[Temp Check] Aave V3 MVP Deployment on Neon EVM Mainnet

Governance
26

Hello Alex,

Great meeting you! I’ve previously heard about DeBridge and had a look at it. My renewed interest was sparked after going through the Uniswap Foundation Bridge Assessment Report. By ‘incomplete,’ I mean that, as far as I understand, the solution isn’t yet operational on Neon EVM. I might be mistaken, and if that’s the case, I apologize. This isn’t intentional. Even the head of growth and co-founder of AngelDAO mentioned a January launch but didn’t specify any dates.

Regarding Neonpass, I have some reservations about relying on it exclusively. It seems to be managed and developed by the Neon team, which, to me, introduces a centralization issue. Moreover, some sources describe it more as a transfer tool than a bridge. An article I read described NeonPass as: ‘Not a bridge connecting two separate blockchain ecosystems. Rather, it acts as a two-way transfer tool for bringing assets in and out of the Neon EVM platform, which itself is a Solana smart contract directly connected to the network.’ You can find the article here: NeonPass: Linking Solana and Neon to Support a Low-Friction EVM-Compatibility Solution | by Neon Labs | Neon Labs | Medium.

I brought up Wormhole and Axelar for several reasons, key among them being their success in passing the Uniswap Foundation Assessment. You can find a comprehensive summary of this assessment here: Summary of Uniswap Foundation's Bridge Assessment Report, in which DeBridge was also a participant. I’m hopeful that DeBridge will clear the future potential assessment and collaborate with one of the leading protocols in the space.

Additionally, in the last temperature check proposed by the Neon Foundation in 2022, it was indicated that Wormhole would initially be used for bridging. This proposal is detailed here: Deploy Aave v3 on Neon EVM Chain. It also mentioned the submission of a guardian proposal for Wormhole’s integration with Neon EVM, aiming to complete the technical integration by 09.12.22. I’m curious about the current status of this proposal. What became of it? If it didn’t go through, what were the reasons behind its failure?

In my research, I’ve come across various red flags that also require attention. The 2022 temperature check, initiated by the Neon Foundation, stated that the Neon DAO would be responsible for adding new operators to the whitelist, with plans to eventually remove the whitelist entirely. According to an article I found (What’s our status? Neon EVM RPC endpoints are available on Chainlist | by Neon EVM | Nov, 2023 | Medium), currently, there are only two operators: P2P and Everstake. This scenario creates potential centralization issues. The article does, however, indicate that going forward, the Neon DAO will review and accept applications from third parties qualified to provide Proxy Operator services.

Despite this, my search for information about the Neon DAO yielded only their documentation, which lacks details on their governance process: Neon DAO Organization | Neon Docs. I’m interested in seeing practical implementations in this area.

Regarding the operators, it’s notable that Everstake Capital was involved in the seed round funding of Neon EVM. I urge the team to provide clear information about their relationship with P2P and Everstake beyond their roles as merely operators.

I want to clarify my position regarding accusations that I’m attacking the team. My intention is simply to highlight the concerns and ‘red flags’ that have come to my attention. While I have indeed voiced reservations about the founders, my aim is not to pass judgment on the entire team. On the Neon Labs website, there are only 11 people listed, and my focus has been primarily on the CEO and CTO. This is because the founding team plays a crucial role in my research process. If necessary, I’m willing to extend my research to other C-level executives.

Given these concerns, I believe it’s imperative for the Aave community to thoroughly scrutinize these aforementioned issues and seek answers before committing any effort. With so many red flags and lack of clarity, I personally am not comfortable proceeding without a clearer understanding of these matters.

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27

Hi Albierto,

I think you have wrong understanding about NeonPass. Basically neonpass is just a wrapper between SPL tokens and ERC20 tokens. You can image it’s all built using SVM contracts. If it’s centralized then you are saying all solana contracts are centralized which makes no sense.

Neon is like early stage of Moonbeam but lack of powerful RPC nodes, moonbeam has embeded the RPC inside parachain nodes which makes it super performant (no inter-communication). I’m only only worried about neon’s RPC performance, all others look great, it’s a great project to be encouraged as it will really bring many ETH devs like me to solana ecosystem.

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All these newly created accounts flocking to post for the first time, zealously championing NEON with such aggressive fervor, create a sea of red flags so vast, I half-expected to log in today and find Grandpa Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov himself resurrected, ready to seize the means of production!

