COZ has published a positional essay arguing that Neo’s foundational design had an implied transition period from founder-led origins toward community stewardship. However, according to COZ, the transition has never been completed, and that the only legitimate basis for the ecosystem’s future is a broader, more durable distribution of stewardship across the community.

The article is not an endorsement of either Da Hongfei’s Neo Foundation Restructuring Proposal or Erik Zhang’s Neo Governance Restoration Proposal, and it does not announce any new COZ initiative, funding commitment, or governance mechanism.

Instead, COZ stakes out a third-position framework that argues neither continued founder concentration nor a substitute concentration in long-serving contributor organizations, including COZ itself, is a legitimate answer to Neo’s current situation.

The promise that never matured

COZ’s central argument is that Neo’s original design carried an implied transition from what the essay calls founder-origin legitimacy toward broader stewardship, and that the transition was never meaningfully completed. The essay identifies four elements of Neo’s original promise: digital assets, digital identity, smart contracts, and a permissionless system.

The permissionless system was initially designed to include stake, participation, and stewardship that can broaden over time, rather than to allow Neo to remain permanently concentrated.

COZ frames the stewardship promise as political rather than purely structural. The intention, according to COZ, was for contributors across Neo, including builders, educators, organizers, and operators, to become meaningful stakeholders rather than merely users. Over time, stakeholders were supposed to mature into governors. This vision never materialized.

COZ also stated that the ecosystem has not produced a broad, durable class of governance-capable participants, which has left a small group bearing the burden while the wider community stayed passive, fragmented, or too weakly organized to redirect the system. COZ extends this to the mechanics of participation itself:

“That is why participation alone never solved the problem. A few committed groups can keep trying to move the ecosystem forward, but without enough independence, authority, or durable power to redirect it, they were not truly governing. They were compensating for a system that never meaningfully transferred power downward.”

A self-reinforcing cycle

COZ sets out a five-step negative cycle, identifying it as the mechanism by which the governance deficit perpetuates itself:

  • Weak support pathways produce thinner participant continuity
  • Thinner continuity produces weaker stakeholder formation
  • Weaker stakeholder formation produces weaker governance legitimacy
  • Weaker governance legitimacy reduces builder credibility
  • Reduced builder credibility makes it harder to deepen the ecosystem

COZ cites examples like the Neo X Grind Hackathon and Polaris Launchpad as evidence that Neo is capable of generating momentum, while arguing that the ecosystem struggles to retain and integrate participants without central approval. While Neo might still be able to generate moments of attention, it struggles to convert that new attention into longevity.

From stewardship to vendor

COZ contrasts the 2017 to 2019 period, which it characterizes as defined by larger ecosystem grants, competition awards, and more endowment-like support, with a later structural shift toward narrower contract-basis work.

The essay argues that contract structures, when they become the dominant form of participation, teach people to behave more like vendors than stewards.

COZ has standing, but not a mandate

In one of the essay’s load-bearing passages, COZ explicitly disclaims its own entitlement to act as a community proxy. Long service, COZ writes, does not erase participation in a structurally flawed system. COZ states, “No contributor group, including us, gets to convert burden-bearing into political entitlement.”

That self-limitation frames a model in which COZ rejects what it calls “contributor capture” as a substitute for founder capture. The essay names five categories, arguing that none individually equate to the community:

  • founders alone
  • institutions alone
  • tokenholders considered in the abstract
  • contributor organizations alone, and
  • any coalition whose claim rests mainly on historical closeness, service record, or accumulated influence

COZ states, “If founder-origin legitimacy failed to mature into broad ecosystem stewardship, then the answer cannot be to replace founder concentration with contributor concentration under a different name. That does not solve the problem. It repeats it.”

What legitimacy would require

COZ argues for four structural requirements necessary to rebuild governance legitimacy:

  • Stronger distribution of support, stake, stewardship, and governing capacity
  • Clearer pathways by which contributors can become durable participants in shaping Neo
  • Real ownership for ecosystem participants rather than prolonged dependence
  • Institutions capable of turning contribution into stake, stake into stewardship, and stewardship into governance participation

The essay does not specify what those institutions would look like, who would build them, or on what timeline. COZ’s formal position statement is:

“We are with the community. We will support, to the fullest extent of our ability, any proactive governance direction that genuinely delivers on the promise and vision this ecosystem is supposed to represent: broader stewardship, real ownership, deeper participation, and institutions capable of honoring the original doctrine that the ecosystem should mature beyond narrow control.”

That framing is deliberately broader than picking a side between the two co-founder proposals. Throughout the essay, COZ keeps its argument at the level of structural principles rather than pointing to specific individuals, institutions, or proposals.

What comes next

COZ closes the essay by acknowledging that Neo now has to complete its stewardship transition under worse conditions than before, citing increased market competition, reduced timelines, and ongoing political dysfunction.

The full essay can be found at the link below:
https://coz.io/blog/the-only-legitimate-option-is-the-community/

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