'China's crypto ban had little impact on Neo,' says organization's developers

Once hailed as the "Ethereum of China," Neo's token price has fallen on hard times ever since the world's most populous nation introduced a series of acute bans on cryptocurrency operations last year. In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Neo's developers — who wished to remain anonymous — explained that partners run most projects sponsored by Neo Global Development, or NGD, from a wide range of countries outside China that serve users all over the world.

In addition, Neo continues to expand inside China. It is currently one of seven open permission blockchains servicing the nation's Blockchain-based Service Network, or BSN. One of the group's goals is to expand the adoption of nonfungible tokens in the country.

There's also been quite a few decentralized finance, or DeFi projects, and decentralized applications, or dApps, since the launch of the Neo 3.0, sometimes stylized as Neo N3, mainnet last year. One example is Defina Finance, an anime-styled NFT metaverse game that uses a play-to-earn model. Total trading volume in the Defina marketplace has exceeded $100 million at time of publication. Defina began expanding to Neo N3 in 2021 in partnership with NGD.

But according to the project's team, the "coolest" development is probably that of Rentfuse. Our sources from Neo explained:

"Rentfuse is a protocol designed to manage NFT rental agreements between owners and tenants for gaming or other functions. Neo leadership is working with Rentfuse to establish it as an NFT leasing standard for the Neo ecosystem."

Its developers, too, appear to be fond of the greater Neo community. "We reached thousands of people through Neo socials to let people know more from us, and we have developed the core contracts of Rentfuse,” so said Michael Fabozzi, founder of Rentfuse, in a statement to Cointelegraph. "Thank you for believing in us."

Meanwhile, sources at GhostMarket, a multi-chain Neo NFT marketplace that recently raised $2 million in strategic funding and completed an initial DEX offering on Flamingo Finance, told Cointelegraph:

"Neo's $10 million N3's early adoption program [last year] was vital for Neo to attract and onboard new projects and was very much needed to exponentially scale Neo ecosystem."

When asked about what made Neo unique in a sea of smart-contract, proof-of-stake blockchains, they explained that out of many highlights, Neo 3.0 has a native built-in oracle for HTTPS or NeoFS requests. A distributed data storage solution also exists for scalability and privacy on the NeoFS Network.

In addition, interoperability protocol Poly. Network enabled cross-chain communications between Neo and Ethereum (ETH), Binance Chain (BNB), and more. There's also NeoID, which is a self sovereign identity initiative allows developers to customize the precise level of attribute verification needed to ensure that contract operates correctly.