Da Hongfei is a Co-founder of the NEO blockchain network, a platform for building decentralized applications (dApps). He is also the Founder and CEO of Onchain, a blockchain technology company in China. ^[1][2]

Education

Da Hongfei attended the South China University of Technology, Guangdong Province of China, between 1997 and 2001 where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A) in English and Technology. ^[1][3]

Career

Hongfei held a position at IntPass Consulting in Shanghai from 2005 to 2013 before starting a career in the blockchain technology industry. In 2011, Hongfei initiated a campaign that fostered the growth of a Bitcoin community in China, actively advocating for Bitcoin adoption in the country. ^[2]

In January 2014, he co-founded Neo Network and in December 2016, established Onchain. ^[2][3]

Neo

In 2014, Da Hongfei met his co-founder Erik Zhang at the Bitcoin Conference in Shanghai. They formed a partnership and announced the launch of their first blockchain company, AntShares, which focused on developing decentralized applications (dApps).

In June 2017, AntShares rebranded as Neo. The main reason for the rebranding from AntShares to NEO was brand conflicts and potential confusion with other entities. In particular, the Chinese internet financial company, Ant Financial, had a similar name and was associated with Alibaba Group, causing confusion. ^[10]

"To avoid these conflicts and create a distinct identity, we chose the name Neo. We decided to pick a name that represents new in Latin, so we rebranded ourselves NEO." - Da HongFei, Founder of NEO^[10]

The Neo platform uses a delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) consensus mechanism and provides infrastructures such as decentralized storage, oracles, and domain name service, which contribute to the foundation of the Next-Generation internet. Within this ecosystem, users can create, deploy, and utilize decentralized applications (DApps), products, and services. ^[7]

Both Neo and the Ethereum blockchain are platforms that enable the creation of DApps and utilize smart contract protocols. Due to these similarities, Neo is nicknamed "the Chinese Ethereum". ^[2][1]

However, there are significant differences between Neo and Ethereum. Neo was created by Da Hongfei and his colleagues using a consensus mechanism called delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT). The transition to dBFT was made after the release of the April 2016 white paper that introduced this new consensus method. ^[7]

"NEO is a lot of things. It's an open-source project; it's a protocol; it's software; it's a node; it's all the other people that are behind the NEO community. So, it's a lot of things." - Da Hongfei commented in an interview^[8]

OnChain

Da Hongfei is also the Founder and CEO of Onchain^[9], an enterprise blockchain solution that emerged from the NEO ecosystem and serves businesses in China, founded in 2016. ^[3][4]

Speaking in an interview, Da HongFei said:

"In 2016, I founded Onchain, a top blockchain technology company in China, which has conducted in-depth cooperation with the Guiyang municipal government and the Tongren municipal government to provide digitization solutions through blockchain technology. With blockchain technology, we are seeing a new system — decentralized, automatic and autonomous institutions — for people and institutions around the world to better collaborate.^[5]