NEO is a next generation smart economy platform (formerly Antshares) and China's first open source blockchain that was founded in 2014, is often known as the “Ethereum of China”. What is NEO? NEO uses a smart economy approach to implement its distributed network concept. Its main objective is to digitize assets using the decentralized network of blockchain technology and digital identity. Neo’s main aim is to be the distributed network for “smart economy”. As their website states: 'Digital Assets + Digital Identity + Smart Contract = Smart Economy.' Neo was developed by Shanghai-based blockchain R&D company “OnChain” and funded by two crowdsales: first crowdsale on October 2015 sold 17.5 million NEO tokens for $550,000 and the second crowdsale sold the remaining 22.5 million NEO tokens for $4.5 million. So why NEO? Asset digitization and identity on the NEO platform essentially creates a novel way for asset registration, issuance, and circulation. This means that tangible assets like real estate, company shares or even fiat money can be digitized and traded on the NEO network, thus giving rise to a whole new economy. Its digital identity system allows for integration between the platform and the real world economy. It has custom digital identity standards that enable the creation of electronic identity data for individuals, organizations and even entities. These electronic systems use multi-layered authentication models that include facial and voice recognition as well as fingerprints. All digital assets on the platform enjoy legal protection thanks to the use of digital certificates on its public blockchain. This, in turn, guarantees trust as the system offers an indelible and unalterable record of all entities’ holdings.
Bismuth, a digital distributed self-regulating database system whose primary application is currency, and its first application is mining. It comes with a set of DAPPs out-of-the-box. Bismuth is not based on the code of BTC or any of its derivates, it is only inspired by some ideas laid down by Satoshi Nakamoto (BitCoin), Sunny King (Peercoin), NXT and ETH developers. Bismuth does not draw any code from other repositories, instead, it reformulates the cryptocurrency code in its own terms to be easily readable, compatible across all platforms, integrated into business solutions with utmost ease and most importantly open for development to a wide public through its simplicity while minimizing the security risk for custom code implementations. Bismuth is a decentralized transaction platform focused on modularity and open source approach. It comes with default decentralized applications and tools out of the box, not only to be used by everyone but also to be hosted by anyone. These applications are supplied as interpretation engines, which prevents blockchain bloat. Inspired by Satoshi’s whitepaper, Bismuth also offers optional hyperblocks as a pruning mechanism, a system which greatly reduces disk space usage and increases execution speed.