This post is not a final proposal. It is an attempt to document the governance reality Neo is experiencing today and to open a serious discussion about structural change. I’m putting this forward as a starting point, fully expecting that others will have improvements, alternatives, or better ideas.
A quick note before diving in: this is a long document. I’m not known for my brevity, but more importantly, I don’t believe the challenges Neo is facing right now can be reduced to quick takes. The magnitude of the issues at hand requires deep introspection, careful reasoning, and sustained discussion. If you’re not willing to engage at that level, this discussion is probably not for you - and that’s okay.
What follows is based on several years of direct involvement in Neo and its governance at all levels, and on repeated attempts to make the current system work as intended.
Before getting into specifics, I want to be clear about the type of change I am trying to explore.
I am not proposing that we throw out Neo’s existing governance model and start again from scratch. Highly invasive reimaginings of governance come with real risks. First, they take a long time to design, build, test, and gain confidence in - time that I do not believe Neo currently has. Second, large structural changes to governance mechanisms risk destabilising the network itself and, in the worst case, compromising security.
What I am trying to work toward instead is an improvement that builds on what already exists, uses familiar patterns, and can be implemented relatively quickly without introducing unnecessary systemic risk. The goal is to create a shorter, safer path to better execution.
Neo Strategy & Treasury Board
Simply put, I believe Neo needs an agile, elected, funded execution body focused specifically on strategy and treasury allocation.
For the sake of discussion, I’ll call this the Neo Strategy & Treasury Board.
The core idea is simple: the Neo Council remains largely as it is today, focused on broad oversight and consensus and protocol-level responsibilities, while responsibility for ecosystem strategy and treasury execution is delegated to a new group that is explicitly designed to do that work.
This is about acknowledging that governance, when a treasury and long-term strategy matter, cannot be treated as a side job.
I’ll explain why I believe this is necessary below.
Context
In 2025, I made Neo governance one of my top priorities. I led the Centre Point initiative, organising events in Dubai and Singapore, and invested a significant amount of time and effort bringing people together across regions to increase responsibility, accountability, and action from a governance perspective.
In a community meeting mid-last year, I delivered a presentation where I declared “the Neo Council is dead.” The intent was not provocation for its own sake, but to clearly articulate why the Council, as currently structured, was not functioning as an execution body for the ecosystem. To me, the lack of coordinated leadership at the chain level was a gaping hole in the ecosystem, while also representing the largest opportunity for high-impact improvement and mobilisation.
At Centre Point Singapore, we managed to bring together the majority of Council members - something I was very proud of. Only a small number did not attend, some without response and a few for personal reasons, but overall the event felt constructive. We left with what appeared to be alignment on deliverables and expectations: what we expected of the Council, of ourselves, and of each other.
Following that effort, several concrete steps were taken. Flamingo volunteered to build the neo.community governance portal we all agreed we needed so we would have a place to organise, discuss, and approve or reject proposals. We held multiple follow-up meetings tracking deliverables, which were recorded and published publicly. We created a public-facing Discord channel so the community could observe governance activity in real time.
Despite all of this, it has remained extremely difficult to get the Neo Council to consistently act. We had some small wins, but equally as many failures. Engagement is uneven, decisions are slow or stalled entirely, and even basic procedural steps frequently fail to materialise.
The biggest issue for me is that I do not feel sufficient drive from the Council. Without that, it is very hard for anything to move forward.
The core pattern I keep seeing
Across Neo’s history - from the community councils in Neo’s early years through to the current Neo Council - the same pattern repeats. When decision makers start making decisions part-time (e.g. they have their own projects to run), the quality, speed, and effectiveness of their actions trend towards near zero. I speak in generalities, as there are always individual expectations.
True governance and decision-making do not work when treated as a voluntary, part-time responsibility layered on top of already demanding roles.
This is not unique to Neo. As blockchain ecosystems mature, many encounter the same structural issue. Early governance models often rely on goodwill, prestige, or light incentives. That can work while treasuries are small, energy is high, or decisions are infrequent. As responsibilities grow and decisions become more continuous, those models begin to break down.
Participation drops, decisions slow, and accountability becomes diffuse. Important actions are delayed not because people don’t care, but because governance work competes with full-time responsibilities that inevitably take priority.
Ecosystems that move past this stage tend to reach the same conclusion: oversight can remain decentralised, but execution cannot remain voluntary. Strategy, treasury management, and operational decision-making must be treated as professional responsibilities with clear mandates, expectations, and accountability.
GrantShares illustrates this clearly. The original intent was that highly involved community groups - i.e. the sponsored communities - would responsibly and efficiently review proposals. In practice, it has become a significant burden. Reviewing grants is always the last task on an already overloaded to-do list, and the result is slow and inconsistent decision-making. (Don’t read what I’m not saying, GrantShares has done a lot of good, but at a fraction of its potential).
Sponsored communities, in particular, have taken on more and more responsibility over the years. Every one of them is managing more projects today than they were three years ago, with broader scopes and higher expectations, often without a corresponding increase in funding to expand capacity. These are also the same groups driving the majority of visible governance engagement, coordination, and follow-through within the Neo ecosystem.
At the same time, this is not a problem unique to sponsored communities. Many Council members who are less directly embedded in day-to-day ecosystem work also have full-time responsibilities elsewhere. Their constraints are real, even if they are less visible. The result is a system where governance responsibility naturally concentrates around the most engaged participants, while others struggle to participate consistently.
