Why we invested £10,000 in ANTSHARES!! Is this Bitcoin's most feared rival?!!

What are Antshares or otherwise known as Neo?

Antshares is a decentralized and distributed ledger protocol that digitalizes real-world assets into digital ones, enabling registration, depository, transfer, trading, clearing and settlement via a peer-to-peer network.

Antshares keeps records of the transfers of digital assets with e-contracts. In Antshares, digital tokens generated by e-contracts function as general underlying data and could be used for recording titles and assets like equities, creditor’s claims, securities, financial contracts, credit points, bills and currencies, and could be applied for areas like equity crowdfunding, equity trading, employee stock ownership plans, peer-to-peer financing, loyalty programs, private equity funds, and supply-chain financing, etc.

Current market cap sits at £299,480,643 and one coin will currently cost you approximately £5.99, heres a graph of Antshares showing their current price.

Antshares along with other smaller coins have been following the majors lower in the strong correction of the past week/days, as the correlation between the coins jumped and the main swings were concerted in the different currencies. The recent re-test was slightly different, as some of the coins started diverging from Bitcoin and Ethereum, while the huge drops in Dollar terms provided buying opportunities for long-term investors in the case of the already consolidating small cap coins.

The short-term trends remain negative and volatility will likely remain high on the coming days, but a less hectic environment would be a bullish sign. This represents a great opportunity for like minded Antshares investors.

AntShares was developed by a company called ONCHAIN, based in Shanghai. Da Hongfei is the CEO of Onchain as well as the creator of Antshares. AntShares has some high profile partners listed on its site, including WINGS, Alibaba, and Microsoft

WINGS combines the ideas of crowdfunding with swarm intelligence decision-making through decentralized forecast markets into a project funding and governance platform easily accessible to anyone with a smart phone.

Alibaba is China’s — and by some measures, the world’s biggest online commerce company. Its three main sites — Taobao, Tmall and Alibaba.com — have hundreds of millions of users, and host millions of merchants and businesses. Alibaba handles more business than any other e-commerce company.

The collaboration with Wings is an R&D partnership. “The strategic cooperation enables European and North American DAO projects to tap into the Chinese cryptocurrency community, and Chinese start-ups to do the same with European and North American communities. Further, the two organizations agree to coordinate resources on mutual business opportunities, and promote joint hackathons to drive ecosystem innovation.” The collaboration with Microsoft relates to Microsoft Azure, specifically a legal blockchain of some kind.

Any collaboration with Microsoft is huge!!

What is causing the current rise in value of AntShare?

• A lot of what is driving the current meteoric rise in valuation can be found in a few key points that investors/traders are just
  now beginning to realize:
• AntShares is very comparable to Ethereum, which has already experienced its own spectacular gain in value over the past 6
  months.
• AntShares has (according to its own site) implemented sharding and concurrency to solve its scalability issues, something
  Ethereum is currently still working on.
• AntShares has been in development since 2014, and provides the ability to implement smart contracts/DAPPs in many more
  languages than Ethereum currently supports.
• Many Westerners are only just now learning about China and its current fascination with digital cash.

Why have we invested £10k?

After announcing NEO’s new brand and strategy, Da Hongfei elaborated on the future of blockchain technology, where every asset will be digitized and programmable with smart contracts. Calling for the transparency and openness of data, he introduced concepts of the “Smart Economy” and new smart contract system, and announced that he is building a new multi-chain protocol for interoperability.

Da Hongfei’s top revelations at the conference were that:

• NEO is collaborating with certificate authorities in China to map real-world assets using smart contracts;
• NEO has received a new patent for cross-chain distributed interoperability;
• NEO’s recent new startup partners include Bancor, Agrello, Coindash, Nest Fund, and Binance, with more
  partner announcements to come. In his presentation, Erik Zhang discussed the evolution of Smart Contracts 2.0, and
  explained the main differences between NEO and Ethereum.

One big contrast of these competing platforms is their programming languages. Ethereum requires developers to learn to program with Solidity. Neo, on the other hand, will support almost all programming languages via a compiler, including those on Microsoft.net, Java, Kotlin, Go and Python, greatly lowering the difficulty for developers to write smart contracts. By making its programming languages more inclusive, NEO hopes to attract a larger community of developers. Zhang also explained the mechanics of the NEO Virtual Machine, its execution engine and interoperability.

In our professional opinion, NEO has built up some strong momentum going forward. They have one of the top blockchain development teams in all of China, with 50 million ANS ($325 million) to support their funding needs and a growing list of partners now aligning by their side. While it may take some time to steal the spotlight from Ethereum, we are sure to see more from this platform in the months to come. And we welcome your thoughts on this up and coming Bitcoin rival!