Neon Exchange (NEX) Review — NEO gets a turbo charged EtherDelta
Rule #1 — There is no Neon Exchange telegram channel!
If you are like me, you join every social media channel for any potential ICO you are going to invest or are keen on.
If you visit the neonexchange.org website and scroll to the bottom (at time of writing), you will see at the bottom — links for twitter, linked in and medium, but no telegram.
Twitter: almost 50,000 followers
Linkedin: 1,700 followers
Medium: 5,400 followers
Telegram: No official channel
However, a search on telegram shows this channel, ‘neonexchanges’ as well as ‘NEONexchangeorg’ with muted channels and reposts of official NEX posts
These are all fake telegram channels. This channel has 9000 followers already. I would guess that a fake ERC-20 address will be posted on the day of the sale and someone will fall for it. Hopefully the community will pick up on this and people find out its a scam channel. Please be aware
Oneparagrapher
The NEO platform and coins don’t have their own decentralised platform to trade on. Ethereum and its erc-20 tokens have etherdelta and idex, but NEO coins have no platform to do P2P trading. This is where NEX comes in. It is basically the etherdelta or idex of NEO NEP-5 tokens. You can buy and sell NEP-5 tokens without a middleman or waiting for exchanges to list it after unlocking of the tokens.
How?
It still uses the NEO blockchain but also a second off-chain matching engine. What the engine does is signs orders and matches them, as well as executes the order. the DEX is separate and acts as an interface.
The 100K tx/s Speed Promise
The promise is that
NEX could potentially execute more than 100 thousand trades per second on the chain
but of course we aren’t there yet.
Types of orders
You can buy market, you can buy at a set price or margin trade with NEX. There are no stop losses mentioned in the whitepaper :(
However there will be a JSON API so you could theoretically write a bot that can do stop losses.
Cross-chain Payment service
NEX, in the future will also support receiving ETH or other cryptos to pay for services or to perform transactions. Using this service is similar to using services like RadarRelay with ETH and WETH — the NEO needs to be wrapped to XNEO and transactions performed via XNEO. Annoying but this is the workaround to allow smart contracts to work on NEO.
Being able to do cross-chain, eventually NEX will allow fiat currencies, leading to decentralised banking. This would be many years down the track
Staking
Holding NEX gives you a share of fees generated. This will be miniscule in the first few months or years of the platform.
Token metrics
Tokens: 50 million total
50% public. 1 nex — $1 USD — Hardcap of $25 million USD
20% Founders
15% NEO council
10% Partnerships
4% Fund
1% E.S.O.P
Public sale — More info here
Round 1 — $1000 USD per person cap
Round 2 — $9000 USD Per person if Round 1 not sold out
March 12th — Registration and KYC
March 31st — Lottery winners announced
April — NEX sale begins
Roadmap
Alpha contracts are implemented while “prototypes for the trading interface and matching engine” have started — i.e. barely any code has been written to show any sort of demo — NO MVP
- Q4 2017: Smart contract examples for payment service and decentralized exchange, demo of profit distribution mechanism on TestNet.
- Q1 2018: NEX token sale and release of open source platform for token sales on NEO.
- April — NEX Token sale
- Q2 2018: Payment service launch on MainNet for NEO and GAS. Also, matching engine launch on TestNet, supported by accompanying CLI. The graphical interface isn’t out yet if we are only at CLI.
- Q2 2018: Smart wallet and API for integration with tethered tokens in MainNet.
- Q3 2018: Trading interface and matching engine launch on MainNet: begin trading NEO, GAS, and NEX. Also, cross-chain demo on ETH and NEO TestNets. This is the actual launch of the website.
- Q4 2018: Cross-chain launch to support trading of ETH and ETH tokens. Also, support for margin trading on MainNet.
- 2019+: Decentralized banking: smart contract asset management across chains
Team
Ethan Fast — Creator or NEON Wallet and Co-Founder of City of Zion. The NEON wallet is the biggest NEO wallet right now and to have Ethan on the team is a massive massive win. Even I am excited
Fabio Canesin — Research engeinner and co-founder of CoZ
Fabian Wahle — CoFounder of CoZ
There are also a few other City of Zion team members and developers included.
Advisors
Da Hongfei — Founder of NEO. I am about to fall off my chair. Anyone remember OmiseGo and how Vitalik Buterin was an advisor?
Erik Zhang — Onchain CTO and on NEO Council. OK I am officially off my chair.
People in the NEO community really respect what City of Zion have done for NEO out of their own free will and time. The community is strong behind these guys.
Weaknesses
No MVP and not much coding has been done — This is not a flip unless HYPE pushes the price prematurely high. I feel this will happen.
The price will go up and then dip I feel until Mainnet launch in Q3 2018 — a potential 6 month hold. This is not like OMG where they can announce a McDonalds partnership, as NEX is just NEX — a website for its first iteration
Predictions and strategy
The hype is huge on NEX, with various bloggers also rating it very well in terms of potential. There doesn’t seem to be any discount given to crowdsalers and as such the price post-ICO should hold. Not only this, the token sale LOTTERY means people will miss out and fomo buy post-ico.
I expect a dip after testnet and CLI (Command Line Interface) launch. People may get excited about a CLI but in reality, a testnet launch don’t mean shit. Buy more after this dips. Maybe people can program bots now that can do stop losses. (side thought — It would be hard to do manual arbitrage if there is public API).
I don’t expect much of a dip too low below ICO before mainnet launch. This is a hold. You could sell half at some point and hold the rest until the end of the year or until decentralised banking comes online a few years from now.
