NEO Releases Detailed Financials Ahead of Cryptocurrency Relaunch

In April, NEO co-founder Erik Zhang announced that an optimized version of the blockchain network will relaunch as NEO 3.0 in 2020.

A financial report from the NEO Foundation, revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, showed the initial coin offering in 2016 raised $97,517 plus 8,169 bitcoin, the latter of which was mostly liquidated for more than $8.3 million by February 2018.

Around 100,000 "Unclaimed" NEO tokens that, according to the foundation, people bought during crowdfunding sales but never added to their wallets, will revert to the foundation in October 2019, the financial report said, if the participating wallets aren't registered for the swap.

Along those lines, venture capitalist Dovey Wan, previously of the DHVC fund that invested in the NEO founders' sister company Onchain, described NEO as a "Compliant" blockchain project where the founders' companies have "Close relationships" with Chinese authorities and run most of the masternodes themselves.

Some critics are still upset the value of NEO tokens plummeted in 2018 while both founders - Zhang and Da Hongfei - focused on Onchain.

Zhang and Hongfei divided a few bitcoins from the ICO into independent entities housed under the foundation, including Neo Global Capital, NEO Eco Fund and the Neo Global Development Fund.

Plus, Hongfei told CoinDesk so far the NEO Eco Fund and NGC earned collective returns worth more than 10 bitcoin.

Stepping back, half of the original NEO tokens were sold in the ICO to fund the foundation's operations, including the fiat salaries of 50 employees at a Shanghai office.

Out of the remaining ICO tokens, 30 percent were divided among the nonprofit's investment arms and a "Contingency fund," according to the NEO report.

"The main goal of developing NEO 3.0 is to enable NEO to support large-scale commercial applications."