The two founders of the established domestic public chain NEO are in a feud, with financial opacity as the core reason

I didn't expect that a long-established domestic public chain could reach such a day. Even more lamentable is that top domestic AI projects Manus, Kimi, and Minimax have had significant news for two consecutive days, either being acquired for billions of dollars or securing hundreds of millions in financing, but the old public chain has surprisingly started to tear each other apart.

Currently, it seems that the two co-founders of the NEO public chain, established in 2014, Erik Zhang and Da Hongfei, have essentially completely fallen out, continuing to clash on X. Based on both parties' statements and publicly available information, let's try to sort out what exactly happened between the two founders of this long-established public chain.

Financial Black Box

In fact, Erik Zhang left NEO a few years ago, which he confirmed on his own Twitter, and then officially returned in September this year. The catalyst for this clash occurred in November, when community news and public information indicated that Erik Zhang, as the technical core, encountered obstacles while seeking detailed financial reports and fund flows from the Neo Foundation.

Subsequently, Erik Zhang accused the Neo Foundation of long-term operational opacity, with asset conditions resembling a "black box." He pointed out that Da Hongfei has long singularly controlled the foundation's assets outside of the NEO/GAS tokens and lacks a complete, auditable disclosure mechanism.

In today's mutual confrontation, we also discovered the reason for Erik Zhang's previous departure. He mentioned that Da Hongfei had approached him alone, stating that their joint responsibility for NEO was inefficient, so he chose to temporarily exit the management to "improve efficiency." However, he found that Da Hongfei was using NEO's resources to develop the independent public chain project EON. This also prompted his return and involvement in the foundation's governance.

In a community exchange in November, Erik Zhang stated that NEO had previously relied on hackathons to create "false prosperity," lacking real users, and many hackathon projects disappeared after receiving awards.

Escalation of Conflicts

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

Da Hongfei quickly responded, stating that Erik Zhang actually controls the vast majority of funds in the NEO ecosystem (including the core assets NEO and GAS tokens) and dominates the voting rights of consensus nodes. He also accused Erik Zhang of delaying the transfer of funds to the foundation's multisig address for years under various pretexts (such as waiting for the completion of N3 migration).

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