Fabio Canesin, co-founder of Neon Exchange (NEX), published a message on the NEO subreddit regarding the progress of the project. NEX is building a decentralized trading platform on the NEO blockchain along with a new payment service medium.
As interest in the NEX project was high, the company held a lottery program to fairly determine who would have access to the token sale. The lottery was completed in April, with the token sale scheduled to be held at the end of the month.
NEX made the decision to register its token as a European Security to ensure full compliance and protect investors. NEX addressed its rationale in a Medium post last month:
“…we believe that every exchange token is in practice a security. These tokens primarily derive their value from the success of the exchange, not from any fixed utility or the efforts of the individuals holding the tokens.
Just ask yourself: What would be the value of an exchange token if the exchange stopped running? If the website went offline and no one continued to develop the project? If there was no fee collected by the platform? The true value of exchange tokens is strongly tied to the success of the platform.”
The process of receiving final approval from the Financial Market Authority has taken longer than expected, forcing NEX to delay its token sale. This has not prevented NEX from continuing development of the platform. However, community questions regarding the progress of the project prompted Fabio to post an update to, “easy [sic] the anxious ones posting rumors every day.”
In his update, Fabio reiterated that development is progressing well. In addition, he announced that beta testers would be selected from lottery winners as early as June 18th.
Fabio also noted a decision to not publicly post any architectural information due to copycat projects:
“We decided to not publish any sketch of any kind of our architecture to public in the foreseeable future as we have seen several players copy NEX ideas, we take every possible competitor, current and future, very seriously. We consider currently coinbase to be our main competition since their recent announcement to follow NEX direction.”
In regards to legal progress, Fabio said that NEX has a “complete legal structure in place” with legal teams in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and the USA. NEX HQ is located in Liechtenstein with a subsidiary in Delaware, USA. In addition, NEX has already formed banking relationships and established bank accounts.
As a final note, Fabio reiterated that the FMA delays are not caused by compliance issues, but rather because NEX is pioneering a new legal approach to token sales:
“Very important to stress: we have had no issue whatsoever to this date, but this is breaking legal ground and due to this fact and complexity is taking longer than initially informed to us, just that. [sic]”
The full Reddit post can be found at the link below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NEO/comments/8raxwd/to_the_nex_community/?st=JIG5C2BI&sh=f8c84777
More information on Neon Exchange can be found at the below links.
About The Author: Dean Jeffs
Dean is a digital project manager who has worked extensively with start ups and agencies in the marketing space. Fascinated by the potential applications of blockchain technology, Dean has a passion for realising the new smart economy.
More posts by Dean Jeffs