Have you ever heard of a cryptocurrency called Antshares? Well guess what... It's now called NEO.

According to a recent article today published on Bitcoinist the rebranding went into effect today, July 25, 2017 and the blockchain formerly known as Antshares will forever more be known as NEO: Smart Economy.

In addition according to the article:

Da Hongfei, the founder of NEO, also announced that NEO will be partnering up with certificate authorities of China, in order bring real-world assets to the next level, by integrating them with smart-contracts.

Ethereum has a big competitor in NEO and here is why...

NEO’s core developer, Erik Zhang, revealed smart contracts 2.0, the next step of smart contracts. Ethereum based smart contracts use Ethereum’s own programming language, Solidity. NEO’s smart contracts 2.0 will use ordinary programming languages like Javascript, Go, Python etc. With this move, the NEO team is hoping to attract a wider audience of developers for potential NEO based applications. Another upcoming feature of the NEO platform will be the ‘Nest Fund’, similar to Ethereum’s ‘The DAO’, it will allow NEO users to create their own decentralized autonomous organizations.

Beyond the threat of smart contracts 2.0 are the partnerships NEO has made with Microsoft (also a member of Ethereum's partner network) and the fact that Microsoft is very close with this business venture can be seen in this statement:

Without a doubt, NEO’s most prominent partner is the software giant, Microsoft. Skrikanth Raju, Developer Experience & Evangelism and Chief Evangelist, Greater China Region, Microsoft, expressed his support for the NEO platform and even described OnChain as “One of the top 50 startup companies in China.”

What to expect from NEO

In the next few weeks and months we will most likely see NEO expanding their marketing campaign and reaching new milestones on their roadmap. Also expect them to be added to several new exchanges and according to their telegram feed they've even announced that Poloniex is soon to host their cryptocurrency on their platform.

For more articles like this please follow me @ldauch

Thanks for reading!

Sources:
https://bitcoinist.com/chinas-first-blockchain-platform-antshares-rebrands-neo/