Neo's Next Act? $700 Million Crypto Ontology Is About to Go Live

That's because Shanghai-based Ontology, a project closely tied to the "Smart economy" blockchain Neo, is expected to launch its live blockchain on June 30, a step that will find one of the top 20 crypto assets finally releasing its proprietary technology.

Described as an enterprise-focused platform, Ontology is seeking to provide a high volume of fast and cheap transactions, all while helping businesses grapple with the thorny problems of interoperability and digital identity.

The protocol emerged from Neo an ethereum challenger whose founder, Da Hongfei, is Ontology's CEO. Both Neo and Ontology are subsidiaries of Onchain, which developed a private enterprise blockchain platform called DNA. Da is also Onchain's CEO. Meanwhile, Ontology's founder Li Jun told CoinDesk that his company and Neo are co-funding work on API standardization, shared smart contract standards, and "Cross-chain technology innovation."

Ontology has created a complex framework in its bid to satisfy all of these goals.

Ontology has conceived this elaborate architecture in order to enable what its white paper calls a "Decentralized trust ecosystem."

Ontology doesn't just want to help define digital identity for people, it wants to do this for digital items as well.

Whether Ontology can follow through on all - or any - of its ambitions is an open question.

Users who hold their ONT on certain exchanges, including Binance and Huobi, may have their tokens swapped automatically, but Ontology social media admins said they should "Refer to individual exchanges' policies."

For users who do the swap manually, Ontology has posted a frequently-asked-questions page.

The Ontology mainnet will accept only round numbers of tokens and disregard fractions.