The project, originally named Antshares, was founded in 2014 by Da HongFei and Erik Zhang and rebranded as Neo in 2017.

[2][3] The Neo network runs on a proof-of-stake decentralized Byzantine fault tolerant (dBFT) consensus mechanism between a number of centrally approved nodes,[4] and can support up to 10,000 transactions per second.

These GAS tokens, a separate asset on the network, can be used to pay for transaction fees, and are divisible with the smallest unit of 0.00000001.

[5] Neo was officially rebranded from Antshares in June 2017, with the idea of combining the past and the future.

These tokens were intended to be used to vote on system upgrades, identity verification mechanisms, and other governance issues on the Neo platform.