NEO's recent turmoil has indeed exploded. This incident at the end of the year has completely exposed the centralization risks of established projects.



The root of the issue is actually not new—fund transparency and checks and balances of power. Erik Zhang (Chief Technology Officer) and Da Hongfei (Foundation spokesperson), the two founders, had already discussed privately who should take the lead. Da's suggestion at the time was that one person stepping back from frontline roles would be more efficient, and Erik agreed, letting Da manage the foundation. It sounded reasonable, but this dragged on for several years.

On December 31, Erik couldn't take it anymore and directly criticized on X: Da has not fulfilled the commitment to disclose funds over the years, the foundation's assets and expenses are opaque, and there are rumors that Da is independently developing competing chain projects like EON. Erik's demand was straightforward—immediately produce a complete and verifiable financial report. He also announced that starting January 1, 2026, Da would step down from work on the Neo mainnet and shift focus to NeoX sidechain and SpoonOS projects.

Da didn't stay silent and responded quickly: This is so ironic! Erik, you are holding massive amounts of NEO and GAS in custody, and you control the voting rights of the consensus nodes. The risk of a one-man rule is unrestrained. I've been urging you for years to transfer these to multi-signature wallets, but you've been delaying. As for the financial report, it is planned to be released in Q1 2026, and I will do everything possible to push for the treasury transfer. By the way, I will never give up on NEO.

Seeing the situation is getting out of hand, the foundation quickly came out to speak: The disagreements among the founders will not affect daily operations, and the financial report will indeed be released in Q1.

The community was completely boiling over. This scene vividly exposes the centralization governance risks of old projects like NEO, and everyone is watching how to resolve this crisis.
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