It's unbelievable that established domestic public blockchains could end up like this. What's even more disheartening is that top domestic AI projects like Manus, Kimi, and Minimax have all made headlines for two consecutive days, either being acquired for billions of dollars or receiving hundreds of millions in funding, while these established public blockchains have started fighting amongst themselves.
It appears that Erik Zhang and Da Hongfei, the two co-founders of the NEO public blockchain established in 2014, have essentially broken ties completely, continuing their public spat on X. Based on their statements and publicly available information online, this article attempts to piece together what exactly happened between the two founders of this established public blockchain.
Financial black box
In fact, Zhang Zhengwen had left NEO a few years ago, which he confirmed on his own Twitter account, and then officially returned in September of this year. The trigger for this conflict came in November, when, according to community news and public information, Zhang Zhengwen, as a core technical figure, encountered obstacles when seeking detailed financial reports and fund flows from the Neo Foundation.
Zhang Zhengwen then accused the Neo Foundation of long-term opaque operations and asset status, which resembled a "black box." He pointed out that Da Hongfei had long held sole control over the foundation's assets other than NEO/GAS tokens, and that there was a lack of a complete and auditable disclosure mechanism.
In today's exchange of barbs, we also discovered the reason for Zhang Zhengwen's previous departure. He said that Da Hongfei had approached him privately, saying that it would be inefficient for two people to manage NEO, so he chose to temporarily step down from management in order to "improve efficiency." However, he discovered that Da Hongfei was using NEO's resources to develop the independent public blockchain project EON. This prompted him to return and get involved in the foundation's governance.
During a community exchange in November, Zhang Zhengwen stated that NEO previously relied on hackathons to create a "false prosperity" without real users, and many hackathon projects disappeared after winning awards.
Conflict intensification
In December, Zhang Zhengwen publicly issued a statement demanding that Da Hongfei fulfill his financial disclosure obligations, which he had promised since December 9th. Even more explosively, Zhang Zhengwen unilaterally announced that, according to a previous telephone agreement between the two parties, starting January 1, 2026, Da Hongfei would no longer participate in NEO mainnet, but would instead focus on the development and operation of the sidechain NeoX and the new project SpoonOS.
Uncle Da immediately responded, saying that Zhang Zhengwen 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 Zhang Zhengwen of delaying the transfer of funds to the foundation's multisignature address (Multisig) for many years under various pretexts (such as waiting for the N3 migration to be completed).
Dahongfei promised to release its financial report for the end of 2025 in the first quarter of 2026 and would share preliminary data in advance.
