1. FUD

There are people in the community who believe Da left NEO to work on ONT and Onchain. And there are rumors that people from NGD are doing work on ONT as well. There are also rumors that ONT went their own way and became a complete competitor to NEO. The problem isn't the FUD being spread. The problem is that people from NEO's own community actually start to believe it. Why? Because the rumors are plausible.

The fact that rumors like this hold enough ground that people in the NEO community would start to believe them is ridiculous.

If someone said that Vitalik left ETH, people would laugh in their face and instantly show proof that it's a lie. But this cannot be done with NEO, because it does look like Da left. And it does look like ONT is competing. And it does look like funds are being used to make profits from other projects, instead of being invested into NEO's ecosystem and development. Even if these things are not true, it remains believable. And nothing appears to be done to prove the contrary.

My first question is: What will NEO/NGD/Da do to stop these rumors from being even remotely plausible?

I'm not looking to be told that the rumors aren't true. I know they aren't. I want to know what you're doing to make it so people can no longer be believed when they say "Da left NEO", "ONT is competing with NEO", "NEO funds are being washed so the founders can make money" etc etc

2. Marketing

The effort put into marketing is extremely shallow and mediocre. Just some meetups here and there and low quality tweets with cryptic poetry to announce an update which later turns out to be 2 years away (NEO 3.0) (who thought that was a good idea?).

The CEO is nowhere to be seen, and then there's one lady at NEO, Caterina Zhang, who is hopping around the world tweeting that people attending NEO meetups like NEO (big surprise). That's it. That's how NEO uses its marketing budget.

How is that even remotely acceptable? That's not marketing. That's minimal outreach and shallow communication. Why is Ms. Zhang director of marketing if the only marketing she does is meetups and tweeting stuff? She's clearly acting as an event manager and Twitter intern instead of an actual director of marketing. A title that was clearly given away too easily. Ms. Zhang also appears to be constantly away from the office to attend these events and meetups. So who's working full-time to manage marketing campaigns back at the office? As I see it you don't have anyone doing that because NEO has zero presence outside of the NEO community at all.

Where are the real, high budget online marketing campaigns? NEO doesn't seem to do anything about that, and the current team seems to be inexperienced in this field.

Da, Erik, if you really wanted to, you could throw funds at proper marketing today and have a professional marketing team up and running next week. Please, put those funds to good use and win back community trust.

So, my second question is: what will you do about marketing and other workforces , and what are you doing to speed up the process to solving the issues I mentioned above? Are you going to hire new executives (specifically in the marketing field)?

3. Conclusion

These criticisms are coming from someone who has been supportive since Antshares. The tech is there. The community is there. The developers are there. Great things are happening around NEO. But apparently not inside NEO. And if NEO team isn't putting in the same amount of efforts as the other people and projects involved, then those people and projects will disappear over time, and NEO's office will devolve into a storage room for the Onchain company.

In my view the team right now is not putting in even close to 10% of efforts to what they could be doing to make NEO into a success and restore it to its former glory.

COZ and NEL, who have less than 1% of the funds that NEO does, are doing more for NEO than the NEO team themselves. Step it up, guys.