First published 10 August 2020. The chain had carried the NEO name since 8 August 2017. Expanded in October 2026 so GAS is not folded into the ticker, and so a whole coin is not described as divisible. NEO is its own chain. Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang are the people most associated with it. It was called Antshares. The 8 August 2017 upgrade renamed the coin and turned on a fuller contract system. It was the same chain, not a holder split. Ethereum without the jargon is a different design. NEO is not ETH.
One hundred million NEO were created at genesis. Half went to the crowdsale. Half was kept by the NEO Council, locked until after 16 October 2017, for development and a reserve. The project’s own paper said that reserve would not be poured onto exchanges, and that yearly use should stay within 15 million. NEO cannot be subdivided. You cannot send half a coin. It is the vote: holders pick the consensus nodes that produce blocks. A small set of nodes is the design. This page will not walk through running one.
GAS is the fee. NEO is not
GAS has its own ceiling of 100 million in that paper. None of it existed at genesis. It is minted on a declining schedule, originally described as about 22 years, and credited toward addresses that hold NEO. NEO 3, the later version of the chain, changed how fees and that credit work. A page that still says every block pays 8 GAS to whoever holds NEO is the 2017 paper. Holding NEO does not by itself pay a transfer. GAS does. New GAS is not new NEO.
A legacy address and an N3 address are not the same string. Coins left on the old network are not spending on the new one until they are moved. This page will not walk through that move. A NEO address is not a Bitcoin address. The wrong network is still the wrong city. Nothing here is an instruction to vote, to claim GAS, or to buy NEO.