The @ACI disapproves of such behaviors. While all opinions are welcome, and @albierto seems to raise legitimate concerns even if we don’t see eye to eye on everything, the nature of these discussions is troubling.

The ACI was initially inclined to support this temp check, but the influx of low-quality community gremlins and the concerns they raise have led us to pivot. We’re switching our vote to NAY until we see a convincing reason to do otherwise.

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29

Hey Marc. Thanks for your comments. I trully understand your thoughts. On your skin i would do the same.

For you to understand this kind of reactions, in the last few weeks Neon community was invaded by huge amounts of people. From these people, there are obviously good and bad actors, as i am sure that happens and have happened in AAVE along his history. With the main reason for this surge was the price pump, it joined a lot of people that understand 0 about technology and the history and evolution of the different blockchains. With this, as the network started to get a lot of demand it started aswell to show some bottlenecks, as it always happen in the history of any other blockchain. We can take as example the problems that Solana faced on 2020/2021 bull run.

The bottlenecks will be solved very soon, devs already adressed that. U can clearly see the evolution on technologic aspect on NeonEVM and u see it aswell on the TVL and attention on the token.

I guess that AAVE and NEON would be the perfect match. AAVE would manage to descentralize liquidity near to the 2nd chain that it has the most, Solana. It would show that it is not the AAVE from Ethereum but it would be Omnichain AAVE. It would depend on ETH sucess aswell that it is a point that i don’t see talked a lot among the AAVE community.
For NEON, it would be good aswell, as they would bring to the table one of the most important protocols in the history and present of every blockchain and it would clearly be a flag to mark the immense amount of protocols that are currently in the move of deploying on NEON.

The OG community (and i am sure that the team aswell) don’t review themselves on this hating speech from some members but i guess we can agree, that it already happened to every each one of us, in our life, that when we some untruth being told, we get a bit too much irrational :sweat_smile:.

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31

@pedrosimoes79, while I find some valid points in your comment, look at @Investor_X’s reply right after yours.

Complete low-effort bullshit text done by an AI. Liked by 3 bots accounts.

There is no way I’m allowing the Aave brand to be tainted with this.

We’ll revisit later when NEON gained some maturity.

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32

I truly get your point. The objective of my previous message was indeed to try to clean the image that Neon community might have showed. But it this kind of AI comments it is not easy indeed, especially when it is on a respected forum like this.

I am sure and i hope that Neon team will have the competency to adress your and AAVE community’s questions, for mutual benefit.

Thanks for your time and apologies for some missunderstanding as English is not my native language.

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33

Do you normally shut down entire discussions because a few bad actors that may or may not have anything to do with actual stakeholders? It seems like there’s a legit team here answering questions. However, due to a handful of accounts, you’re willing to torpedo a legitimate effort that could benefit the platform and its users.

Did you or @ACI ever actually consider this? Or, is this just your reason to end the open discussion, full stop?

If I want to end discourse here going forward, can I just use AI and a few bots to shut down progress across AAVE Governance? Because, to his credit, outside of @Albierto I haven’t seen any other real objections. Regardless, it’s a discussion. But, you’re giving us all a roadmap for shutting down TEMP Checks or discourse. Is that really the goal? or is it just by virtue of it being a Solana EVM that you have no intent of ever deploying? Just be honest.

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35

Hello everyone! I am one of the co-authors of this proposal and a member of Neon Foundation. First of all, I want to apologise to @MarcZeller and the whole Aave community for any of the above less constructive comments by the Neon community. These community actions are not fueled by us and we do not support such activities. We have already asked our community in Discord to refrain themselves from commenting on this forum to allow other active Aave DAO contributors to get involved and provide their feedbacks for a constructive discussion.

In order to address concerns raised above and to provide more clarity to the Aave community on this particular deployment proposal, would like to include following points :

  1. Aave v3 deployment on Neon EVM will allow Aave to access Solana’s unaddressed users, liquidity, and overall ecosystem. So, it would be wrong to look at TVL, transactions, ecosystem of Neon EVM only. Solana is showing strong growth recently and current TVL is north of $1.35 billion making it the 5th largest chain and the largest non-EVM ecosystem by TVL with many innovative protocols in their ecosystem. Aave being one of the most popular and largest DeFi protocol, it can capture a significant share of the Solana’s DeFi market with this deployment and will further reinforce its spot as the top liquidity market on-chain. Moreover, Neon EVM has multiple innovative projects across all DeFi verticals committed to deploy natively on Neon in coming few weeks which will certainly bring more transactions on Neon EVM and hence more TPS.

