The Apex Network, which recently completed its ICO, has announced that it will no longer be building its network using the NEO protocol. The company has issued an announcement, stating that after “research and technical evaluation,” it has decided to proceed with building its own blockchain.
Apex, however, says that it will continue to build out its proof of concept on the NEO contract protocol and that the native CPX token will remain an NEP-5 token for now. Once Apex Network’s mainnet launches, the CPX tokens will be translated over to the proprietary blockchain on a one-to-one basis.
“Too Centralised”
While it is possible that Apex Network’s requirements are beyond the scope of NEO, this still does not make for good the ‘Chinese Ethereum’ which has been coming under increasing scrutiny in relation to its alleged lack of decentralisation.
One analyst recently published a blog post, arguing why the platform may be more centralised than Ripple. Some of the ICOs that have been hosted on NEO have also been greeted with scepticism.
Whilst NEO has lost ground against some of the other cryptocurrencies since January, it remains the eighth largest crypto asset with a market cap of $6.95 billion. It also has loyal supporters, many of whom believe it will be the strongest digital currency of 2018.
There has also been some speculation that NEO enjoys informal backing from the Chinese government, and that China will eventually allow ICOs provided they are hosted on the NEO platform.
Regardless of the technology, the key factor going forward will be whether it can continue to attract new ICOs, and what the market thinks of those projects.