I have now come to the conclusion that asking any group - whether sponsored communities or individual Council members - to absorb continuous proposal review, nuanced trade-off analysis, and high-impact decision-making on top of existing full-time obligations does not scale. The issue is not commitment or intent. It is capacity.
To quote the great Ron Swanson: “Never half-ass two things. Whole ass one thing.”
Some may argue that with 21 Council members, there should always be enough availability to make decisions. In my experience, the opposite is true. The more people involved in a decision, the harder it becomes to move. I have spent much of last year trying to drive engagement, and nearly every step has felt like an uphill battle.
This context matters because Neo is now facing decisions where delays, ambiguity, and unclear ownership (both in decision making and assets) carry real consequences.
Why this matters now
This brings us to the current discussion around Neo Foundation funds and who should manage them. I believe we have been approaching this point for some time, but recent events have made it impossible to ignore. The ecosystem is demanding more transparency and accountability from leadership.
I’m not interested in relitigating the past. What matters is this: treasury funds belong to token holders. If we are serious about decentralisation, those funds should not sit indefinitely with founders. They should be overseen by token holders or by an elected body acting on their behalf.
The obvious solution that would come to mind for most would be to move this responsibility to the Neo Council. This is also alluded to in the Neo 4 roadmap, where it is suggested that the Council would be responsible for financial management, though it is not yet explicitly laid out in what capacity.
However, based on lived experience and everything outlined above, I do not believe the Neo Council - as currently structured - is prepared to manage a treasury of any meaningful size. Nor is it efficient enough to define any kind of strategic plan for ecosystem investment. Although I will continue to work at it if we cannot decide on any improvements, I feel it will always be a small, already overloaded subset of the Council trying to push for action, weighed down by members who will not engage often enough for anything meaningful to occur.
Even after Centre Point Singapore, with all the commitments made, we struggled to get enough votes for an outcome on a simple pilot proposal for a European developer hub. We could not even reliably get Council members to sign up to the governance portal, let alone participate consistently in discussion and voting. That reality makes it difficult to imagine the Council responsibly managing a large treasury or ecosystem level strategy.
Part of reaching that conclusion required me to reassess my own assumptions about the role of the Council.
What the Neo Council is capable of - and what it is not
I want to be clear about where I think I went wrong in 2025 in how I approached governance, and what I have learned from that experience. It is not that the Neo Council is ineffective at decision-making altogether. Rather, I have come to understand that it is suited to a different class of decision-making than what Neo currently needs most.
The Neo Council is not well suited to making highly specific, fast-moving, day-to-day decisions that require deep engagement, frequent iteration, and constant interaction with proposers and constituents. Reaching alignment across 21 members on detailed funding decisions, nuanced trade-offs, or evolving proposals is slow by nature. Expecting daily or near-daily engagement at that level simply does not scale, regardless of individual intent or effort.
Where the Council can work well is in making infrequent, high-level decisions that require broad alignment rather than continuous execution. Examples include protocol parameter changes, network-level adjustments, or other decisions where the scope is well defined and the impact is systemic rather than operational. These decisions still require care and discussion, but they do not demand sustained, hands-on involvement or rapid turnaround. The Council still needs to improve in these areas, but it is well within its capabilities.
In this same vein, I believe the Council is capable and positioned to elect and oversee a Strategy & Treasury Board. This is not something that needs to happen daily. It might occur on a regular cadence, such as annually, or with the Council stepping in only when necessary to remove or replace a Board member who is not performing or no longer represents the interests of the ecosystem. These are important decisions, but they are episodic rather than continuous.
The Council can also engage with the Strategy & Treasury Board on an as-needed basis - providing guidance, feedback, or acting as a backstop when major concerns arise - without bearing the burden of being “always on.” That distinction is critical. The current system, or at least what I’ve been asking the system to do, places too much pressure on the Council to be permanently engaged in execution-level governance, which is neither realistic nor sustainable.
The model I am proposing is not about sidelining the Council. It is about aligning responsibilities with capacity. By allowing the Council to focus on what it can do well, and delegating continuous strategy and treasury execution to a dedicated group, we can reduce friction, improve decision speed, and avoid burnout - while preserving legitimacy, oversight, and security.
Decision scope:
Low Frequency / Broad Alignment
-------------------------------
• Protocol parameters
• Network-level changes
• Delegated body elections
• Oversight & veto authority
• Legitimacy & network security
↓
Neo Council
(large, representative, episodic)
High Frequency / High Specificity
--------------------------------
• Strategy definition & iteration
• Budget allocation decisions
• Funding approvals & sequencing
• Priority setting across initiatives
• Ongoing evaluation & adjustment
↓
Strategy & Treasury Board
(small, focused, always-on)
The Neo Strategy & Treasury Board (more detail)
So what I am proposing is a model where the Neo Council remains largely as it is today. Its primary purpose remains network security and protocol-level responsibilities. We still need to address the ability for token holders to remove and replace Council members, but that is outside the scope of this discussion.
I have come to accept that the Council is not designed for fast, focused, and continuous execution - which is exactly what Neo needs right now.
Responsibility for ecosystem strategy and treasury allocation would therefore shift to a new group with a very specific mandate.
The Strategy & Treasury Board would be small - ideally five members, seven at most - composed of individuals rather than teams. Members would be elected by the Neo Council and would be known, identifiable people with public track records. These would be paid, full-time or near full-time roles.
