Ontology

At the New York launch on 27 November 2017, founder Li Jun described a trust network that could connect identity information and business systems. The contemporary technical paper argued that one public chain could not satisfy every industry's access, compliance and governance rules, so Ontology would link configurable ledgers and existing information systems.

Onchain supplied development and support. NEO supplied an early smart-contract environment and ecosystem relationship. Li later drew the boundary plainly: Ontology/Onchain and NEO were separate teams, with different Go and C# implementations. That distinction prevents the project's origin from being reduced to a NEO spinoff label.

Ontology said in January 2018 that there would be no public sale, and newsletter subscribers were promised free ONT. That did not make the full supply a giveaway: the published allocation also reserved tokens for institutional partners, ecosystem development, the technical community, the core team and the NEO Council. The Council then used part of its 10% allocation for a 20-million-ONT airdrop to NEO holders. The first half arrived as divisible NEP-5 units on NEO; the second half was directed to corresponding Ontology mainnet addresses.

Ontology 1.0 launched on 30 June, backed by the same-day v1.0.0 software release. Mapping from NEP-5 ONT to indivisible native ONT began on 9 July and carried a 1 October deadline. On 31 August the project reported 97.98% mapped; the notice did not announce a final 100% conversion. Unmapped NEP-5 units were to remain on NEO and could not cross to the new chain.

ONTO v0.8.4 went public on 10 July 2018. It combined native ONT and ONG transactions with ONT ID registration, verifiable-claim authentication and the one-stop mapping flow. The migration was therefore also a product launch: users met the new chain through a client that treated identity and assets as adjacent but distinct modules.

That design came from the 2017 paper. An ONT ID description object could publish keys and control information without including the person's real-world identity by default. Credentials could be presented selectively. The later ONT Login and ONT TAG products extended that idea into passwordless authentication and authorized credential checks rather than turning ONT balances into identity records.

Ontology split value and execution between two native assets. ONT is fixed at one billion tokens and supplies stake for Triones selection; ONG pays fees. From 7 July 2020, released ONG stopped flowing to every passive ONT balance and entered the staking incentive pool instead.

A holder must choose a node and accept its terms. Governance rules rank consensus and candidate operators, while each operator selects fee-sharing percentages. The official interface showed 15 consensus nodes on 5 September 2026, but hundreds of other nodes and sharply different sharing settings. A wallet balance, delegated stake, an elected operator and an operating validator are four different positions.

The block-13,920,000 upgrade changed ONT's application-facing precision from whole units to nine decimals and activated the EVM path. Ontology's March 2022 release added Ethereum accounts, EIP-155 transactions and Web3 APIs, using ONG as gas while preserving native contracts and ONT ID alongside it. The announcement described the EVM as fully audited but linked no report, leaving the audit scope and findings unverified.

Governance still did not end at a ballot. From 28 to 31 October 2025, Triones nodes recorded 117,169,804 votes for an ONG overhaul and none against. Operators then installed the v3.0.0 series, and Ontology announced on 19 December that the cap had fallen from one billion to 800 million and 200 million ONG had been burned. The announcement said circulating supply was unchanged at that moment; its projected reduction depended on a later permanent-liquidity mechanism.

In July 2026 Ontology described ONTO Wallet as the center of a market where people could contribute consented, verifiably human data to AI, using ONT ID and privacy-preserving checks. The announcement is evidence of strategy and released infrastructure, not independent proof of marketplace demand, income or every planned feature.

This direction reuses parts that arrived at different times rather than turning them into one product. ONT delegates stake, ONG pays for execution, ONT ID carries identifiers and credentials, and ONTO is the user-facing wallet. Onchain’s development role, the NEO Council’s distribution role and Triones nodes’ voting role likewise belong to different chapters. Reading those roles separately explains what an ONT holder can do in the protocol without treating the token as ownership of every Ontology-branded service.