I'll apologize in advance if my feedback below strikes a dissonant chord with some of you. The intent of my post is to provide ground-truth observations and to encourage members of the AntShares/NEO community to get involved with this project.

DISCLAIMER: About 2 weeks ago, I made a post "predicting" that the price of ANS would fall below $4. This didn't exactly happen, but I did want to be transparent here about this.

Background

I'm a techie with a significant number of years in software development. Several weeks ago, I began by reading both whitepapers (https://github.com/AntShares/AntShares/wiki/Whitepaper-1.1 and http://docs.antshares.org/en-us/sc/white-paper.html) to learn as much as I could about the underpinnings of AntShares.

I've subsequently began lurking on the AntShares #dev Slack channel, and I've checked-out/combed thru the AntShares repositories on Github. I even managed to build the AntShares VM/IL and Framework on OSX.

I've held onto AntShares (ANS) since it was in the $1.50-$3.50 USD range with the belief that a blockchain developed in China and for the Chinese economy would be an incredibly investing opportunity. From my ANS holdings, I've generated some ANC and I also bought ANC on 19800.com at various prices.

Observations

Like many, I was concerned that the AntShares/NEO development team may in fact only be about 2 people. From my observations, it seems that this is in fact true. It's disheartening that the Chinese development community haven't gotten themselves involved with this project.

In terms of the AntShares/NEO codebase, the quality of the code on Github is amateurish. This makes me mostly worried that the blockchain may not be able to withstand an attack (e.g. if someone were to inject malicious AntShares/NEO VM code into the blockchain). The current blockchain storage mechanism is also of concern (e.g. it can easily cause the blockchain size to balloon thereby making it expensive to synchronize nodes/wallets). There are other technical concerns too (e.g. around reaching consensus on gas prices to reflect changing ANC prices) -- but these can be addressed over time as they're less critical.

Developer documentation for AntShares is minimal and gives developers a reason to distrust the project. I was able to get ANS/ANC for the AntShares testnet from Ray at OnChain so that I could follow the Smart Contract tutorial (http://docs.antshares.org/en-us/sc/tutorial.html), and I was able to build an .avm (i.e. AntShares VM file) from my C# AntShares Framework code (I built something similar to the Domain Name System example). I used the GUI to deploy the smart contract, but I couldn't do anything else (e.g. invoke it). This seems very broken -- the fundamental AntShares/NEO feature isn't even properly documented...

Lastly, I'm concerned that OnChain (http://www.onchain.com/), the company behind AntShares/NEO, may be distracted with other projects (e.g. Law Chain, etc.). In particular, they seem to be working on another blockchain project at https://github.com/DNAProject/DNA which seems to have much more activity than the AntShares/NEO codebase. I suspect 2 people at OnChain are 'dedicated' to AntShares/NEO.

Conclusion

Others have mentioned in this subreddit that AntShares/NEO is in a very early phase. This is absolutely correct. Given the relative positioning of AntShares/NEO ("market-cap"-wise) to other/similar projects, I was expecting development to be much further along (especially given that the project began in 2014). To their credit, the AntShares/NEO team accomplished a great deal given the amount of resources actually working on the project.

My advice for anyone investing in AntShares/NEO is that this project will require much more involvement from the development community if it is to succeed. There amount of work left to be done before AntShares/NEO is a viable production blockchain (for the masses) is enormous.