Veteran domestic public chain NEO's two founders are feuding, with lack of financial transparency as the core reason

I didn’t expect an established domestic public chain to have such a day. What’s even more lamentable is that top domestic AI projects Manus, Kimi, and Minimax have all made major news for two consecutive days—either being acquired for billions of dollars or raising hundreds of millions in funding. Yet, the veteran public chain has surprisingly started to tear itself apart.

Currently, it appears that the two co-founders of the NEO public chain, founded in 2014—Zhang Zhengwen (Erik Zhang) and Da Hongfei—have essentially broken all ties, continuing to clash on X. Based on statements from both sides and publicly available information online, let’s try to piece together what exactly happened between these two founders of this veteran public chain.

Financial Black Box

In fact, Zhang Zhengwen had already left NEO a few years ago, which he confirmed on his own Twitter. He officially returned in September of this year. The trigger for this feud was in November. According to community sources and public data, Zhang Zhengwen, as the technical core, encountered obstacles when seeking detailed financial reports and fund flow information from the Neo Foundation.

Subsequently, Zhang Zhengwen accused the Neo Foundation of long-term opacity in operations, describing its asset status as a “black box.” He pointed out that Da Hongfei has long controlled the Foundation’s assets, excluding NEO/GAS tokens, and lacks a complete, auditable disclosure mechanism.

In today’s exchanges, we also uncovered the reason why Zhang Zhengwen previously left. He said Da Hongfei approached him alone, saying that the two of them managing NEO was inefficient, so he chose to temporarily step down to “improve efficiency.” However, he discovered that Da Hongfei was using NEO resources to develop an independent public chain project called EON. This prompted him to return and get involved in the Foundation’s governance.

In a community exchange in November, Zhang Zhengwen stated that NEO had previously relied on hackathons to create a “false prosperity,” with no real users. Many hackathon projects won awards and then disappeared.

Conflict Escalation

In December, Zhang Zhengwen publicly issued a statement demanding that Da Hongfei fulfill his promise of financial disclosure starting from December 9. More explosively, Zhang Zhengwen unilaterally announced that, based on a previous phone agreement, Da Hongfei would no longer participate in NEO mainnet affairs from January 1, 2026, and would instead focus on the development and operation of sidechain NeoX and the new project SpoonOS.

Da Hongfei quickly responded, stating that Zhang Zhengwen actually controls the vast majority of funds within the NEO ecosystem—including core assets NEO and GAS tokens—and leads voting rights for consensus nodes. He also accused Zhang Zhengwen of delaying the transfer of funds to the multisig address of the Foundation for years under various pretexts (such as waiting for N3 migration to complete).

Da Hongfei promised to release the 2025 year-end financial report in the first quarter of 2026 and would share preliminary data in advance.