The Strategy & Treasury Board would operate in parallel to other existing groups as an elected, token-holder-facing body. Provided the Foundation allocates funds into a dedicated treasury (the Foundation’s willingness to engage on this idea is critical to this being workable), this Board would manage those funds transparently, allowing token holders to more directly observe, influence, and engage with strategy and treasury decisions.
Responsibilities of the Strategy & Treasury Board
The Board’s responsibilities would be ongoing and operational in nature.
First, the Board is responsible for strategy and priority setting. This includes defining and publishing clear twelve-month ecosystem priorities, translating those priorities into fundable focus areas, reviewing and adjusting them quarterly, and explicitly deciding what does not align with current goals.
Second, the Board acts as a fiduciary steward of the treasury allocated to it. This means maintaining a clear public view of allocated, committed, and remaining funds, pacing spending responsibly, and structuring funding in phases where appropriate.
Third, the Board is responsible for proposal review and funding decisions. Proposals may be submitted by any ecosystem participant, discussed publicly, and voted on by the Board in the open. Votes are individual and attributable - everyone can see which Board members voted for or against a proposal, along with the rationale for those decisions.
Fourth, the Board delegates rather than executes. It does not implement projects, sign legal contracts, run operations, or control protocol development. Instead, it allocates funds to existing entities who then execute the work and, where required, enter into legal agreements with third-party partners. This preserves legal clarity while ensuring ecosystem-wide transparency around funding decisions. (I'll note my assumptions regarding legal entity status here may be incorrect, as it's outside my area of expertise. If the Board needs to be registered as a legal entity, that would need to be explored).
Fifth, the Board provides light oversight and accountability. It sets reasonable reporting expectations for funded initiatives, reviews progress at agreed milestones, decides whether to proceed with subsequent funding phases, and publishes summaries of outcomes and learnings.
Finally, the Board has a clear responsibility around communication, transparency, and representation. Board members are expected to publish regular quarterly reports, communicate decisions clearly, engage publicly with the community, speak with media, participate in interviews, attend events, and represent Neo in this capacity. This is not a behind-the-scenes role; Board members should be visible and comfortable speaking for Neo.
Establishing a Board Charter before elections
Before any elections take place, the community and Council should collaboratively draft and ratify a formal charter for the Strategy & Treasury Board.
This charter would define the expectations, constraints, and accountability mechanisms that Board members operate under. It should address, at minimum: the scope and boundaries of Board authority; conflict of interest rules and recusal requirements; reporting obligations and cadence; the process and thresholds for Board member removal; any term limits or rotation requirements; and the metrics or criteria against which Board performance will be evaluated.
By establishing this charter in advance, we ensure that candidates know exactly what they are committing to, that token holders and the Council have clear standards for accountability, and that future disputes can be resolved against an agreed framework rather than ad hoc interpretation. The charter itself should be treated as a living document, amendable through a defined process, but its initial ratification should be a prerequisite for moving to elections.
This is something we failed to do before we established the Neo Council.
Governance Flow
To make this model clearer, the relationship between participants looks roughly like this:
Token Holders
|
v
Neo Council
(Legitimacy, Oversight, Consensus, Veto)
|
| elects / removes
v
Neo Strategy & Treasury Board
(Strategy, Treasury, Funding Decisions)
|
| allocates funds
v
Executing Entities
|
v
Ecosystem Outcomes
Board members are elected by the Council. The Board operates independently within its mandate. The Council would not need to approve expenditures, but could retain veto power before funds are disbursed and may remove or replace Board members at any time. Authority flows downward; accountability flows upward.
It’s also worth noting that this is not a wholly new pattern for Neo. The Council already elects specialised groups such as Oracle nodes. The Strategy & Treasury Board would be another delegated body with a clearly defined purpose.
Simply put, strategy and treasury governance need to be treated as a profession, not as an add-on.
An illustrative example of how this could work
To make this more concrete, it may help to walk through a simple, hypothetical example of what a twelve-month strategy set by the Strategy & Treasury Board could look like in practice.
This is not a proposal or a recommendation - it is purely illustrative.
Imagine that, after reviewing ecosystem needs, industry trends, and community feedback, the Board identifies real-world assets as a high-potential growth area for Neo over the next twelve months. The Board might determine that bringing tokenised real-world value onto Neo is a strategic priority and decide to allocate a defined portion of the annual budget toward initiatives that increase real-world asset value locked on the network.
Rather than building anything itself, the Board would translate that priority into funding focus areas. That could include supporting teams working on RWA-related infrastructure, funding pilot projects that onboard real-world assets, or incentivising integrations that demonstrably increase on-chain asset value. Proposals aligned with this theme would be prioritised for review and funding.
At the same time, the Board might recognise that documentation and open-source reference implementations are a bottleneck for developer adoption. As part of the same twelve-month strategy, it could earmark a smaller portion of the budget toward improving documentation, tutorials, and example repositories. That funding could then flow to teams willing to maintain high-quality developer resources that lower the barrier to entry.
The Board might also identify a specific region - for example, Latin America - as a high-impact area for growth. Based on that assessment, it could allocate funds to support developer participation in regional events, subsidise travel or hackathon attendance, or fund local initiatives that strengthen Neo’s presence in that ecosystem. Again, the Board would not execute these activities itself, but would fund organisations and community teams positioned to do so effectively.
Finally, the Board could decide to reserve a portion of the budget for ecosystem usage incentives. That might include subsidising transaction fees for specific applications, supporting usage campaigns for existing projects, or funding experiments that encourage real user activity rather than speculative deployment.
