Head of NGD Seattle John deVadoss was present with other NEO leadership at the Consensus NYC cryptocurrency conference. During the event, deVadoss caught up with two YouTube personalities: “Mr. Kristoff” and “That Martini Guy”. In consecutive interviews, deVadoss outlined the role of his newly formed Seattle office and advocated NEO’s central identity as a platform.

Mr. Kristoff

When asked about the “latest and greatest with NEO” by Mr. Kristoff, deVadoss mentioned NGD’s new Seattle office, February’s NEO DevCon, and the development roadmap for NEO 3.0. However, deVadoss was most passionate about the developer experience, saying that “new assets in terms of tooling, libraries, frameworks, extensions…that gets me particularly excited.”

“Da’s vision of the smart economy, making the smart economy real, is the driving, core principle for NEO.” He elaborated that this core vision makes NEO one of a few cryptocurrency projects that truly qualify as platforms. While acknowledging that there are other projects with excellent marketing teams in the space, he clarified, “We are not a marketing-led team. We are a platform team, and we essentially have a goal of realizing the smart economy. This is a long journey, this is the beginning of the game,” he added.

“We remain committed to realizing this platform vision. And things will go up and down, back and forth, and it really doesn’t do anything for us, because we are driven by this core principle.”

When asked about any additional partnerships for NEO in 2019, deVadoss answered, “We will see a few more in the fall” which will be announced later in the year.

“Now that we are in Seattle, our reach goes well beyond what it used to be, so we are cooking some things right now.”

That Martini Guy

deVadoss fielded a question about NEO’s choice of Seattle, and answered, “‘I spent close to two decades at Microsoft working on platforms. Seattle, I would say, is the platform city. You have Microsoft, you have Amazon Web Services, you have Google more and more in Portland near Seattle, and you have the Oracle cloud.”

“NEO’s ambition is [as] a platform. [We want to be] a platform for dApps, a platform for the smart economy. We want to be where platforms are being built in the US, and that was Seattle.”

“The way I see it, is this is a very long game.”

deVadoss also spoke on what he saw as the future of the NEO blockchain, saying, “There will not be a single ledger. Yes, there will be a base layer for settlement, but there will be a number of diverse layer two solutions…We want to be both the layer two as well as the base layer solution. That gives us a very good handle on scalability.”

“We haven’t seen anything yet. The way they say it is, you know, ‘The trailers play, but the movie is so far away.’ And so for us, the dips, the ups and down, they do not sway us. We are a platform company. Our goal is to make Da’s vision of the smart economy real. That’s a very long game we are playing, so you won’t see us doing this flashy marketing.”

When asked what NEO has to offer short-term minded people, deVadoss answered, “I would say one thing. If you want to bet on a player who is truly building a platform for this next wave of dApps, if you want to bet on a player who has a very clear vision of what the future looks like, then, bet on NEO.”

He concluded by stating that in the next 3-6 months, NEO will be releasing significant new information on its upcoming version 3.0 blockchain, and also added, “We are betting very heavily” on developer experience. “Tooling, libraries, frameworks, we’ll see more from the Seattle office, and from Shanghai as well. In terms of how we can attract more developers, there are millions of people out there, and make it easy for them to build dApps and to build smart contracts.”

John deVadoss is the head of NEO Global Development’s Seattle office.

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