Founder Of NEO Thinks That Blockchains Are ‘Over-Regulated’

The founder of the altcoin NEO is in the latest cryptocurrency news. Da Hongfei, which is actually the founder of Antshares (best known as NEO), has recently stated that blockchains and cryptocurrencies are over-regulated in the extreme.

His quote was taken from an interview with 8BTC in which he stated:

“In essence, blockchain can barely survive within the existing financial regulation system. A licensed institute may find it unnecessary to cooperate with a blockchain company because it is already licensed to conduct the business. Why would it bother to be engaged in a partnership that doesn’t benefit it that much? If blockchain companies end up with no license, they won’t be legally permitted to promote massive adoption of applications.”

However, what Hongfei should know is the fact that NEO, along with several other blockchain ICO-funded projects, offered refunds to buyers in order to comply with the Chinese regulation efforts towards ICOs. One of the affected ICOs was actually a token that lives on NEO’s blockchain – the Red Pulse (PHX). With a market cap of $22 million, Red Pulse is decent while the altcoin NEO has been in a depression for some time now, resting under the $20 mark at present rates.

The founder of NEO also commented on the rise of blockchains and how they are used in gaming, noting that a NEO-based company called NewEconoLabs had officially sponsored a blockchain game. As he said, he is optimistic about the future of blockchain:

“In the future, blockchain games may present a virtual world similar to that constructed in the sci-fi film “Ready Player One” where all the virtual assets are recorded on the blockchain, the implementation of which requires a flawless economic model. However, we can’t predict the timing of such games. I hope that someday blockchain games can even be played by my daughter.”

When asked about the decentralization of NEO, Hongfei said:

“The majority of votes come from exchanges and our team so far, which gives the NEO team more say on the matter. The team will delegate the voting power to the public in the future and by that time, the team will have a less dominant influence on the voting results.”

And while there are a number of public blockchains besides NEO and Ethereum, Hongfei believes that most of them don’t have enough interesting applications on them.

“There are many public chains, but we are running short of upper-layer application and developers. It’s like you have developed an operating system but there are no apps running on it, without which the operating system is same as dead. Yes, we do feel some sort of threat. Facing the competition from our peers, NEO reacts by exploring how to develop an ease-of-use and developer-friendly public chain. For example, we think docs and tutorials are important as they can quickly teach a developer to develop smart contracts on NEO,” he concluded.