In this model, the Board’s role is to define priorities, allocate budgets, and approve aligned proposals. The ecosystem responds by building, executing, and delivering outcomes. Over time, the Board reviews what is working, adjusts allocations, and updates priorities as conditions change.
Example flow as seen below:
Board Defines 12-Month Strategy & Priorities
(budget envelopes, focus areas)
|
v
Proposals Submitted
(aligned to defined priorities)
|
v
Public Discussion
(open forum, community input)
|
v
Strategy & Treasury Board Review
(deliberation + public sentiment vote)
|
v
Board Approves Funding
|
v
Council Veto Window
(time-bound)
|
|-- Veto Exercised --> Funds remain in Treasury
|
v
No Veto
|
v
Funds Released
(to executing entity)
It’s also worth noting that some of the tooling required to support this model already exists. The neo.community governance portal built by Flamingo does not need to be abandoned. On the contrary, it already provides a strong foundation for transparent discussion, signalling, and coordination, and could be adapted to support this system with relatively modest changes.
In particular, the ability for token holders to publicly signal their preferences on proposals, and for Council members to signal support or concern, remains extremely valuable - even if final decision-making authority rests with the Strategy & Treasury Board. These signals provide important context, surface sentiment early, and help ensure that Board decisions are made with a clear view of ecosystem perspectives.
In this sense, the Strategy & Treasury Board model builds on existing governance infrastructure rather than replacing it. The goal is to evolve how decisions are made and executed, not to discard tools that we already have.
I would probably propose that Board members publish quarterly reports covering: (a) funds allocated, (b) proposals reviewed and outcomes, (c) strategic priorities and any changes, (d) self-assessment against goals set in prior quarter. The community should determine what quantitative metrics, if any, should accompany this.
What a Strategy & Treasury Board member looks like
It is worth being explicit about the kind of people this role is intended for.
Members elected to the Strategy & Treasury Board should collectively bring a broad range of perspectives and experience. No single individual is expected to embody all of these qualities, but the Board as a whole should cover them.
At a baseline, Board members should have a deep understanding of Neo itself - not just the technology, but the dynamics between different groups within the ecosystem, the needs and constraints of sponsored communities, the realities faced by DApp builders, and the challenges of sustaining long-term growth. They should understand how projects actually get built, how development workflows function in practice, how long things realistically take, and what it costs - in time, money, and coordination - to deliver meaningful outcomes.
Board members should also have a strong grasp of the broader industry. That includes familiarity with other blockchain ecosystems, awareness of current trends, an understanding of what has worked and what has failed elsewhere, and a willingness to learn continuously. This role requires people who actively engage beyond Neo, who are comfortable speaking with other projects, organisations, and ecosystems, and who can bring those learnings back in a grounded and pragmatic way.
Just as importantly, Board members must be willing to listen. They should engage openly with the Neo ecosystem, pay attention to what the community is saying, and be comfortable discussing decisions publicly - especially when those decisions are difficult or unpopular. Transparency and communication are not optional; they are core expectations of the role.
Diversity of background is also critical. A healthy Board should not be drawn from a single constituency. Ideally, it would include individuals with experience building DApps, working within sponsored communities, contributing to foundation or protocol-adjacent organisations, leading grassroots or regional community efforts, and potentially even someone from outside the Neo ecosystem who can provide a fresh and independent perspective.
It is also important to recognise that some of the people best suited to this role may currently be working within sponsored communities or other ecosystem projects. Serving on the Strategy & Treasury Board should be treated as a form of public service. In some cases, that may require individuals to step back from existing roles, at least temporarily, particularly if term limits are introduced. It would be a personal decision for individuals if they are up for the role. This is not a drawback - it is a sign that the role carries real responsibility and demands real focus. Just as in traditional public service, succession and backfilling within teams should be seen as a healthy outcome rather than a loss.
Finally, Board members should have a vision. They should be able to articulate not only what Neo is today, but what it could become - and why. Strategy and treasury decisions are ultimately about shaping the future of the ecosystem. This role requires people who are comfortable thinking long-term, making trade-offs, and committing to a direction, even when that direction involves risk.
Incentives
I also want to address incentives directly, because they matter.
Some portion of GAS rewards should be redirected into an ecosystem treasury or used to fund Strategy & Treasury Board members, where governance work is explicit, visible, and treated as a professional responsibility. The exact level of compensation is open for discussion and should be high enough to attract capable people and stable enough to support sustained focus.
I also believe the level of rewards for Neo Council members beyond the top consensus nodes requires re-evaluation. Once token holders are genuinely able to remove Council members, those rewards can serve a healthy purpose by incentivising DApps, projects, and contributors to compete for Council positions through better infrastructure, tooling, services, and long-term commitment.
However, the current reward structure is disproportionate to the responsibilities being exercised today, particularly if many of the expectations shift to a dedicated Board. I say this as a Council member myself. Under any rebalancing, my own team would see reduced income. It is not pleasant, but it is necessary. Incentives must align with responsibility and output, not merely with position.
Closing
This proposal is not meant to be the final word. It is a starting point.
What I am certain of is that the current governance model is not delivering the transparency, accountability, or speed that Neo now requires. Incremental nudges have not fixed this. Structural change is necessary.
It’s also important to acknowledge what this discussion does not yet cover. What I’ve laid out here is a governance and execution model at the structural and organisational level. It does not attempt to specify how these mechanisms would be implemented at the protocol or code level.
