Is Ontology (ONT) A Good Investment?

Ontology has been around for quite some time. The token sale was launched in January 2018, and it quickly became crypto traders’ new favorite at the time. Even when most other tokens started to fall apart in terms of price action, ONT managed to stay on the top until June 2018. It was a remarkable achievement.
However, ONT has not been very relevant in the past few years since its fall in the second half of 2018. It tried to reinvent itself with some changes in the past two years, especially with the momentum of DeFi recently. So, how about this year where everything is all about DeFi? Can ONT become relevant again? Let’s see.
Before we continue, check out this article on everything you need to know about Decentralized Finance applications.
The Sibling To NEO
For you who don’t know, Ontology is the sibling to NEO. NEO co-founders were Da HongFei and Erik Zhang, who are also part of OnChain, a Chinese blockchain company. After they had some successes with NEO, they decided to launch its sibling, Ontology.
Since its inception, both NEO and ONT have been deemed as “confusing.” They confused people because NEO was already a direct competitor to Ethereum. For some months of Q3-Q4 2017, it was already judged as the Chinese Ethereum. Yep, NEO can build smart contracts.
Many projects back in 2017 issued their own NEP-5 tokens, the equivalent of ERC-20 in NEO blockchain. And then, OnChain decided to create another smart contract platform called Ontology. Obviously, it confused a lot of people and rightfully so.
However, there are some huge differences between NEO and ONT, even though they are both smart contract ecosystems. Well, NEO is open-source, and it’s widely open (just like Ethereum). Many big traditional companies might not trust NEO because they want some data to remain private and not fully exposed to the public.
This is where Ontology differs from NEO. Ontology is the bridge from traditional systems to NEO blockchain. It is not meant to be adopted by the masses but rather by conventional companies who want to utilize blockchain technology but refuse to share all data. It is a blockchain intended for enterprises.
And even though it has its own differences from NEO, it still adopts the same consensus mechanism and dual-token ecosystem. With NEO, you have NEO (as a governance token) and NeoGAS (as a utility token to pay transaction fees). With Ontology, you have ONT (as governance token) and ONG (as utility token). HODLing ONT will grant you ONG, just like hodl-ing NEO will grant you NeoGAS.
The Evolution Of Ontology
Even though Ontology started as something to be used by enterprises, it didn’t get as much adoption as it would have hoped. Because of this reason, Ontology had slowly evolved under its management team. At one point, it actually started to compete with NEO in normal DApps.
For example, there was a music DApp and games built on Ontology. They didn’t last long, though. And Ontology also tried to capture the Security token (STO) market by optimizing its platform for security tokens. Once again, they never really captured that market in 2018 and 2019.
Things, however, started to change in 2020. Just like every other smart contract platform, Ontology decided to tap into DeFi. Its most-anticipated DeFi launch is OIN, and it is also teaming up with its brother, NEO, to launch Flamingo Finance.
Whether Ontology can capture some of the DeFi markets, it’s still a big question mark. Many other platforms have been trying to shift people’s attention from Ethereum but without much success. Tron has its own DeFi protocols such as Just, but they are not as popular as those operating on Ethereum (i.e., YFI, Aave, or Compound).
Find out everything you need to know about Ethereum 2.0
So, is Ontology a good investment?
Well, Ontology started as a promising enterprise-grade blockchain platform. However, it has slowly evolved to cover the typical crypto audience. Whether it can be successful in its approach or not, we still don’t know. However, the bull market of 2020 has been kind to every DeFi platform out there. Hopefully, that is a good sign for ONT as well.