  2. Liquidity from Solana flows into Neon EVM via NeonPass which is already live and this deployment of Aave v3 is going to mainly target Solana users and liquidity as mentioned above. Neon EVM is not a blockchain and NeonPass is not a conventional bridge where assets are wrapped but it rather applies an ERC-20 interface on SPL tokens, which itself is a Solana smart contract directly connected to the network and the audits done by multiple providers can be found here: neon-evm/audit at develop · neonevm/neon-evm · GitHub. Moreover, deBridge integration has already been announced and expected to go live by the end of this month to allow liquidity to flow from EVM chains as well. We are committed to closely work with Aave’s technical service providers and provide all the necessary information and material to do a thorough evaluation of NeonPass to meet Aave’s standards during the ARFC phase before the final AIP.

  3. Chainlink provides data feeds on Solana (Data Feeds on Solana | Chainlink Documentation) and Neon EVM reads them from there using a wrapper contract created by the Neon team and audits can be found in the link above. Also, any risk associated with using these price feeds will be evaluated by the Aave DAO’s tech service providers before final AIP. They are welcome to provide their feedback in this temp check as well.

  4. Regarding the concerns around the capabilities of the team, a team of 55+ members of Neon Labs + Neon Foundation work together on the development of the Neon EVM and the website (https://neon-labs.org/) shared above does not provide the full picture of the potential of the team.

  5. Regarding the concerns raised around the PMF of Neon EVM, Solana ecosystem is the fastest growing major blockchain ecosystem and Neon being the first and only EVM on Solana allows Ethereum developers to access it’s native liquidity by deploying their existing codebase on Neon EVM without any reconfiguration.

  6. We do have only two RPC providers (P2P and Everstake) at the moment, but we are in the process of adding more to make the platform sufficiently decentralized as we are currently working on the technical implementation of our DAO. Both P2P and Everstake are leading non-custodial staking service providers in the crypto ecosystem with combined AUM of over $5.5b and active on almost every DPoS chain (P2P.org AuM & Staking Flows | Staking Rewards, Everstake AuM & Staking Flows | Staking Rewards).

I invite all active Aave contributors here to provide their feedbacks and more than happy to address their concerns about this proposal if any. Thanks!

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36

thanks for posting this.

This kind of contribution is exactly what is expected from discussion in the AAVE governance forum.

Focused on facts and debate on intrinsic merits of proposals.

I’m a man of my words, the ACI will vote YAE on the TEMP CHECK snapshot as points 2, 3 & 6 that were concerning to us have been clearly explained. expect us alongside other service providers to dive deeper around this at ARFC stage as they’re critical.

This is a TEMP CHECK, it’s meant to gauge community sentiment before a more in-depth proposal consideration alongside Aave DAO service providers among them importantly Risk teams (Chaos & Gauntlet) & technical review (bgdLabs).

With neon intrinsic merits and strategic potential opportunities of synergies with aave, we will support this proposal for the current stage.

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37

Hey all, Joeh from Sobal here. :wave:

I’ve been refraining from pitching in earlier as I felt the discourse wasn’t necessarily positive but I appreciate that the conversation is beginning to take a much better direction and appreciate @MarcZeller coming in and putting a stop to what looked like an unproductive discussion.

@Albierto although I am not part of the Neon team, I’ve been along side their developments for almost 2 years now and I’m happy to address your concerns and help answering questions that you feel have not been addressed fully, so please feel free to raise anything that you feel has been unanswered from above and I’ll be happy to give you my honest perspective on those matters.

In regards to bridging, Sobal has been working on a light integration of the SVM<>EVM bridging functionality that incorporates our V2 version of the platform, this is currently under the test circle but I’m happy to share it here today as it’s a refined product but requires some basic UI improvements to make user prompts more intuitive, these are minor improvements and the feedback from our public test circle has been positive and not displayed any technical issues.

Bridging actually works at the contract level and is effectively permissionless and does not rely on any third party services or workers apart from the proxy operators of the Neon EVM itself to confirm the transactions. This makes the design of the bridge more concrete and it follows a factory deployment method where mappable bridge tokens (SPL<>ERC20) are not able to be duplicated to alternative SPL/ERC20 respectively, this is something we discussed at a technical level before the inception of NeonPass and are proud to have an input on.