That is partly intentional, and partly a reflection of my own domain. Designing safe, robust protocol-level changes is the responsibility of core developers, and it should be treated with the same care and rigour as any other change to Neo’s foundations.
If this direction resonates with the community, I would fully expect - and welcome - a deeper collaboration with core developers to explore how a model like this could be implemented safely, incrementally, and without compromising network security. My goal here is to articulate the business, governance, and ecosystem needs clearly, so that any technical implementation is grounded in a shared understanding of why we are building it, not just how.
Neo needs a small, trusted group that can mobilise resources as soon as possible.
I welcome feedback, criticism, and alternative ideas. But the time to act was yesterday.
This post is not a final proposal. It is an attempt to document the governance reality Neo is experiencing today and to open a serious discussion about structural change. I’m putting this forward as a starting point, fully expecting that others will have improvements, alternatives, or better ideas.
A quick note before diving in: this is a long document. I’m not known for my brevity, but more importantly, I don’t believe the challenges Neo is facing right now can be reduced to quick takes. The magnitude of the issues at hand requires deep introspection, careful reasoning, and sustained discussion. If you’re not willing to engage at that level, this discussion is probably not for you - and that’s okay.
What follows is based on several years of direct involvement in Neo and its governance at all levels, and on repeated attempts to make the current system work as intended.
Before getting into specifics, I want to be clear about the type of change I am trying to explore.
I am not proposing that we throw out Neo’s existing governance model and start again from scratch. Highly invasive reimaginings of governance come with real risks. First, they take a long time to design, build, test, and gain confidence in - time that I do not believe Neo currently has. Second, large structural changes to governance mechanisms risk destabilising the network itself and, in the worst case, compromising security.
What I am trying to work toward instead is an improvement that builds on what already exists, uses familiar patterns, and can be implemented relatively quickly without introducing unnecessary systemic risk. The goal is to create a shorter, safer path to better execution.
Neo Strategy & Treasury Board
Simply put, I believe Neo needs an agile, elected, funded execution body focused specifically on strategy and treasury allocation.
For the sake of discussion, I’ll call this the Neo Strategy & Treasury Board.
The core idea is simple: the Neo Council remains largely as it is today, focused on broad oversight and consensus and protocol-level responsibilities, while responsibility for ecosystem strategy and treasury execution is delegated to a new group that is explicitly designed to do that work.
This is about acknowledging that governance, when a treasury and long-term strategy matter, cannot be treated as a side job.
I’ll explain why I believe this is necessary below.
Context
In 2025, I made Neo governance one of my top priorities. I led the Centre Point initiative, organising events in Dubai and Singapore, and invested a significant amount of time and effort bringing people together across regions to increase responsibility, accountability, and action from a governance perspective.
In a community meeting mid-last year, I delivered a presentation where I declared “the Neo Council is dead.” The intent was not provocation for its own sake, but to clearly articulate why the Council, as currently structured, was not functioning as an execution body for the ecosystem. To me, the lack of coordinated leadership at the chain level was a gaping hole in the ecosystem, while also representing the largest opportunity for high-impact improvement and mobilisation.
At Centre Point Singapore, we managed to bring together the majority of Council members - something I was very proud of. Only a small number did not attend, some without response and a few for personal reasons, but overall the event felt constructive. We left with what appeared to be alignment on deliverables and expectations: what we expected of the Council, of ourselves, and of each other.
Following that effort, several concrete steps were taken. Flamingo volunteered to build the neo.community governance portal we all agreed we needed so we would have a place to organise, discuss, and approve or reject proposals. We held multiple follow-up meetings tracking deliverables, which were recorded and published publicly. We created a public-facing Discord channel so the community could observe governance activity in real time.
Despite all of this, it has remained extremely difficult to get the Neo Council to consistently act. We had some small wins, but equally as many failures. Engagement is uneven, decisions are slow or stalled entirely, and even basic procedural steps frequently fail to materialise.
The biggest issue for me is that I do not feel sufficient drive from the Council. Without that, it is very hard for anything to move forward.
The core pattern I keep seeing
Across Neo’s history - from the community councils in Neo’s early years through to the current Neo Council - the same pattern repeats. When decision makers start making decisions part-time (e.g. they have their own projects to run), the quality, speed, and effectiveness of their actions trend towards near zero. I speak in generalities, as there are always individual expectations.
True governance and decision-making do not work when treated as a voluntary, part-time responsibility layered on top of already demanding roles.
This is not unique to Neo. As blockchain ecosystems mature, many encounter the same structural issue. Early governance models often rely on goodwill, prestige, or light incentives. That can work while treasuries are small, energy is high, or decisions are infrequent. As responsibilities grow and decisions become more continuous, those models begin to break down.
Participation drops, decisions slow, and accountability becomes diffuse. Important actions are delayed not because people don’t care, but because governance work competes with full-time responsibilities that inevitably take priority.
Ecosystems that move past this stage tend to reach the same conclusion: oversight can remain decentralised, but execution cannot remain voluntary. Strategy, treasury management, and operational decision-making must be treated as professional responsibilities with clear mandates, expectations, and accountability.
GrantShares illustrates this clearly. The original intent was that highly involved community groups - i.e. the sponsored communities - would responsibly and efficiently review proposals. In practice, it has become a significant burden. Reviewing grants is always the last task on an already overloaded to-do list, and the result is slow and inconsistent decision-making. (Don’t read what I’m not saying, GrantShares has done a lot of good, but at a fraction of its potential).
