On May 14th at the Consensus 2019 event in New York, NEO co-founder Da Hongfei gave a presentation on “The Next Phase” of NEO. During the speech, Hongfei revealed the details of a new USD$100m EcoBoost program designed to support the growth of the NEO ecosystem.

EcoBoost

The EcoBoost program will focus on seed project activation, dApp growth support, infrastructure development, and institutional collaboration. In addition, the fund will be available to projects at different phases of their life cycle, from seed phase, through to growth, and maturity.

Support provided by the EcoBoost program will include tech training and support, project collaborations, community support, liquidity channel recommendations, events, joint marketing efforts, and more.

Speaking on the goals of the program, Hongfei said “Without an ecosystem – blockchain – you can say it’s useless. It’s just a bunch of technology,” and encouraged developers and projects working in the blockchain industry to reach out via eg@neo.org.

Next Generation Internet & NEO 3.0

Hongfei also outlined his vision for the next generation internet and NEO’s role in its future. In Hongfei’s view, a paradigm shift is taking place that will see a “great migration” and “ignite a new wave of tech startups.”

In this new paradigm, Hongfei believes that we will begin to rely less on trusted parties, and empower users to retain control and ownership of data. Due to platforms collecting less information, applications will become more “browserized,” allowing users to view the data rather than hosting it internally, whilst infrastructure will become more decentralized to prevent a single point of failure.

According to Hongfei, the new internet will consist of four layers: The content neutral network, the state & settlement layer, the transaction layer, and the application layer. NEO’s main body of work falls within the state & settlement and transaction layers, whilst NEO 3.0 milestones such as NeoID, NeoFS, and oracle support will have touch points across all layers.

Governance

Another topic discussed by Hongfei was governance. A map of NEO’s governance structure was provided, outlining the relationships between the different teams and organizations. Among the recent updates included Hongfei’s role as CEO of NEO Global Development (NGD) in charge of strategy execution and the sponsored communities reporting directly to the NEO Foundation, led by Hongfei and NEO’s other co-founder, Erik Zhang.

Hongfei also revealed that NEO currently has approximately US$440m in NEO and GAS assets, and US$12m in fiat and other crypto assets. A draft version of NEO’s financial report is expected to be released within a week, with the full version to be released in July.

Mission

Hongfei stated NEO’s main mission is “to provide the optimal infrastructure for mass adoption,” which he expects to achieve through NEO 3.0 and the hiring of talented people such as John deVadoss and the NGD Seattle team.

Further, Hongfei reiterated that NEO’s philosophy is one of “pragmatic idealism,” noting, “Pure pragmatism can’t imagine a bold future. Pure idealism can’t get anything done. It is the delicate blend of both that drives innovation.”