Furthermore we also are exploring ways that we can become a future RPC provider to the network once this opportunity arises, AFAIK we are one of many that have expressed this interest however Neon are taking a fair approach to making this implementation more permissionless so we are awaiting further confirmation from this side.

I also have had the pleasure of working with many various members of Neon, and have been impressed about how vast the team and its technical ability is. As most are aware, there are technical resolutions which are being worked on currently to resolve the rate of transactional inclusion with a displayed lead-time of 1-2 months, this is not necessarily due to the technical challenge it poses but also the working components of the EVM that require third party oversight in terms of re-auditing and approval for implementation.

I do believe that Neon EVM is a network positive contribution to Solana which is maturing at a rapid rate, and do agree that although this proposal may come at the wrong time in terms of resolution of technical issues and a rapid growth of token holders, there is also reasonable opportunity here for a favourable implementation for AAVE but should only be made in the pre-requisite that the technical matters above are made whole and addressed with confidence.

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38

Following community feedback, the following proposal has been escalated to TEMP CHECK Snapshot stage.

Vote will start tomorrow. We encourage everyone to participate.

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39

Hello Joeh,

It is fantastic meeting you! I genuinely appreciate your constructive feedback and insights. Thank you for the detailed explanation about NeonPass. It seems I need to deepen my understanding of this solution. However, I still have some reservations about the use of a third-party bridge, as I was anticipating a deployment similar to Wormhole. Additionally, I’m puzzled as to why the team hasn’t addressed my concerns about the status of the Wormhole proposal, choosing instead to respond selectively to my questions.

In advocating for this, I’m aligning with the values of the Ethereum community, where I actively contribute. Thus far, many aspects seem opaque. The team hasn’t clarified the involvement of P2P and Everstake in the Neon ecosystem beyond their roles as operators. Are they investors as well? Also it strikes me as peculiar that the Aave community would be content with having just two operators.

Moreover, anticipating further pointed remarks from Daniel, I’ve conducted additional research to stay grounded in facts and available online information. Daniel mentioned several Neon supporters like Jump, Solana, and CyberFund. I chose to delve into CyberFund, being the least familiar to me. I have navigated to their website and delved into their team (cyber•Fund | Our Team). I have also discovered that Neon’s CEO, Marina, was associated with CyberFund: Marina Guryeva, Founder and CEO of Neon Labs, developer behind Neon EVM, Director of CyberFund. I noted that CyberFund has invested in projects where Konstantin Lomashuk is involved, such as Lido, Nil Foundation, and his connection with P2P.

My concern here is the apparent layers of conflicts of interest in this project, which I find unsettling. I don’t believe these practices align with the values of the Aave community, which consistently seeks transparency and equality. My reservations about the situation might have been less pronounced had the Neon team been more forthcoming and transparent about all these issues.

Nonetheless, I appreciate your input and for shedding light on some issues. This has been the most constructive feedback I’ve received from the Neon team so far.

2 Likes
40

Likewise! A pleasure, I’ve been admiring your discourse and your in-depth research that you’ve done, it’s definitely nice to converse with people that take pride in their technical and foundational analysis of things.

Regarding your comments about NeonPass and Wormhole, do you mean that you envisaged NeonPass to be a similar style integration to Wormhole? Also when you say it is a Third Party, I just want to make sure that I haven’t put forward my explanation incorrectly, but to clarify that NeonPass is effectively the UI to SVM<>EVM functionality that is maintained by Neon EVM itself, meaning that it’s part of the proxy model itself and is not maintained externally.

I can seek some clarity on the questions you raised and am happy to raise them with other members within Neon, can I just clarify that when you ask if P2P and Everstake will be taking an extended role, which specific functionality do you refer to? I will also request information if they have a vested interest in the project, but just to clarify anyone that runs a proxy operator will require to hold gas tokens for both networks AFAIK which inherently makes them an investor to some degree irrespective of external holdings.

Regarding the CEO and Daniel as strategic leads, I do agree that monetary matters are always necessarily tricky to analyse from both angles, and I can see that there are positives and negatives that can be considered. An example negative is whether the question of actions and decisions have been taken in the best interest of the project and an example positive is that having a vested interest means that you have a tighter long term alignment and are more motivated to work towards the long term success of a project.

Having conversed with the people that you bring to light and having an outsiders view of the structure and operation, I have not been able to have any reasonable doubt that they display traits of individuals that perform actions to elude to pursue financial gain and I have confidence in their ethic to carrying out their duties in the best interest of the project, so I would confidently say that to my statement in the previous paragraph, it would be the latter that they may have a tighter alignment with the longer term success of the project.

