Da Hongfei, founder of Antshares released the coin in 2014. Following its launch as AntShares, AntShares re-branded into what we now know as NEO in June of 2017.

NEO has received extensive criticism for its distribution and architecture. The fact that about half of all NEO tokens were never released for public consumption has been a cause of worry for investors over the years.

NEO’s somewhat centralized system has put them on the receiving end of jokes throughout the cryptocurrency world.

TokenPay (TPAY) Mocks NEO On Twitter

On 15^th of August 2018, Token pay decided to mock a number of cryptocurrencies on Twitter. Their tweet stated that NEO is centralized.

TokenPay left a suggestion in their tweet. They suggested that all NEO nodes are controlled by the NEO Foundation. TokenPay further labeled NEO as, “Chinese Ethereum”.

“$NEO centralized just like $XRP. The fake ‘Foundation’ (fancy word for a company masked as a charity) controls all the nodes. ‘Chinese Ethereum,’” relayed the tweet.

Backlash Resulting From Centralization

As a matter of fact, many analysts and experts are of the opinion that TokenPay is only echoing the thoughts of a large amount of individuals in the cryptocurrency world.

Consequently, individuals in the cryptocurrency world are beginning to question whether or not NEO should be classified as a cryptocurrency.

Centralization Of Cryptocurrencies

AntShares knew that centralizing their currency, at least to some extent, was going to have a few backlashes at the very least.

In NEO’s “genesis block,” a total of 100 million NEO tokens were created. Out of that amount, only 50 million found their way to investors.

NEO made use of “Smart Contracts” in storing 50 million units privately. Each year, NEO’s development team releases a certain amount of these locked tokens for “long term development plans.”

NEO token users can generate GAS tokens. Consequently, customers can process online transactions using these GAS tokens.

GAS tokens are deflationary in nature; furthermore, an algorithm controls the deflation of Gas tokens. That algorithm would release 100 million GAS tokens over a period of 22 years.

In Conclusion

NEO and other seemingly centralized cryptocurrencies are going against what most cryptocurrency enthusiasts believe cryptocurrencies should stand for.

We don’t know what the future might hold for NEO, but one thing that we are sure of is that these “attacks” aren’t going away anytime soon. At least it won’t happen until NEO’s business model evolves.