A $200 Million Crypto Project's Fate Hangs in the Balance as Co-Founders Clash

For years, the NEO treasury was managed in an unconventional manner, with hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto assets controlled by personal wallets and lacking multisig protections and formal oversight. According to co-founder Da Hongfei, Erik Zhang, the other co-founder and architect of NEO's core protocol, has sole control over approximately 85% of the assets, valued between $200 million and $250 million, with no multisig protection and little formal oversight. The native NEO and GAS tokens held by Zhang are currently worth more than NEO's $197 million market capitalization. Zhang has accused Da of separate issues, and the two founders have been publicly airing their disputes since December, resulting in rival governance plans and an unsuccessful mediation effort in Hong Kong. Da's restructuring proposal, published on GitHub, calls for the Neo Foundation to be redomiciled from Singapore to the Cayman Islands, replacing the current two-founder governance with an independent five-member board, and redistributing roughly 26 million NEO and 40 million GAS to tokenholders. In contrast, Zhang's counter-proposal involves staying on the board and keeping the Foundation in Singapore. Zhang's proposal also calls for a formal investigation into historical asset management, including provisions to address potential corruption, improper asset transfers, and concealment of public assets. Da has dismissed these provisions, stating that there is no corruption or misuse of funds. The numbers, however, appear stark, with NEO's treasury holding approximately $460 million in assets, roughly double the project's market value, while the token has dropped 98% from its 2018 peak. Da has proposed a mutual disarmament, where both he and Zhang would sacrifice their individual control over assets. Da's restructuring depends entirely on Zhang's cooperation for its most critical step of transferring the single-signature token holdings to a multisig lock address, with a committed timeline of one to three months. If Zhang refuses, Da believes the community should decide the next course of action.