Also; although I disagree with the way Daniel has posted in this forum, I understand well his actions and I know they do not come from a bad intention, but one of which is a person who has been tiredly exhausted from pushing back at what may be speculated to be targeted misinformation and I believe he has wrongly assumed that you may be part of this, I do believe and see that you show an interest in both directions of AAVE and Neon and this does not represent the same nature that I witnessed several times occur in their discord server over the last 6 or so months. Also I do think that Daniel might be more new to public discourse and his experience in these discussions will improve vastly over time. We all make mistakes and I hope you have not taken any of his messages personally and appreciate your patience through everything.

Regarding CyberFund, I have no knowledge about this project but I can understand the triangle that you have displayed in reference to P2P, NeonEVM and other parties. I wonder if this relationship may actually be beneficial to Neon EVM and whether it signifies a positive ability for growth by utilising strong relationships to support and improve the ecosystem of Neon, however I also do see where you can look at negative impacts of a tightly knitted environment.

The fact that in my dealings with Neon they have been quite insistent on creating a fair and competitive environment for their network infra growth, I believe even if they have used favourable connections to establish the network/create a stable environment, they are looking to diversify the networks infra to be a fair ground for entry for everyone, hence why they are pivoting to a DAO structure.

If you could compose a condensed list of questions regarding investments of specific members of the team, I can work on getting clarification on these and posting these on here, I also think this is a good thing to be transparent for all parties, whether community members, providers or partners.

Hope that helps give you a slightly different viewpoint to the concerns you raised :blush:

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41

Nice to meet you too! I can only talk about bridging part of your concerns here.

Speaking about Uniswap Assessment — our team was very actively involved in that process and I don’t think that results of this assessment should be ever used as a benchmark. You can read the comment of our team that was published by Uniswap Foundation:

It doesn’t matter now what bridges support Neon as bridges don’t introduce any risks to Aave. What matters is how asset custody is built. Any custody solution has two layers:

  1. Governance — Who governs it controlling custody smart contracts — lock, mint, burn, etc
  2. Transport — Who is in charge of transport (relaying message or proof of reserve confirming that derivative is 1:1 backed)

It’s important to differentiate asset custody from value transfer, which are two different verticals of interoperability, even though both are called “bridging”

From what I understand Neon Pass is a canonical asset custody solution that allows bringing any asset from Solana to Neon without introducing any additional risks or trust assumptions and evaluating the bridging aspect of integration you should look at how governance + transport are implemented there (instead of thinking about other bridges that are not deployed or not in Neon)

Also to note — Aave can pick its’ own asset-custody solution (where the governance layer can be equal to Aave governance) or use solutions like our dePort (in this case it will be governed by deBridge)

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42

Hello Joey,

I really appreciate the effort you’re putting in to address my outstanding concerns. It’s noticeable that you are more engaged in fostering a constructive dialogue compared to the founder and other team members. It’s somewhat surprising that the founder hasn’t actively participated in the discussion or addressed some of the points I’ve raised.

  1. Due to the lack of clear answers regarding the Wormhole integration, I took the initiative to investigate this case further and I am truly thankful for the support and assistance. From what I’ve learned, Neon has had two proposals rejected by the Wormhole guardians. In both instances, it seems the team didn’t fully grasp the requirements set by the guardians and had significant technical gaps.

  2. I have some queries about P2P and Everstake’s roles in the Neon ecosystem. Specifically, I’m interested in whether they are acting as investors, and if so, what percentage of token allocation they hold. The dual role of being an investor while also profiting as an operator strikes me as a conflict of interest, almost like vultures preying on the community and ecosystem.

  3. Regarding Daniel, I prefer not to delve into personal discussions. My concern centers on his dual roles as a co-founder of AngelDAO and as head of growth at Neon. His passionate responses to my posts give the impression he might be attempting to inflate his own investments before any token unlocks. To be honest, I haven’t looked deeply into Neon’s tokenomics, but I am curious about the amount of tokens allocated to AngelDAO.

  4. As for CyberFund, I see a significant conflict of interest. It appears as if the fund’s founders are using it to finance their own projects. Am I missing something here?

  5. Concerning the Neon DAO, the team has been talking about it since 2022 in various publications, yet it’s been two years and they still haven’t established a DAO or set up a governance process. They could have simply adopted an existing governance model by now.

