The Architect
Shanghai
Joined August 2014
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Guy on the train is building PowerPoint slide by slide.
My workstation at home is running agents 24/7.
The gap is getting wild.
Malcolm Lerider retweeted
.@FlamingoFinance, the primary DeFi platform on Neo N3, has been exploited through a vulnerability in its staking contract reward calculation. The attacker minted approximately 2.19 trillion $FLM tokens & used them to drain liquidity from the trading pools
neonewstoday.com/defi/flamin…
Published independent research on Neo 2026–2030 while Phase 0 is still to kick off:
lerider.com/neo/index.html
Priors on record before the process shapes them, and time to improve it with people who know parts of this better than I do.
12 segments ranked, 6 falsification criteria, and a pre-registered prediction of Phase 0's output I'll score myself against publicly.
v1.0, confidence-tagged, gaps marked. Sources, a different weighting, or a case that the core reframe is wrong. It all folds into v1.1, contributors credited.
Disclosure: I hold a Phase 0 research seat. Self-funded, no NF or NGD money.
@Neo_Blockchain
$NEO
Malcolm Lerider retweeted
When @FlamingoFinance launched in 2020, it hit a TVL of nearly $1.6 billion. On August 29, the remaining $500,000 was mostly drained.
It's now been 3 days. Nothing publicly from @Neo_Blockchain.
No warnings. No acknowledgment. No plan forward. Nothing.
No one has said a word outside a few Discord messages.
How did it happen?
A user (maybe random, maybe not, who knows?) figured out how to mint trillions of $FLM and drain the platform's LPs.
They minted approximately 2.19 TRILLION FLM, using an attack vector between Flamingo's lending and staking contracts.
Then swapped it for nearly everything of value. According to the Flamingo Discord server, only about 11k $bNEO and some $FUSD were left behind.
That bNEO was left behind because the on-chain OrderBook contract made it technically impossible to imbalance the pools so drastically.
And the FUSD? Well, the Flamingo team doesn't know why that was left behind, either.
The bigger problem?
Earlier this year, the Flamingo Finance maintainers publicly released a letter alleging that Neo Global Development and Neo Foundation failed to deliver promised assets and operational support.
For years, the team has publicly called for changes to the Neo code to lower transaction costs.
(Worth noting: the Flamingo Finance maintainers do not hold the keys to their own smart contracts, and that contract-upgrade authority rests with NGD and NF.)
More recently, the Flamingo team asked for help in resolving:
> widespread CEX delistings,
> bridge issues from dependency problems, and worse,
> disbursements they expected to receive from NGD and NF that never arrived.
Those calls fell on deaf ears.
Now what?
The Neo Council has voted to freeze the attackers wallet. The address is: NcNCXJf2H8GSHp8MYSgJRCjRvPjznasZMy.
At this point, I'm not certain how much of the stolen funds have been liquidated or moved out of the Neo ecosystem.
Neo is currently embroiled in a battle between the two co-founders who are fighting over a $400 million treasury (as of Q1 2026).
Flamingo was the largest activity-driving platform in the ecosystem. Now Neo doesn't even have that.
Both can be true. A chain can be alive and still be losing ground. Resilience and momentum are not the same measure.
The float analogy does not quite hold, by the way. Buffett's float was other people's money, held as a liability. A treasury is equity. Nothing comes due, so nothing enforces the discipline. That has to come from us.
Da is right that the timeline is longer than 3-5 years. Neo has the capital to think on that horizon. What we have lacked is the discipline in how it gets deployed.
We fund teams without a record, building what has already been proven elsewhere, which means we arrive after the users are gone. Proven demand is not available demand.
If we bet ahead of demand, and I think agentic AI is where that bet sits, then the discipline has to move to the other side: unproven market, proven operators. Both cannot be unproven at once.
@Neo_Blockchain $NEO
teapawt.org/dahongfei/status/20925…
Personally, both as a member of the community and as the founder of Neo, I respect Dylan and appreciate his research.
A few thoughts on this post:
I disagree that Neo is a dying chain. A chain is either alive and still building, or it is dead. There is no middle ground—and Neo is very much alive.
