A contingent of community members from within the Neo ecosystem have launched Meteor, a new initiative to develop and deliver a collective roadmap through a structured three-phase process. It has garnered support from Neo co-founder Erik Zhang, Neo Global Development, the core development team, and a significant number of Neo Council members.

Neo has been without an agreed product direction for much of the past year, a gap that has deepened alongside a prolonged dispute between co-founders Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang over the future governance and structure of the ecosystem. Prior proposals from both founders and core contributors have addressed the governance structure, but have stopped short of producing a unified product thesis that the whole ecosystem could organize around.

Meteor is positioned as the initiative to fill that gap.

What is Meteor

Meteor is described in the initiative document as “a Neo initiative to identify the strongest product direction for Neo’s next stage of growth.” It is a process, not a product announcement. At the end of the process, the ecosystem is intended to have an evidence-backed, community-vetted product strategy and roadmap.

No specific product direction has been selected or pre-approved.

The three phases

Meteor is structured in three sequential phases:

  • Phase 0 (underway now): A council-nominated research team conducts field research and opportunity framing, mapping where the blockchain market is heading over the next five years, evaluating candidate directions against shared criteria, and producing a ranked shortlist backed by evidence.
  • Phase 1: A lean strategy workshop defines the business hypothesis, target customer, product and market definitions, and the first sellable entry point in the chosen direction.
  • Phase 2: Technical and product planning converts the selected strategy into an actionable roadmap that the ecosystem can align around.

No timelines have been announced for Phase 1 or Phase 2. The only confirmed near-term deadline is the one-week window during which council members may nominate the Phase 0 research team.

How the decision gets made

The scoring process at the center of Phase 0 is a weighted decision matrix with categories including market timing, customer pain, buyer clarity, strategic fit, differentiation, revenue plausibility, ecosystem activation, execution feasibility, and technical leverage, among others.

The category weights themselves are determined by a time-bound Neo Council vote, with one ballot per council seat. Voting and results will be made public.

Candidate directions are scored against the weighted matrix by Council members, producing a transparent ranked shortlist that will undergo a Delphi-style review cycle. That is a structured method for surfacing and resolving significant disagreements among participants; it surfaces material outliers before final results are published, and voters may revise their ballots before the round closes.

Results, rankings, outlier analysis, and rationale will all be published publicly.

Who is behind Meteor?

The announcement confirms backing from four groups:

  • Erik Zhang has agreed to support the initiative, including code deployment and endorsement of strategic processes.
  • NGD has confirmed its support and will participate in the council vote.
  • Core developers have agreed to support the process and provide technical continuity.
  • A significant number of Neo Council members have been engaged and support moving forward.

The initiative document is careful to frame what this support does and does not mean:

These commitments do not pre-approve a specific product direction. They provide the organizational credibility to run a process worth paying attention to.

Immediate next steps

The announcement lists five near-term actions:

  • Council members nominate individuals to serve on the research team within a one-week window.
  • Council members consult their constituents to understand priorities before voting.
  • Council members prepare to vote on strategic priorities.
  • Council members review and nominate a priority backlog of paralyzed ecosystem features, and the council votes on what can now be actioned.
  • Community members engage directly with council members to ensure their priorities are factored in.

The full announcement can be found at the link below:
https://discord.com/channels/382937847893590016/1424687418807816202/1536435213981319299