I will be compiling and sharing a list of my questions shortly.

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43

Hello Alex,

Thank you so much for your detailed explanations. I truly appreciate it and I’m motivated to learn more about DeBridge. The reason I referenced the Uniswap report is due to the extensive research they conducted, which I trust to a certain extent. They were able to identify specific issues with Multichain before its collapse. Moreover, in my conversation with the Celer team, they recognized the feedback provided by the Uniswap team and are actively working to address it. This forms the basis of my personal viewpoint.

44

Hey @joeh ,

I’ve compiled a list of questions, and I’d appreciate it if you could address these, along with the queries in my previous post. For me to comfortably support the Aave V3 deployment on Neon EVM, I need transparent responses from the team. As an advocate for transparency, I want to ensure that Aave isn’t being used to artificially inflate the value of investors’ holdings. Aave has historically been stringent about adding new chains, and I’m curious about the rationale behind this apparent shift in approach. While I’m all for Aave’s expansion and maintaining its status as a leading protocol, it’s important that our values align with those of our partners.

  1. Chainlink Integration: While there are official Chainlink docs for Solana data feeds, there’s no mention of support for Neon EVM data feeds. If you claim official support, why isn’t this acknowledged by Chainlink? Could you ask Chainlink’s team to confirm or deny your statement?
  2. Technical Issue Resolution: What are the specific timelines for Neon to address its current technical issues? When is the update to the Neon Program on Solana scheduled, and can you detail the exact nature of the issue? I’m looking for precise information, not vague assurances.
  3. NeonPass and DeBridge: I will conduct further research on these, and I thank the team for the clarifications provided.
  4. Wormhole Proposal: Was the Wormhole integration proposal rejected twice? If so, what were the reasons?
  5. TPS Clarification: Could you explain the Transactions Per Second (TPS) rate displayed on https://neonscan.org/?
  6. Previous Project Involvement: Regarding the project mentioned in Блокчейн-соцсеть Commun закрылась из-за отсутствия пользователей, what was the outcome? If funds were raised, were they returned to investors after the project’s closure? I note the involvement of names connected to CyberFund.
  7. NeonDAO Timeline: What are the specific timelines for establishing the NeonDAO? It appears to have been in development for about two years.
  8. Investment Details: Could you provide details on investments from P2P, CyberFund, Everstake, and AngelDAO? Moreover, could you please provide details on the processes in place these companies have to avoid conflict of interest?

Transparent responses to these questions will greatly influence my support for this initiative.

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45

Hey Albierto!
Thanks for your kind words :blush:

I’d say that the Neon team are actually very passionate about their product but many of their team members take restraint from participating in discourse as the business structure is relatively corporate due to the size of the team. At peak I’ve seen maybe 80 or more employees in Neon so you can imagine it would be absolute chaos if everyone in the company was to create a more public facing persona, it seems that the organisation encourages team members to focus on their roles and not to stray into the domain of others (as there are people whom are employed solely for public facing activities) unless it’s completely necessary or they are requested to do so. Daniel being very passionate about the product has jumped in here although I have learned that he was not the author of the proposal, but just wanted to contribute his knowledge and provide an explanation to your concerns. Regarding the CEO; Marina generally maintained what I see as a professional position of not taking part in the daily ongoing discussions in platforms such as Discord but focuses on larger more impactful activities and the internal activities in the business, I do however have the personal opinion that it would be nice to see her break down that wall in the future to be more accessible but I can imagine how this could also distract her from the goals of their foundation and reduce the overall productivity from her side if she was to be actively involved in that aspect. Maybe a middle ground where she dedicated a small amount of time periodically to converse or hold office hour talks with the community might be something valuable to everyone.

  1. It looks like you’ve identified a very positive opportunity for Neon to explore, I don’t have full knowledge about the Wormhole situation but I do remember that they had a deployment on Devnet and I had done some test interactions with their assets that I found on chain, however if there are technical requirements that are feasible for the team to carry out and they goal is within reach then I think it’s a good opportunity that shouldn’t be missed to revisit. The BD team has vastly changed over the last 6-8 months so I think this is the best time than ever to get a good shot at making opportunities come to fruition. I’ll open a discussion with the team and see if this initiative is viable and hopefully we can hear some good news in the near future!

