NEO is a blockchain platform and cryptocurrency which enables the development of digital assets and smart contracts. The project is based in China and was originally launched in 2014 as AntShares. NEO uses a delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) consensus mechanism and can support up to 10,000 transactions per second. NEO tokens can be staked to produce GAS tokens which are used as the fuel of the platform, to pay for computation or deployment of smart contracts within the NEO network. The project was founded by Da Hongfei.