Neo co-founder Da Hongfei released an op-ed on how he believes AI is increasingly being framed as the next major demand driver for public blockchain networks, and what Neo’s role will be in that future. The article argues that autonomous software agents will become the primary on-chain users over the coming decade, calling for a “Humanless Blockchain” strategy.
The thesis builds on a pattern observed across earlier crypto milestones: Bitcoin introduced a permissionless monetary system, Ethereum expanded the design space with programmable smart contracts, and automated market makers popularized a new liquidity primitive. In this view, blockchains competing primarily on incremental performance improvements offer little differentiation, while “AI-native” infrastructure represents a comparatively underexplored vertical.
Neo X and AI agents
Within Neo’s ecosystem, Da is positioning Neo X as the environment optimized for agentic activity. The concept is that users will ultimately express goals to personal agents, and agents handle execution, coordination, and settlement on-chain.
The op-ed outlines several key ways Neo X is intended to meet the needs of AI agents, including:
- Agent identity via EIP-8004: Neo X adopts EIP-8004 registries for agent identity, reputation, and validation, enabling discoverability and portable trust histories.
- Agent-to-agent coordination primitives: Neo X is described as supporting standardized communication and a skill index intended to reduce reliance on ad hoc off-chain orchestration.
- SpoonOS lifecycle tooling: SpoonOS is positioned as an “agent operating system” layer that streamlines deployment, configuration, monitoring, upgrades, and multi-agent collaboration.
- NeoFS integration for context and memory: NeoFS is the data layer used to store agent state, strategies, and outcomes, supporting continuity across sessions.
- Privacy for sensitive logic: Neo X is described as combining trusted execution environments and zero-knowledge techniques to protect proprietary strategies and reduce vulnerability to adversarial behaviors such as transaction-level exploitation.
- dBFT finality model: Neo X is described as upgrading Neo’s dBFT approach with BLS signatures while maintaining one-block finality, targeting environments where agents require immediate settlement guarantees.
Da has also characterized Neo X as a “blank slate” that can iterate faster on agent-native primitives, while Neo N3 continues to evolve its existing stack with backward compatibility.
How GAS is intended to be leveraged
Neo X’s economic design is being presented around GAS as the utility asset that prices core consumption across the agent stack. Under the “agentic economy,” GAS serves as the metering mechanism for both execution and ongoing services.
Neo’s outlined leverage points for GAS include:
- Transaction fees: GAS is used to pay for on-chain execution on Neo X.
- Agent service invocation: GAS is positioned as the payment medium for agent services and related middleware interactions, including SpoonOS-related operations.
- Storage fees: NeoFS storage payments are denominated in GAS, tying long-term agent memory and data persistence to ongoing consumption.
- Protocol-level service payments via x402: Neo’s materials reference GAS for additional protocol fees, extending demand beyond basic transaction gas to service flows.
In this model, rising agent activity is expected to translate into measurable GAS consumption driven by real on-chain transactions. Da also ties this to broader value-accrual dynamics within the ecosystem, with GAS usage framed as a leading indicator of on-chain economic throughput.
The benefits of building in Hong Kong
Neo Global Development’s presence in Hong Kong is being positioned as a strategic advantage for both crypto and AI commercialization, especially for projects aiming to engage institutional stakeholders.
The primary benefits highlighted in Neo’s framing include:
- Regulatory proximity and alignment: Hong Kong’s evolving virtual asset policies and stablecoin discussions are cited as a more direct path to operating within a recognized compliance perimeter, which might be attractive for partnerships, custody, and institutional distribution.
- Institutional on-ramps for regulated products: A Hong Kong base is being positioned as supportive for developing compliant tokenization initiatives and regulated on-chain exposure, including RWA structures.
- Gateway positioning: Hong Kong is frequently viewed by market participants as a bridge between global capital markets and the broader region, which can be advantageous for business development, licensing pathways, and cross-border structuring.
- Reputation and market access considerations: Da’s messaging argues that Neo’s clean fundraising history, with a token buyback program for ICO participants, and a Hong Kong operating footprint may reduce friction when pursuing certain partnerships and asset onboarding strategies in the region.
Outlook: a settlement layer for the machine economy
Neo’s “humanless blockchain” thesis ultimately rests on a directional bet: the dominant on-chain user shifts from humans manually operating wallets to autonomous agents executing intent, optimizing strategies, and coordinating with other agents in real-time. If that transition accelerates, ecosystem characteristics may also change, diverting away from short-term liquidity incentives and toward identity, privacy, data availability, deterministic finality, and agent-centric developer tooling.
Da is positioning Neo X as the network designed around those constraints, with GAS serving as the consumption asset across execution, services, and storage.
As the broader industry experiments with agent frameworks and machine-to-machine commerce, Neo’s near-term challenge will be translating the category narrative into developer adoption, production-grade tooling, and sustained economic activity that validates the “agent-native” approach.
The full announcement can be found at the link below:
https://x.com/dahongfei/status/2028813617857171512
