In the recent post-January crash recovery period, NEO hasn’t really dazzled anyone. Many good alts have prospered nicely and went through some strong periods of price growth and “the Chinese Ethereum” has surprisingly remained somewhat subdued. That’s not to say it hasn’t benefited from Bittoken moving sideways and giving investors motive to invest into alts; if we look at the month of April, when the recent altcoin bullrun started, NEO has respectively grown from 0.0067 BTC to 0.009 BTC at the peak of the run.
The run has cooled off since and Bitcoin started acting all uppity again, flirting with 10k for the first time since its crash. As a result NEO corrected itself as well, moving down in price to 0.002 BTC. The NEO/USD pairing suffered more as the price flip-flopped from $130 at the beginning of March to $50 on the 1st of April.
While its price hike happened partially due to the Bitcoin movement, we have to give some credit to in-house developments aimed at improving the NEO platform as a whole. First of all, NEO Name Service Project was announced. This project will enable NEO holders to create their own .neo domains that can be used to make transactions. Partnerships with Fenbushi Capital and NEO Global Capital will be an important part of this project. So called “NEO dot” addresses, services which should serve as NEO public keys, will become a reality as a result of these partnerships. Further developments of the NEO Name Service Protocol should help NEO price go up as they come.
In April, Fenbushi Capital has prepared their consensus node which is now also up and running on the NEO TestNet. Current nodes running on TestNet are NEO Foundation, CoZ, KPN, and Fenbushi Capital. The team have been preparing to stress test the TestNet with all these nodes voted in as Consensus nodes to ensure stability and performance. In addition, updates to the application forms for Concensus nodes are being made. A website displaying nominee information is also in the workings, and this should improve NEO holders’ ability to pick a quality node to vote for. Finally, an update to the NEO GUI is coming which should allow users to use community-developed wallets to vote.
All in all, the month of April was a relatively slow one for NEO. While some development updates were made, the focus was mainly on public speaking and appearances with many hackathons, meet-ups and workshops being organized all over the world. A European Tour was held, where NEO decided to revisit Europe with its second ever mini tour in 2018. Amsterdam, Vienna, Lisbon, Madrid, Zurich and Paris were visited this time, spreading the NEO message to interested enthusiasts.
And while as a result of somewhat low development activity the token has underperformed a bit, this shouldn’t surprise you or turn you away from it. A comment from a completely unbiased NEO Redditor named Hodl_Neo_Til_I_Die sums up the tokens future neatly by saying: “Sounds like massive plans are in the works!” Many believe that NEO’s potential will be fully realized only in about 3-5 years from now, so buying it now, when it’s so far away from its ATH, wouldn’t be the worst investment decision you ever made.