  2. I am happy to ask these questions and will come back to you shortly. I do think that there has to be a clear incentive model in order to cover the costs of operators. In order to maintain a proxy operator, I believe there are heavy costs involved as this will require having a full index of the solana chain, which if you have been familiar with the ongoing costs that the Solana foundation pay towards their nodes, it is quite considerable. I do see that Neon are very actively working on opening the doors to public to participate in this but I do know that Neon also have a heavy legal burden to set the foundations of a DAO in the best way possible, which creates a more complex process for them.

  3. After sitting down and thinking about this quite a lot myself recently, I personally think that having a VC related growth lead is actually a lot more valuable than people may think from an initial perception, generally VCs are quite well connected and have a wider experience in dealing with, mentoring, guiding and supporting a range of projects to assist with their success. This is generally more robust than someone that has had experience in a few smaller projects who may have a narrow/concentrated perspective due to the nature of each project they worked on. Neon obviously believe this was in their best interest to take on board someone like Daniel and if I’m being brutally honest, even if his firm wasn’t an initial investor, being a team member to this calibre would have most likely lead to some form of team token allocation, and afaik the initial investors have a similar unlocking schedule to the team itself, so inevitably the result is the same but instead a VC pays for their allocation while a team member receives it as part of their compensation.

  4. I had a look at CyberFund and their fund looks relatively diverse, I assume that there are potentially a lot of members of CyberFund that have their own projects but may not have received financial support or investment from them. I’m sure CF have done their own due diligence to whether it is a good investment or not and made a decision based on purely objectives. I can’t really comment otherwise on CyberFund though as I’ve only learned about them yesterday and it’s hard to find fault in them when they appear to be quite a professional setup from what I could find when doing the little research I could after our discussion. It might be worth contacting them directly to find out a little bit more about how their investment materialised or if they even have an investment at all within Neon, although I did see Neon in their portfolio list on their website.

  5. Regarding the DAO, there has been a lot of progress on this although it’s been a slow and difficult one. The majority of the foundational changes are already in place as NeonLabs migrated recently into two new entities, Neon EVM and Neon Foundation. There is still a lot of legal footwork left to do by the team and I have seen the struggles that the legal team have been dealing with to make sure that this is carried out in the best way possible as they only have one chance to get this right, I am confident though that this is a very close goal to being achieved in its entirety as I’ve been keeping tabs on this as we also have interest as expressed earlier to operate nodes for the network :grin:

Looking forward to your list of questions and I’ll make sure to do my best effort to get the answers you’re looking for :blush:

1 Like
46

Hello Joeh,

Thank you for your prompt response. I value your contributions and am glad to engage with someone knowledgeable. Above, I have outlined a list of eight questions. However, I now have some additional queries and would appreciate your insights.

  1. I’m grateful that you’re addressing my concerns regarding Wormhole and I eagerly await your feedback.
  2. Since Neon EVM has been live on the mainnet since July, I haven’t seen any announcements or comments about opening the doors to DAO-driven decision-making for onboarding operators. When can we expect this to happen?
  3. Having been a startup founder myself, whose project failed, I can relate. We even reimbursed our investors, partly from my own pocket. Our VC provided support and introductions but wasn’t involved in day-to-day operations or driving growth. I find it concerning and potentially indicative of a conflict of interest when a VC is too deeply involved, as it might appear they are inflating their investment. As per my eighth question, I’m keen to know AngelDAO’s stake in Neon, which the Neon team could easily clarify.
  4. I don’t see the need to reach out to CyberFund for information that Neon could disclose, especially since, as per a video, Neon’s CEO was previously responsible for investments at CyberFund https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtflyjP_pW0. Could you comment on this? Honestly, I hadn’t considered CyberFund initially, as it’s not a name I’ve come across on platforms like Crunchbase. However, Daniel’s mention of it has been enlightening and valuable, leading me to discover additional concerning aspects that I hadn’t noticed before.
  5. Can you provide exact timelines for the updates and improvements? Offchain labs managed their updates in a concise timeframe, which sets a precedent. I appreciate your input; let’s focus on providing direct and factual responses without digressing.

Looking forward to your factual and straightforward responses to these questions.

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Hey Albierto!
Thanks for pointing me to your previous reply earlier, I did in fact miss it at the time as it must have come through as I drafted my last response.

I thought I’d check in quickly as it’s been a while since your last message to let you know that I’ve been working on getting a clear answer to all of your concerns and please expect a response shortly.

Thanks for being patient as always :blush:

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