Neo Foundation Announces Neo3 Will Feature File Storage on the Blockchain and a Decentralized Digital Identity Service

Key highlights:

• The third iteration of the smart contract-enabled blockchain Neo will support file storage and offer a decentralized identity service
• However, the demand for such services is unclear
• Neo co-launched a cross-chain interoperability protocol Poly Network and a DeFi service named Flamingo this year

In an October 17 open letter from the Neo Foundation, the entity behind the NEO blockchain reflected on the past 4 years of its activity and progress. Towards the end of the letter, the foundation also unveiled its plans for the future.

Neo3 to include Neo File Storage and NeoID

According to the open letter, Neo’s third iteration will offer two features in addition to being a future-proof full-stack blockchain and having an in-built price oracle. These new features include support for file storage or ‘NeoFS’, and a digital identity feature dubbed ‘NeoID’. Neo Foundation revealed that the Neo3 testnet will likely go live by the end of the year with the Neo3 mainnet set to launch in the first quarter of 2021.

Do users even need these services?

The addition of new features comes as a surprise to the community, especially as the demand for blockchain data storage and decentralized identity services remains unclear. The recently launched data storage platform Filecoin and the associated token FIL, for example, demonstrated a surge of 118%, quickly followed by an almost equal price dump of 80%.

Much like the decentralized data storage, the digital (or decentralized) identity blockchain products have also experienced hindered adoption. While blockchain-based identity solutions are a perfect use case of the blockchain technology, no project has managed to break mainstream yet.

Nevertheless, the Neo Foundation wrote believes that these features will boost the blockchain’s adoption and improve its future prospect:

“Together with vast new features and enhancements in system security and performance, Neo3 will surely become the ideal next-gen internet infrastructure for mass adoption.”

A strong year for Neo

The Neo project otherwise experienced quite a strong year. The project launched an interoperability protocol dubbed the Poly Network in collaboration with Ontology and Switcheo in August 2020. In addition, the Flamingo DeFi saw great success with over $1.5 billion in total value locked at the peak of its popularity.

NEO is currently trading at just a few cents below $17.50 and is already the 20th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.