem that can support just about any application one would want to build in the NEO ecosystem.

Even some Bitcoin maximalists have begun to accept that there will not be one coin to rule them all. There will actually be many. Similarly, there will not be one DApp ecosystem to rule them all. It is highly unlikely that Ethereum will maintain that overwhelming dominance in the platform market. That’s not a bad thing, even for Ethereum. The Ethereum ecosystem is not going away. It’s already well established and it’ll just evolve. Even if NEO or other platforms reduce Ethereum dominance in this category, it will remain a huge ecosystem. We could easily predict the overall crypto ecosystem could expand by several multiples in the next few years. That leaves a lot of room for several other platforms to develop ecosystems the size of the Ethereum sphere today.

NEO is beginning to implement their Smart Economy vision. Their controlled coordination of DApps and NEO-based projects should propel their project forward this year. There is an awful lot of upside potential here. It may hit a tipping point and depending on when the overall crypto market heats up, we may see NEO explode upward.