NEO DevCon: Co-Founder Explains How Blockchain Is Developing Like The Internet

The co-founder of NEO, Da Hongfei has recently revealed that he believes the “whole world will [eventually] become digital.”

The co-founder of NEO is a self-taught computer programmer who pointed out that cards never saw widespread adoption in China. Despite this, mobile payment apps like WeChatPay and AliPay are used by millions of the Chinese people because it is a lot more convenient according to Hongfei. His comments came during an interview he took part in at NEO’s DevCon decent, held in Washington last week.

Hongfei went on to explain distributed ledger technology and how it was slowly getting adopted by big financial institutions saying that “after 2014, bankers realized that some geeks invented a protocol that could transfer value across countries in a few minutes. So they are curious about the technology and they abstracted it and called it blockchain.”

Three years ago, it was realised that blockchain technology could be used to facilitate a “collaboration between individuals” and other entities in general, Hongfei said. In 2016, developers “invented or borrowed words like decentralised autonomous company (DAC)” which was later changed to DOA (decentralised autonomous organisation) by the Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin according to Hongfei.

When more people started to work on DAOs, the NEO co-founder found that blockchain was a new “institutional technology”. He explained that blockchain technology evolves in a manner that will be somewhat similar to how the internet came to be.

According to Hongfei:

“[Blockchain development will be divided] into different layers. [For example,] TCP/IP is at the bottom and HTTP protocol is on top of TCP/IP. If you are building an internet application, you don’t have to bother about TCP/IP these days, you don’t even need to worry about HTTP. You have different middle layers to build on top of that. So blockchain will take a similar road.”

Hongfei acknowledged that most dApps are currently being deployed and built on top of layer one or the standard layer of blockchain networks and also is a believer “in the future, there will be different layers” and there will especially be “a lot of layer 2 solutions.” This is in order to release dApps on second and third layers of the network. The NEO co-founder recommended creating “native support” or native development spaces.

Speaking on Ethereum, Hongfei said that the development team is “like the go-to solution. If you want to [learn] how to [write proper] smart contracts, [then] you will probably do it on Ethereum.”