Neo Global Development (NGD) has admitted NekoHit, an early-stage, Patreon-like project that takes a decentralized, blockchain-based approach to crowdfunding, as the seventh project to the N3 Early Adoption Program.
NGD introduced the Early Adoption Program in June of 2021, allocating $10 million to foster promising developers and project teams who want to build their technologies on the all-in-one Neo N3 platform. This program is part of Neo’s broader $200M set of investments allocated across multiple tracks to support Neo ecosystem growth, nurturing projects ranging from those of grassroots developers to those of established businesses and institutions.
The NekoHit project seeks to bring a crowdfunding model for content creators to the Neo ecosystem. However, instead of using the subscription model common among other solutions such as Patreon, NekoHit is designed to connect content creators with individuals who can offer funding on a per-project basis.
The NekoHit project is focused on eliminating trust problems between content creators and their sponsors, using blockchain technology to give more control to both parties. The project’s model employs an insurance mechanism based on the NekoHit WCA (Work Contract Agreement). The WCA is a smart contract designed to give both creators and sponsors more control over the crowdfunding process. To start a project, a content creator must stake CAT tokens and open a WCA. Sponsors can fund projects by transferring tokens to the corresponding WCAs. If a creator fails to meet their deadlines, then their sponsors can be compensated with the staked CAT tokens.
NekoHit and Neo N3
At an early point in the NekoHit project, the developer team began searching for a technology stack that they could start with and stay with for smart contract development. They conducted a careful evaluation of options upfront earlier in 2021.
Yannick, co-founder of NekoHit, described the team’s search: “We evaluated Solidity and Ethereum as popular options. But with both, we saw risks of leaving flaws in the code. IOTA was also appealing, but we lacked the experience with Rust and WASM to make this a developer-friendly choice for us.”
The team then learned about Neo N3 through the 2021 Neo Frontier Launchpad hackathon, where NekoHit, like some fellow Early Adoption Program members, was a prizewinning competitor. Yannick said that the Neo Frontier Launchpad hackathon provided an excellent starting point for the NekoHit project.
“We took a deep look at Neo N3 and found that it works out of the box with Java,” said Yannick. “Its multi-language support is outstanding. It also has many features to protect against introducing security flaws during the coding process. And the active Neo community makes it easy to develop a high-quality contract.”
Ultimately, the team selected Neo as the developer-friendly blockchain upon which they could establish their project and scale it out over time. The team sees an exciting path ahead as they build on the Neo N3 blockchain. “We don’t want to stop at the concept or prototype level,” Yannick said. “We want to build out this project to fit serious usage — like a Patreon or a Kickstarter, but on a decentralized blockchain.”
Looking ahead, the NekoHit team aims to improve the project’s ease of use through the Neo partnership and make it easier for others to enter the blockchain world. This will require a significant amount of collaboration with existing Neo projects — especially Flamingo and Lyrebird.
As a near-term milestone, NekoHit aims to achieve a stable value for the CAT token via the combined efforts of Neo projects such as Flamingo Wrapper and Lyrebird. The team then aims to begin accepting additional tokens. Following this, NekoHit plans to introduce DAO tokens to distribute to community members, establishing a solid, decentralized community. As a longer term goal, the team expects to experiment with new ideas — for example, enabling periodic projects and payments and introducing voting to enable creators to change project deadlines.
“We’re excited to be part of the Early Adoption Program and the Neo community,” said Yannick. “We look forward to building the N3 ecosystem together.”
John Wang, Head of Neo Eco-Growth, foresees a mutually beneficial relationship ahead for the Neo ecosystem and NekoHit. He noted that NekoHit needs decentralized finance (DeFi) support from Neo projects, while the Neo ecosystem has lacked a unique content creation platform such as NekoHit can provide. “We are impressed by NekoHit’s highly innovative crowdfunding model and adherence to DAO even at this early stage in the project,” said Wang. “With the efforts of both parties, we believe that NekoHit can grow to become a mature content creation platform that is recognized and loved by creators and sponsors alike.”
Learn more
NekoHit official website: https://nekohit.com
NekoHit on Medium: https://blog.nekohit.com/
Follow NekoHit on Twitter: @NekoHit Project
Join the NekoHit community: Discord
Neo official website: https://neo.org
NGD N3 Early Adoption Program: https://neo.org/eco#earlyadoption
Follow Neo on Twitter: @Neo_Blockchain