Sponsored communities, in particular, have taken on more and more responsibility over the years. Every one of them is managing more projects today than they were three years ago, with broader scopes and higher expectations, often without a corresponding increase in funding to expand capacity. These are also the same groups driving the majority of visible governance engagement, coordination, and follow-through within the Neo ecosystem.
At the same time, this is not a problem unique to sponsored communities. Many Council members who are less directly embedded in day-to-day ecosystem work also have full-time responsibilities elsewhere. Their constraints are real, even if they are less visible. The result is a system where governance responsibility naturally concentrates around the most engaged participants, while others struggle to participate consistently.
I have now come to the conclusion that asking any group - whether sponsored communities or individual Council members - to absorb continuous proposal review, nuanced trade-off analysis, and high-impact decision-making on top of existing full-time obligations does not scale. The issue is not commitment or intent. It is capacity.
To quote the great Ron Swanson: “Never half-ass two things. Whole ass one thing.”
Some may argue that with 21 Council members, there should always be enough availability to make decisions. In my experience, the opposite is true. The more people involved in a decision, the harder it becomes to move. I have spent much of last year trying to drive engagement, and nearly every step has felt like an uphill battle.
This context matters because Neo is now facing decisions where delays, ambiguity, and unclear ownership (both in decision making and assets) carry real consequences.
Why this matters now
This brings us to the current discussion around Neo Foundation funds and who should manage them. I believe we have been approaching this point for some time, but recent events have made it impossible to ignore. The ecosystem is demanding more transparency and accountability from leadership.
I’m not interested in relitigating the past. What matters is this: treasury funds belong to token holders. If we are serious about decentralisation, those funds should not sit indefinitely with founders. They should be overseen by token holders or by an elected body acting on their behalf.
The obvious solution that would come to mind for most would be to move this responsibility to the Neo Council. This is also alluded to in the Neo 4 roadmap, where it is suggested that the Council would be responsible for financial management, though it is not yet explicitly laid out in what capacity.
However, based on lived experience and everything outlined above, I do not believe the Neo Council - as currently structured - is prepared to manage a treasury of any meaningful size. Nor is it efficient enough to define any kind of strategic plan for ecosystem investment. Although I will continue to work at it if we cannot decide on any improvements, I feel it will always be a small, already overloaded subset of the Council trying to push for action, weighed down by members who will not engage often enough for anything meaningful to occur.
Even after Centre Point Singapore, with all the commitments made, we struggled to get enough votes for an outcome on a simple pilot proposal for a European developer hub. We could not even reliably get Council members to sign up to the governance portal, let alone participate consistently in discussion and voting. That reality makes it difficult to imagine the Council responsibly managing a large treasury or ecosystem level strategy.
Part of reaching that conclusion required me to reassess my own assumptions about the role of the Council.
What the Neo Council is capable of - and what it is not
I want to be clear about where I think I went wrong in 2025 in how I approached governance, and what I have learned from that experience. It is not that the Neo Council is ineffective at decision-making altogether. Rather, I have come to understand that it is suited to a different class of decision-making than what Neo currently needs most.
The Neo Council is not well suited to making highly specific, fast-moving, day-to-day decisions that require deep engagement, frequent iteration, and constant interaction with proposers and constituents. Reaching alignment across 21 members on detailed funding decisions, nuanced trade-offs, or evolving proposals is slow by nature. Expecting daily or near-daily engagement at that level simply does not scale, regardless of individual intent or effort.
Where the Council can work well is in making infrequent, high-level decisions that require broad alignment rather than continuous execution. Examples include protocol parameter changes, network-level adjustments, or other decisions where the scope is well defined and the impact is systemic rather than operational. These decisions still require care and discussion, but they do not demand sustained, hands-on involvement or rapid turnaround. The Council still needs to improve in these areas, but it is well within its capabilities.
In this same vein, I believe the Council is capable and positioned to elect and oversee a Strategy & Treasury Board. This is not something that needs to happen daily. It might occur on a regular cadence, such as annually, or with the Council stepping in only when necessary to remove or replace a Board member who is not performing or no longer represents the interests of the ecosystem. These are important decisions, but they are episodic rather than continuous.
The Council can also engage with the Strategy & Treasury Board on an as-needed basis - providing guidance, feedback, or acting as a backstop when major concerns arise - without bearing the burden of being “always on.” That distinction is critical. The current system, or at least what I’ve been asking the system to do, places too much pressure on the Council to be permanently engaged in execution-level governance, which is neither realistic nor sustainable.
The model I am proposing is not about sidelining the Council. It is about aligning responsibilities with capacity. By allowing the Council to focus on what it can do well, and delegating continuous strategy and treasury execution to a dedicated group, we can reduce friction, improve decision speed, and avoid burnout - while preserving legitimacy, oversight, and security.
The Neo Strategy & Treasury Board (more detail)
So what I am proposing is a model where the Neo Council remains largely as it is today. Its primary purpose remains network security and protocol-level responsibilities. We still need to address the ability for token holders to remove and replace Council members, but that is outside the scope of this discussion.
I have come to accept that the Council is not designed for fast, focused, and continuous execution - which is exactly what Neo needs right now.
Responsibility for ecosystem strategy and treasury allocation would therefore shift to a new group with a very specific mandate.
The Strategy & Treasury Board would be small - ideally five members, seven at most - composed of individuals rather than teams. Members would be elected by the Neo Council and would be known, identifiable people with public track records. These would be paid, full-time or near full-time roles.