I’ll take “dinochain” as a compliment. It means we have survived multiple cycles and continued adapting to each new era, even when we occasionally fell behind.
I’m not thinking about how Neo can “win” in the next three to five years. If we believe a new financial order will be shaped by several technologies—and that blockchain and crypto will be among them—then we need to think on a much longer timeline.
I intend to embrace x402, AI, and the agentic economy, because I see in them the same kind of opportunity I saw in crypto in 2012.
We may disagree on the path, but I appreciate Dylan pushing this discussion forward.
I want to share where I have landed on the Meteor initiative, because it isn't the story I was going to tell yesterday.
Meteor exists to give NEO a shared product direction. The Council was asked to nominate a research team.
Only 5 of ~21 Council members engaged.
@Neo_Blockchain $neo
1/5
I am personally disappointed. I publicly volunteered to help and had no clear path in.
If Meteor is to reflect community voice, a path from volunteer to seat needs to exist.
4/5
I would like to join if the council trust me with a nomination.
$NEO @Neo_Blockchain
teapawt.org/coz_official/status/20…
Neo is starting a public product-strategy process to decide what it should build toward next.
Neo has the technology, builders, and community.
The work now is to choose where to focus them.
Meteor will define Neo’s next five-year opportunity space, assess candidate directions against shared criteria, and produce a ranked shortlist for the ecosystem to review.
coz.io/blog/operation-meteor…
Malcolm Lerider retweeted
This feels a bit disingenuous. Ethereum is more decentralized than Neo, and the Ethereum Foundation is actually decentralizing and spinning off new groups
Meanwhile, we haven’t seen any action on the decentralization and governance strategies, from either founder, since said announcements
I get that we want Neo to succeed, but what’s happening right now, from both founders, is not really putting Neo in a place to win
Neo X is “building for AI,” but there’s nothing meaningfully being released (still not sure if SpoonOS is actually building anything substantive), nor is X decentralized in any manner of the word
Neo N3 is being left to die (ie Flamingo) and there’s zero onboarding of RWA/stablecoin projects
I’d love to see progress made on the governance and treasury proposals put forth by both Erik and Da, but nothing has been done (or publicly stated) in the 3 months since they were released
Malcolm Lerider retweeted
Next week, I will meet with @erikzhang and @r3ejimmy in-person as a community delegate to plan Neo ecosystem deployment. I look forward to a productive discussion.
500,000 GAS moved on-chain on July 3.
Same sender, same destination as the 150,000 GAS + 300,000 NEO transfer on May 2.
494k GAS hasn't moved yet, but the sender routes funds through parallel chains that reach exchange liquidity within hours.
I interpret this transaction as intention to enter circulating supply.
$NEO @Neo_Blockchain
teapawt.org/erikzhang/status/20729…
May we get a note on what this GAS is going to be used for?
@Neo_Blockchain $NEO @dahongfei
teapawt.org/erikzhang/status/20729…
Same fault line, surfacing again.
The issue was never who said what to whom in a DM. It's that one set of keys controls the repo, the permissions, and the treasury — with nothing checking it.
Structural problem. Structural fix. Working on it.
Soon.
@Neo_Blockchain $neo #neo
I agree with this.
teapawt.org/ricklock99/status/2064…
With the network in its current state and its users effectively abandoned, NGD's priority is a recovery program for people who left assets idle for over half a decade.
Those tokens should be declared permanently lost, and everyone who migrated on time accepted that finality. Reopening it rewards inaction, spends resources on a non-problem, and feeds fresh supply back into the market as sell pressure.
The process makes it worse. A private Google Form with no transparent, formal verification is a black box and invites the same opaque migrations it is supposedly meant to prevent.
If the goal were honest accounting, the fix is simple: burn every unmigrated asset. That rewards the holders who actually showed up, provides a clean, verifiable supply, and closes the door on discretionary reissuance.
Given the unresolved questions surrounding FLM/FUSD, NGD should not propose anything until its own practices are explained.
Here is what the community need to do:
Demand the temporary committee roster.
Demand the business case for every line item.
Demand Da to break silence.
Demand the Council to explain, publicly, why it hasn't intervened.
Demand the Council to take control of the treasury from both founders.
Not in six months. Now.