NEO

Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang founded Antshares in 2014. Code appeared in July 2015 and the Legacy mainnet followed in October 2016. The project paired digital assets with identity and smart contracts, a broader institutional pitch than the single-purpose payment chains of that period.

In 2017 Antshares became NEO. The rename changed the address to an international developer audience; it did not by itself replace the running ledger. The old architecture later acquired the retronym Neo Legacy because a much larger break was coming.

Work on N3 began in 2018. When mainnet opened at 09:00 UTC on 2 August 2021, Neo described it as incompatible with Legacy. Contracts, applications and balances needed a deliberate crossing to a new genesis rather than an automatic node update.

Early migration opened on 9 August and the mass phase on 1 September. During September, 30,921,991 NEO and 10,378,258 GAS moved; the Foundation used 1% and then 0.5% NEO bonuses to accelerate migration. Legacy stopped creating GAS on 19 September at 52 million, the amount minted into N3 genesis.

Migration preserved denominations while changing the governing machine. A user who never crossed did not gain N3 voting, native contracts or application state merely because exchanges kept showing the same ticker.

N3 fixes NEO at 100 million indivisible units. Its native-contract hash is 0xef4073a0f2b305a38ec4050e4d3d28bc40ea63f5. GAS, at 0xd2a4cff31913016155e38e474a2c06d08be276cf, is divisible and pays for state changes and contract execution.

GAS is intentionally not scarce in the same way. N3 began at 5 GAS per block with no terminal cap: 10% for all NEO balances, 80% for voters and 10% for committee and consensus work. System fees burn, and elected governance can alter generation. The yield is a protocol allocation, not business revenue paid by a company.

One NEO account votes for one candidate, and rankings refresh every 21 blocks. Once participation exceeds 20% of supply, the top 21 form the committee and the top seven serve as consensus nodes. dBFT asks that small selected set for the signature threshold that finalizes a block.

The committee is not ceremonial. A majority can change fees, execution and storage prices, block or unblock accounts, and appoint oracle, state-root and NeoFS service nodes. Voting therefore delegates concentrated operating powers; it does not let every holder approve every parameter directly.

The distinction matters during low turnout or coordinated voting. The rules are transparent, but a 21-seat committee and seven-node consensus set remain narrower than the full holder base. Name disclosure and onchain votes show formal authority, not every offchain affiliation or beneficial owner.

Neo X mainnet launched on 25 July 2024 as an EVM-compatible sidechain, chain ID 47763. It uses dBFT and GAS for execution, but its electorate is GAS holders: staked GAS selects seven validators for each 60,480-block epoch. NEO ballots do not cross that boundary.

The N3–X bridge locks or releases assets after validators attest to ordered transfers. Neo X system contracts expose governance, policy, treasury, bridge and multisig roles, with many actions requiring more than half the current validators. That design is inspectable, yet a bridged asset adds contract, validator, relayer and upgrade dependencies to the risks of both chains.

A June 2019 Neo Foundation report described the original 100 million NEO allocation: roughly 50 million distributed to supporters and the remainder held by the Foundation, formerly the Neo Council, for core development and ecosystem support. The report documented a funding design and past spending.

It is not a 2026 proof of which addresses the Foundation controls, how they vote, or how much influence delegates exercise. Software maintainers, Foundation grant budgets, elected committee members and Neo X validators are overlapping parts of an ecosystem, not one interchangeable administrator.

A NEO unit gives its controller transferability, an N3 vote and protocol-defined GAS accrual. It does not say that the holder owns Neo Foundation reserves, shares in Neo Global Development, founder obligations, revenue, redemption assets or intellectual property.

That boundary is the durable reading of the story. Antshares supplied the origin, N3 required consent through migration, and Neo X multiplied the control surfaces. The public code can show who may sign a block or change a parameter; it cannot create legal promises that the reviewed terms never made.