The Strategy & Treasury Board would operate in parallel to other existing groups as an elected, token-holder-facing body. Provided the Foundation allocates funds into a dedicated treasury (the Foundation’s willingness to engage on this idea is critical to this being workable), this Board would manage those funds transparently, allowing token holders to more directly observe, influence, and engage with strategy and treasury decisions.
Responsibilities of the Strategy & Treasury Board
The Board’s responsibilities would be ongoing and operational in nature.
First, the Board is responsible for strategy and priority setting. This includes defining and publishing clear twelve-month ecosystem priorities, translating those priorities into fundable focus areas, reviewing and adjusting them quarterly, and explicitly deciding what does not align with current goals.
Second, the Board acts as a fiduciary steward of the treasury allocated to it. This means maintaining a clear public view of allocated, committed, and remaining funds, pacing spending responsibly, and structuring funding in phases where appropriate.
Third, the Board is responsible for proposal review and funding decisions. Proposals may be submitted by any ecosystem participant, discussed publicly, and voted on by the Board in the open. Votes are individual and attributable - everyone can see which Board members voted for or against a proposal, along with the rationale for those decisions.
Fourth, the Board delegates rather than executes. It does not implement projects, sign legal contracts, run operations, or control protocol development. Instead, it allocates funds to existing entities who then execute the work and, where required, enter into legal agreements with third-party partners. This preserves legal clarity while ensuring ecosystem-wide transparency around funding decisions. (I'll note my assumptions regarding legal entity status here may be incorrect, as it's outside my area of expertise. If the Board needs to be registered as a legal entity, that would need to be explored).
Fifth, the Board provides light oversight and accountability. It sets reasonable reporting expectations for funded initiatives, reviews progress at agreed milestones, decides whether to proceed with subsequent funding phases, and publishes summaries of outcomes and learnings.
Finally, the Board has a clear responsibility around communication, transparency, and representation. Board members are expected to publish regular quarterly reports, communicate decisions clearly, engage publicly with the community, speak with media, participate in interviews, attend events, and represent Neo in this capacity. This is not a behind-the-scenes role; Board members should be visible and comfortable speaking for Neo.
Establishing a Board Charter before elections
Before any elections take place, the community and Council should collaboratively draft and ratify a formal charter for the Strategy & Treasury Board.
This charter would define the expectations, constraints, and accountability mechanisms that Board members operate under. It should address, at minimum: the scope and boundaries of Board authority; conflict of interest rules and recusal requirements; reporting obligations and cadence; the process and thresholds for Board member removal; any term limits or rotation requirements; and the metrics or criteria against which Board performance will be evaluated.
By establishing this charter in advance, we ensure that candidates know exactly what they are committing to, that token holders and the Council have clear standards for accountability, and that future disputes can be resolved against an agreed framework rather than ad hoc interpretation. The charter itself should be treated as a living document, amendable through a defined process, but its initial ratification should be a prerequisite for moving to elections.
This is something we failed to do before we established the Neo Council.
Governance Flow
To make this model clearer, the relationship between participants looks roughly like this:
Board members are elected by the Council. The Board operates independently within its mandate. The Council would not need to approve expenditures, but could retain veto power before funds are disbursed and may remove or replace Board members at any time. Authority flows downward; accountability flows upward.
It’s also worth noting that this is not a wholly new pattern for Neo. The Council already elects specialised groups such as Oracle nodes. The Strategy & Treasury Board would be another delegated body with a clearly defined purpose.
Simply put, strategy and treasury governance need to be treated as a profession, not as an add-on.
An illustrative example of how this could work
To make this more concrete, it may help to walk through a simple, hypothetical example of what a twelve-month strategy set by the Strategy & Treasury Board could look like in practice.
This is not a proposal or a recommendation - it is purely illustrative.
Imagine that, after reviewing ecosystem needs, industry trends, and community feedback, the Board identifies real-world assets as a high-potential growth area for Neo over the next twelve months. The Board might determine that bringing tokenised real-world value onto Neo is a strategic priority and decide to allocate a defined portion of the annual budget toward initiatives that increase real-world asset value locked on the network.
Rather than building anything itself, the Board would translate that priority into funding focus areas. That could include supporting teams working on RWA-related infrastructure, funding pilot projects that onboard real-world assets, or incentivising integrations that demonstrably increase on-chain asset value. Proposals aligned with this theme would be prioritised for review and funding.
At the same time, the Board might recognise that documentation and open-source reference implementations are a bottleneck for developer adoption. As part of the same twelve-month strategy, it could earmark a smaller portion of the budget toward improving documentation, tutorials, and example repositories. That funding could then flow to teams willing to maintain high-quality developer resources that lower the barrier to entry.
The Board might also identify a specific region - for example, Latin America - as a high-impact area for growth. Based on that assessment, it could allocate funds to support developer participation in regional events, subsidise travel or hackathon attendance, or fund local initiatives that strengthen Neo’s presence in that ecosystem. Again, the Board would not execute these activities itself, but would fund organisations and community teams positioned to do so effectively.
Finally, the Board could decide to reserve a portion of the budget for ecosystem usage incentives. That might include subsidising transaction fees for specific applications, supporting usage campaigns for existing projects, or funding experiments that encourage real user activity rather than speculative deployment.
In this model, the Board’s role is to define priorities, allocate budgets, and approve aligned proposals. The ecosystem responds by building, executing, and delivering outcomes. Over time, the Board reviews what is working, adjusts allocations, and updates priorities as conditions change.
