By Jose Antonio Lanz
Da Hongfei, Founder of NEO —the blockchain known as the Chinese Ethereum— was recently interviewed on the Project’s official blog on the occasion of the second anniversary of the launch of its mainnet.
Mr. Da comments that the gaming industry has strongly influenced the development of his blockchain. He remarks that the financial market, although having an immense potential to contribute to the growth of the ecosystem, has slowed its progress due to excessive regulation:
“In the early days, people were expecting to see blockchain being applied to the finance industry as the new technology may disrupt the traditional finance industry. However, implementation has been faced with regulatory barriers as the finance industry is strictly regulated virtually everywhere in the world. There are only two possible ways to integrate blockchain into finance industry by either cooperating with a licensed traditional financial institute … or you may bypass the license by doing something that doesn’t need a license …
In essence, blockchain can barely survive within the existing financial regulation system.”
For The Mastermind Behind NEO, Games and Blockchain Can Walk Together
He remarked that for the dream of adoption to be fulfilled, it is necessary to promote the development of more applications. Currently, software development in blockchain technologies is at a very early stage, so real applications tend to be very limited:
“Gradually some game developers turned to NEO for development and noticed that game development is also popular in other platforms like Ethereum. Game assets and tokens go together naturally.
However, some existing blockchain games only add a few blockchain compatible features, e.g., some game’s digital assets can be recorded on-chain. For such games, their blockchain compatibility is merely an add-on feature, in essence, they haven’t been turned into so.”
Da Hongfei said this problem might complicate adoption as the public will not feel the need for blockchain technologies. Like Eric Vorhees, Da Hongfei is convinced that embracing of cryptos and DLTs is a gradual cultural process that will increase as the public feels comfortable near this innovation.
Healthy Competition is Good for Business
For the man behind NEO, the launch of competing projects such as EOS or TRON represents a threat; however, the NEO team takes this as a challenge to develop an increasingly secure blockchain in which adoption is a concrete possibility.
