The NEO and the Ontology foundations have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), May 14th. The Memorandum concerns the key cooperation areas and shared resources between NEO and Ontology, including some joint initiatives.

In the Memorandum, it also defines the differences between Ontology and NEO, as well as their shared technical understandings and vision. To begin with their similarities, both platforms use NeoContract and the NeoVM. They also both utilize a dual token economic model to fuel and govern their networks (NEO for governance, GAS for network fees on NEO; ONT for governance, OTG for network fees on Ontology). Both systems support the development of decentralized applications. Finally, Ontology is provided technical support by Onchain, which was co-founded by NEO founders Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang, along with Jun LI of Ontology.

The difference between NEO and Ontology is in their strategic focuses for application development. Although NEO and Ontology are both open source, public blockchains, Ontology will also create private chains for businesses and entities in the public sector, while NEO is purely designed to be a public chain. Private chains allow entities to store their information with higher privacy and regulatory compliance, and can be connected to other blockchains through cross-chain protocols. So, Ontology and NEO and fundamentally different in their use cases, and these differences are likely to become clearer as the platforms mature.

Referring back to the Memorandum, NEO’s focus is public, while Ontology’s focus is private. NEO’s vision is to create a Smart Economy with a public blockchain, focusing on digital assets, digital identity, and publicly developed dApps. The Ontology network is also public, but will create private blockchains for business and will connect blockchains to each other, and this is its key difference to NEO.

NEO and Ontology will cooperate to create a smart contract ecosystem, and support the development of NeoVM and NeoContract, as well as collaborate on developing smart contract open standards. Both parties will also provide standardized technology interfaces like APIs and SDKs and share development achievements and research results. Additionally, both will progress with cross-chain research, with the end goal of producing integrable MainNets.

A joint task force will also be established, comprised of representatives from both parties. The task force will dedicate itself to realizing the above goals and to advance other important projects.

Finally, the foundations will move forward with a joint funding initiative. The funding will be allocated for academic research exploring blockchain technology development, including algorithm, cross-chain protocols, and formal verification. Other communities and individuals who share the same interests are welcome to join in these funding initiatives.

The MOU can be read in full at the below link:
https://neo.org/blog/details/3079

Tags: ,