Example flow as seen below:
It’s also worth noting that some of the tooling required to support this model already exists. The neo.community governance portal built by Flamingo does not need to be abandoned. On the contrary, it already provides a strong foundation for transparent discussion, signalling, and coordination, and could be adapted to support this system with relatively modest changes.
In particular, the ability for token holders to publicly signal their preferences on proposals, and for Council members to signal support or concern, remains extremely valuable - even if final decision-making authority rests with the Strategy & Treasury Board. These signals provide important context, surface sentiment early, and help ensure that Board decisions are made with a clear view of ecosystem perspectives.
In this sense, the Strategy & Treasury Board model builds on existing governance infrastructure rather than replacing it. The goal is to evolve how decisions are made and executed, not to discard tools that we already have.
I would probably propose that Board members publish quarterly reports covering: (a) funds allocated, (b) proposals reviewed and outcomes, (c) strategic priorities and any changes, (d) self-assessment against goals set in prior quarter. The community should determine what quantitative metrics, if any, should accompany this.
What a Strategy & Treasury Board member looks like
It is worth being explicit about the kind of people this role is intended for.
Members elected to the Strategy & Treasury Board should collectively bring a broad range of perspectives and experience. No single individual is expected to embody all of these qualities, but the Board as a whole should cover them.
At a baseline, Board members should have a deep understanding of Neo itself - not just the technology, but the dynamics between different groups within the ecosystem, the needs and constraints of sponsored communities, the realities faced by DApp builders, and the challenges of sustaining long-term growth. They should understand how projects actually get built, how development workflows function in practice, how long things realistically take, and what it costs - in time, money, and coordination - to deliver meaningful outcomes.
Board members should also have a strong grasp of the broader industry. That includes familiarity with other blockchain ecosystems, awareness of current trends, an understanding of what has worked and what has failed elsewhere, and a willingness to learn continuously. This role requires people who actively engage beyond Neo, who are comfortable speaking with other projects, organisations, and ecosystems, and who can bring those learnings back in a grounded and pragmatic way.
Just as importantly, Board members must be willing to listen. They should engage openly with the Neo ecosystem, pay attention to what the community is saying, and be comfortable discussing decisions publicly - especially when those decisions are difficult or unpopular. Transparency and communication are not optional; they are core expectations of the role.
Diversity of background is also critical. A healthy Board should not be drawn from a single constituency. Ideally, it would include individuals with experience building DApps, working within sponsored communities, contributing to foundation or protocol-adjacent organisations, leading grassroots or regional community efforts, and potentially even someone from outside the Neo ecosystem who can provide a fresh and independent perspective.
It is also important to recognise that some of the people best suited to this role may currently be working within sponsored communities or other ecosystem projects. Serving on the Strategy & Treasury Board should be treated as a form of public service. In some cases, that may require individuals to step back from existing roles, at least temporarily, particularly if term limits are introduced. It would be a personal decision for individuals if they are up for the role. This is not a drawback - it is a sign that the role carries real responsibility and demands real focus. Just as in traditional public service, succession and backfilling within teams should be seen as a healthy outcome rather than a loss.
Finally, Board members should have a vision. They should be able to articulate not only what Neo is today, but what it could become - and why. Strategy and treasury decisions are ultimately about shaping the future of the ecosystem. This role requires people who are comfortable thinking long-term, making trade-offs, and committing to a direction, even when that direction involves risk.
Incentives
I also want to address incentives directly, because they matter.
Some portion of GAS rewards should be redirected into an ecosystem treasury or used to fund Strategy & Treasury Board members, where governance work is explicit, visible, and treated as a professional responsibility. The exact level of compensation is open for discussion and should be high enough to attract capable people and stable enough to support sustained focus.
I also believe the level of rewards for Neo Council members beyond the top consensus nodes requires re-evaluation. Once token holders are genuinely able to remove Council members, those rewards can serve a healthy purpose by incentivising DApps, projects, and contributors to compete for Council positions through better infrastructure, tooling, services, and long-term commitment.
However, the current reward structure is disproportionate to the responsibilities being exercised today, particularly if many of the expectations shift to a dedicated Board. I say this as a Council member myself. Under any rebalancing, my own team would see reduced income. It is not pleasant, but it is necessary. Incentives must align with responsibility and output, not merely with position.
Closing
This proposal is not meant to be the final word. It is a starting point.
What I am certain of is that the current governance model is not delivering the transparency, accountability, or speed that Neo now requires. Incremental nudges have not fixed this. Structural change is necessary.
It’s also important to acknowledge what this discussion does not yet cover. What I’ve laid out here is a governance and execution model at the structural and organisational level. It does not attempt to specify how these mechanisms would be implemented at the protocol or code level.
That is partly intentional, and partly a reflection of my own domain. Designing safe, robust protocol-level changes is the responsibility of core developers, and it should be treated with the same care and rigour as any other change to Neo’s foundations.
If this direction resonates with the community, I would fully expect - and welcome - a deeper collaboration with core developers to explore how a model like this could be implemented safely, incrementally, and without compromising network security. My goal here is to articulate the business, governance, and ecosystem needs clearly, so that any technical implementation is grounded in a shared understanding of why we are building it, not just how.
Neo needs a small, trusted group that can mobilise resources as soon as possible.
I welcome feedback, criticism, and alternative ideas. But the time to act was yesterday.