The NEO Blockchain Crumbles: NEO and GAS have hit major price snags within the last week due to a major glitch.

Source: CoinMarketCap

Source: CoinMarketCap

Gas is the cryptocurrency that fuels the NEO blockchain. As you can see from the chart above, both digital tokens have taken a downward plunge within the last week. The reason behind the sudden drop off is quite alarming for NEO enthusiasts. Most blockchain networks hold hundreds, if not thousands of nodes and they should never have a center point of failure – hence why the blockchain was formed in the first place. However, the NEO network came to a complete halt, due to just one of its nodes crashing.

This node was a consensus node, and it became disconnected during the actual consensus process. During that time, all nodes were halted and were waiting for the reaction of the node. The system was delayed for several hours, as programmers attempted to restart it. Eventually, the network resumed as normal but it took a restart to all the nodes on the network.

This error exposed a huge flaw within NEO – that there is still a large amount of centralized control on its network. This centralization isn’t anything new to the community and the NEO team is steadily working on decentralizing its ecosystem daily. It seems that the team has lost some of its trust from its investors, as a single node has the capability to entirely cRipple (available on Binance) the current NEO network. NEO, is known as China’s Ethereum (available on Coinbase) and has seen major growth and adoption over the past year.

For the year, the coin is up over 91,000% and is the 7th largest cryptocurrency by market cap. However, if the project’s development team doesn’t act fast this could mean a serious drop in NEO’s price. A single point of failure is completely unacceptable for any blockchain.