Antshares, a Shanghai-based open-source blockchain project, is rebranding as NEO, amid efforts to embark on a new direction for the development of China’s blockchain community, Bitcoin Magazine reported.

Onchain, the company behind Antshares, made the announcement at conference held at Microsoft’s headquarters in Beijing.

In addition to the rebranding announcement, the developers also detailed the strengths of their advanced smart contract code, which will support decentralized commerce, digital IDs, as well as digitization of various assets.

The holders of ANS can currently auto-generate Antcoins (ANC) in their Antshares wallets, which will be used as gas on the platform. In Q3 2017, the ‘ANS’ asset symbol will be replaced by ‘NEO’. The NEO team is currently working on new clients and a UI for the new brand.

During the conference, Da Hongfei, founder of NEO, introduced the concepts of “smart economy” and new smart contract system. He also announced that the development of a new multi-chain protocol for interoperability. In addition, Hongfei made the following announcements:

• NEO is teaming up with certificate authorities in China for mapping real-world assets using smart contracts
• NEO has been granted a new patent for cross-chain distributed interoperability
• NEO’s new startup partners count the likes of Bancor, Agrello, Coindash, Nest Fund, and Binance.

In his presentation, NEO core developer Erik Zhang said that NEO will support nearly all programming languages via a compiler including those on Microsoft.net, Java, Kotlin, Go and Python. This would help developers write smart contracts easily. In addition, NEO expects to attract more developers by making its programming languages more inclusive.

Innospace CEO Chen Cheng Qiang announced a collaboration with the NEO blockchain team in a ¥200 million ($29.3 million USD) incubation fund. The fund would seek to establish a new blockchain space in Shanghai, combine working spaces, and provide startup incubation and acceleration services.

FxWirePro launches Absolute Return Managed Program. For more details, visit http://www.fxwirepro.com/invest