Democracy of Two: City of Zion and the NEO 'Election' That Wasn't

Case in point, the NEO Foundation, which develops software for neo, announced this month that it had elected the first node to its network, a foundation-funded collective of NEO developers calling themselves City of Zion.

"[The] NEO Council values efficiency over decentralization at this early stage," the project's governing body, now called the NEO Foundation, explained in a May post.

Once the foundation is confident in the strength of the network, it says it "Expect[s] to see one to a few dozens of consensus nodes to be elected by NEO holders." But before token holders are able to vote for candidates, the foundation plans to "Elect" several private nodes, of which City of Zion is one.

Still, the NEO Foundation's use of the term "Election" to describe the process by which City of Zion became a node at all has triggered some skepticism.

While "Election" would arguably imply that a multiplicity of votes were cast, blog posts suggest that the NEO Foundation is currently the only voting entity in the ecosystem.

City of Zion's Fast confirmed that "There was no one from the public that voted in this election besides the NEO Foundation." Likewise, of the foundation, only project co-founders Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang have the authority to make decisions, according to another blog post.

NEO is not the only project to be criticized for how it is going about the election of nodes.

"Neo's trying to address scalability in a different way than ethereum is... Neo has a more centralized approach for that."

According to a timeline published in a blog post, the foundation plans to elect Dutch telecommunications company and neo partner KPN and Chinese venture capital firm Fenbushi Capital to operate the next privately held nodes in the network by the end of 2018.

The NEO Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.