The consensus mechanism used for EOS (DPOS) is not a recent announcement. From the very start Dan mentioned that EOS was going to use it. DPOS is a BFT consensus algorithm the same way that POW is BFT. I did point out in a reply on another post that NEO was using DPOS but call it dBFT (it's not like their inventing the wheel). The fact that NEO uses DPOS (or dBFT as they call it) is a testament to how good it is to reach consensus on block production.
The NEO white paper also mentions the use of the "Distributed Storage Protocol: NeoFS":
NeoFS is a distributed storage protocol that utilizes Distributed Hash Table technology. NeoFS indexes the data through file content (Hash) rather than file path (URI).
If this sounds familiar it is because it's also known as IPFS. This is another case of the NEO team taking an existing solution and renaming it instead of just mentioning where it originated.
Don't get me wrong, I think NEO is a great project but they just failed to mention where the original ideas came from.
What they are implementing that is innovative is the "Anti-quantum cryptography mechanism: NeoQS" (although here they are also renaming an existing solution I haven't seen any other blockchain project preparing for quantum computing so kudos to them for the long term thinking).
Thanks for this thorough reply! It's finally a real answer that I can work with! Too bad I just posted an article asking for this information and getting a discussion going which may now be redundant.
I always knew NEO was 'like DPOS' but thought they had their own angle on it with the BFT stuff. I guess I saw this as experimental within the blockchain space. I always thought that EOS would simply use DPOS, like Bitshares and STEEM.
I know that NEO didn't come up with the BFT solution, nor the DPoS part of it, that's for sure. I just thought they were the first/only blockchain to implement these solutions. Now that EOS is doing it too I feel like EOS is 'like NEO' now.