In a blog post made on the 20th of April, NEO announced an extension of its Sponsor Giveback Plan. The Sponsor Giveback Plan launched on the 5th of December, 2017 and ran until March 15th, 2018, designed to “unconditionally give back to NEO’s early sponsors,” sharing the significant amount of funds and resources it collected for R&D and ecosystem development.
The Sponsor Giveback Plan lets participants who invested in NEO’s seed round, ICO1 and ICO2 claim the fiat equivalent of the total they contributed in either RMB or NEO tokens. The NEO tokens acquired during the initial funding phases do not need to be returned to be eligible for the giveback. The NEO Giveback Plan was initially announced in a blog post on the 30th of October. The details of how the plan works and who’s eligible can be read here.
In spite of NEO’s success with its Giveback Plan, only a small number of sponsors have provided their information to NEO to claim their funds, which is why NEO has decided to extend its Giveback Plan. As part of this extension period, NEO claims that the submission channel will remain open, so that “[we] are able to give back to every NEO sponsor.” You can visit this page to submit your details for the Giveback plan if you haven’t done so.
In total, NEO received and fulfilled 558 requests for its Giveback Plan, with a total remit of 15,546,943.58 RMB, equal to 52.46% of the total amount raised of its initial funding for ecosystem development. NEO claims that the pool funding came from the ”unspent portion of funds raised during the early fundraising rounds.”
NEO also gave details for when the submission channel will close. Submissions will discontinue at 23:59 (UTC+8) on May 31st, 2018, and there will be no further extensions. It’s claimed that once this final extension finishes, the remaining funds will be donated to further academic research on behalf of the NEO Foundation.
To conclude the post, NEO states that it has become the first open-source blockchain to give back sponsors’ entire contributions and that it thanks all of its sponsors and current community members. NEO hopes to continuously improve and implement its shared vision for the new, Smart Economy.
About The Author: Matthew North
Matthew North is a freelance writer and journalist who resides in East Asia. He spends his time writing and learning about financial technologies like the Blockchain and digital currencies. You can follow him on twitter @fintech_matthew.
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