NEO (NEO)

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Historical price evolution of NEO

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

NEO has its origins in 2014, when Da Hongfei, former consultant at IntPass Consulting and Bitcoin activist in China since 2011, met Erik Zhang, former Huobi employee and author of the dBFT algorithm, during the Global Bitcoin Summit in Shanghai. Together they co-founded AntShares, which would become China's first public blockchain. In July 2015 they published the source code on GitHub, followed by the official whitepaper in September of the same year.

In 2016 they conducted an ICO that raised $4,650,000. Of the total 100 million NEO generated in the genesis block, 50 million were sold to investors whilst the other 50 million remained locked in a smart contract to finance future development. The AntShares mainnet launched in October 2016. Two months later, in December, Da Hongfei founded Onchain, a blockchain solutions company for enterprises that would secure clients such as Alibaba and Microsoft China.

In June 2017, AntShares was rebranded as NEO to avoid confusion with Alibaba's Ant Financial. The rebranding coincided with the implementation of Smart Contracts 2.0 and aggressive global expansion. The price experienced notable growth, rising from $0.20 in January 2017 to an all-time high of $198.60 in January 2018. During 2018, Erik Zhang announced Neo3 (N3), the largest update in the protocol's history, which would include new modular architecture, improved governance and native services such as decentralised storage, oracles and NeoNS.

In 2019 the EcoBoost programme launched, a comprehensive support initiative that offered funding, technical support and promotion for projects built on NEO. The Neo N3 mainnet finally launched in August 2021, incorporating dBFT 2.0, NeoFS, Neo Oracle Service and decentralised governance via Neo Council. Between 2022 and 2023, NEO operated at single-digit dollar prices, affected by the general bear market and competition from new layer 1 blockchains.

The transition process towards N3 was completed in 2025, with the closure of the NEO Legacy testnet on 1st June and the definitive closure of the original mainnet on 31st October, after 8 years of service that recorded 281 million transactions, 14 million blocks and 3 million addresses. However, on 31st December 2025, Erik Zhang published public accusations against Da Hongfei for lack of financial transparency in the Neo Foundation, alleging that Hongfei controlled approximately $200,000,000 in Bitcoin and Ethereum without accountability, whilst he himself controlled 85% of the NEO and GAS tokens, valued between $200,000,000 and $250,000,000, in a personal wallet without multisig. In April 2026, Da Hongfei proposed a $461,000,000 restructuring of the Neo Foundation to implement independent formal governance, whilst Erik Zhang announced a temporary committee to assume the foundation's functions during the dispute resolution. In parallel, Neo X connected to LayerZero, enabling interoperability with more than 170 chains.

NEO operates as a layer 1 blockchain with a dual token architecture that separates governance and utility functions. The NEO token, indivisible with a minimum unit of 1 NEO, grants voting rights to elect the 21 members of the Neo Council, of which the 7 most voted act as the network's consensus nodes. The GAS token, divisible to eight decimal places, functions as fuel for transactions and smart contract deployment, generating automatically for NEO holders following a decreasing half-life algorithm designed to release 100 million GAS in approximately 22 years.

The consensus is based on the dBFT (delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance) mechanism, developed by Erik Zhang, where elected consensus nodes must reach a 2/3 supermajority agreement to validate each block. This approach guarantees absolute finality in a single block without possibility of forks, allowing the processing of up to 10,000 transactions per second. Smart contracts, called NeoContracts, execute on the NeoVM and support multiple programming languages such as C#, Java and Python, eliminating the need to learn a blockchain-specific language.

The Neo N3 version, launched in 2021, incorporated integrated native services that expand the platform's capabilities: NeoFS for decentralised storage, Neo Oracle Service for accessing verified external data, NeoNS as a name system, and Neo X as a sidechain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This modular architecture allows the network to offer advanced functionalities directly at protocol level without depending on external solutions.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.