Antshares has been renamed NEO, and will be an up and coming competitor to Ethereum!

Antshares has been renamed NEO and rebranded!

And from the NEO website it looks like the token code will remain ANS.

"NEO'token NEO (ANS)"

Here's the main info so far from the announcement:

All assets will be digitized into two categories:

1. Proof of existence is on the blockchain
2. Off chain physical assets for example: IDs, bikeshare, intellectual property.

Spirit of blockchain isn't decentralization. It is transparency and fairness via publicly agreed upon rules and data.

Mantra: digital asset + digital ID + smart contract = smart economy.

-Neo contracts with C#, Java/kotlin, python, go
-NeoX is like an interledger protocol
-NeoQ is quantum safe encryption
-NeoFS is a new database layer

The ecosystem will partner with Bancor, Agrello, Matchpool and more!

Neo is different from Eth and fabric because it has static contract calls, deterministic blockchain network calls, and uses oracle's instead of internet API calls. Example, different nodes will have different Google search results based off of IP location.

NeoVM vs EthVM vs Docker Dyanmic sharding for NeoVM makes parallel processing scale better than EVM which has static sharding. Variables in NeoVM are determined beforehand and then the sharding is done before computation as opposed to EVM which divides work inflexibly.

EthVM has high coupling (bad). NVM has low coupling like docker. Execution of contracts depends too much on the node.
Microsoft offers IDE plugins and compilers to help people develop on the Neo platform.

Digital certificate issuance and asset digitization are supported in Neo but not inherently in Eth.