2025
Corporate Roadmap
About us
- Who is COZ?
- Our Team structure
2024 in review
- Successes
- Room for improvement
2025 roadmap
- Organizational changes
- Platforms
- - Core Technology
- - Neon
- - ITEM Systems
- - Product Experience
About us
Who is COZ?
"COZ is a group of open source developers that formed over the past weeks to support NEO. We recently established communication channels with the core NEO team in China and have begun to provide them with weekly reports that summarize our goals, projects, and progress.
In exchange, Neo is supporting these contributions through ANS rewards. To encourage a more transparent community, we have decided to publish these reports and the total amount of offered reward."
COZ Weekly Report #1 (July 09, 2017)
The blockchain ecosystem has undergone significant change since our initial report was published and we have pivoted to accommodate, but much of our cultural identity remains the same.
- Open source (and now open hardware) is critical for sustainable community growth and accountability.
- Custodianship is critical for sovereignty and infrastructure robustness.
- Community is everything.
Global Team
We are a pioneer in the blockchain space, offering a comprehensive suite of services - from core cryptography to end-user applications. We are a one-stop shop for all things Web3.
Today, COZ operates in seven countries, helping numerous partners achieve their business goals with blockchain-driven solutions.
What sets us apart is our user-centric technical approach, ensuring client success at every stage of any project, be it software development, immersive experiences, Web3 marketing, or government advisory.
Our client portfolio includes top players across various industries such as Neo Blockchain, The Associated Press, and DENVER WALLS Festival.
Our Team Structure
Organizationally, COZ is structured as a "strong matrix". We formally transitioned to this structure in 2024 to facilitate team and project growth as well as the ability to quickly pivot resources into new focal areas when necessary. In this structure, every team member is assigned two roles with an optional third designation:
Function
Function broadly defines a team member's expertise and general role on projects. Functions also group team members for mentorship and alignment by their discipline. For example, the engineering team coordinates and supports each other across all projects with direct reporting into the engineering functional manager. By collaborating at a functional level, all engineers, for example, have some understanding of every project in the organization and are aligned on common tools and processes.
Platform
Platform is the product area that a team member is assigned to. Platforms source resources from the Functions on an as-needed basis depending on the campaign requirements. For example, the Neon platform may require 6 months of "extra" engineering functional support to push out a new product, then require 3 months of "extra" marketing support to facilitate new product introduction. Consensus on resource allocation by functional teams is reached in recurring cross-platform planning meetings.
Council
Council is the term broadly assigned to the group which mediates the resource planning and strategic direction of COZ. Generally speaking, this role is an additional assignment to executive staff, but it is not an obligation. Platform leads and Functional managers can also act in this role as strategically necessary.
2024 in review
Last year’s achievements
Successes
Neon Platform Consolidation
A unified product architecture hallmarks the Neon platform with the release of Neon 3 for Desktop.
Neon is one of the longest running open source self-custodial wallet products in the industry and 2024 saw the release of the latest iteration of our world-class desktop product. With its delivery, we're proud to announce that our wallet platform now uses a shared architecture which allows us to ship product features and configurations more quickly while also minimizing the attack surface of the product to ensure that our users are secure.
Cross-Chain Swaps
Natively swap tokens between self-custodial accounts in Neon Wallet.
In a final December push, the Neon and Core Technology teams delivered cross-chain swaps to the Neon platform with support for thousands of tokens. The feature is enabled on both the Desktop and Mobile version of the wallet. It supports all authentication methods and key stores including Ledger. This feature unlocks a convenient(and primary in the case of the US) path in/out of the ecosystem compared to alternatives and provides a strong reference point in listing negotiations.
Networking and Collaborator Engagement
A year of testing and formalization of processes.
For the past two years, COZ has formally worked to build a high-caliber collaborator network. Historically, this initiative has been a passive endeavor. 2024 marked the first year where we shipped formal proposals for large scale blockchain products to retail customers. The lessons learned from this initiative were invaluable and have been injected into our plan for 2025, with some successes already in our calendar.
Political Advocacy
Engagement with the Stand With Crypto initiative allowed us to communicate our unique perspective to federal lawmakers.
Blockchain was a major political topic in US politics for 2024. The COZ team actively collaborated with the Stand With Crypto organization to engage federal lawmakers on the topic of progressive blockchain legislation which can resolve issues that are strangling the industry domestically. Notably, these efforts resulted in multiple cross-isle supporting votes and appointment of the first “pro-crypto” federal government for the United States.
ITEM Systems PMF testing with major players
In partnership with AxLabs, COZ conducted multiple brainstorming sessions and feasibility studies with large web2 industry players despite lacking internal sales and business development facilities.
The response was universally positive and changes have been consolidated into the 2025 ITEM Systems roadmap. Primary change requests were associated with application feature set with major interest arising from risks taken in 2023 and 2024 to deploy major conceptual experiences through the Product Experience team.
Room for Improvement
Locking large deliveries that scale platforms after major wins in 2023
We were poorly prepared to double down on product
2023 was a major year for COZ with our debut of large scale experiential products. Between the OneBand activation at Consensus, Denver Walls, and Tribeca Film Festival, we were incredibly busy. As an organization, we were completely unprepared to receive and properly handle the positive product reception and market interest that these experiences provided us, resulting in some loss of new business in 2024.
Organizational Integrity and Cohesion
A blob of resources is ineffective for strategic delivery
Historically, COZ has operated as a blob of resources that are amorphously spread across products. 2024 presented issues with this approach as many projects lacked strategic alignment to deliver on large initiatives and ultimately delivered partially implemented solutions which burden the organization with technical debt. This issue came to a head in 2024 with failed delivery on a number of strategic targets for developer tools.
Strategic Funnel and Accountability
Defined communication channels and strategic alignment across platforms is critical.
As COZ scales, strategic focus needs to be a priority. Numerous instances in 2024 triggered “all hands on deck” initiatives with an incredibly short notice. These activities had major impacts to project timelines and resulted in rushed deliverables which were below our typical expectations of quality. These experience have been reviewed and mitigations have been implemented.
2025 Roadmap
This year’s plan
Organizational
A more coherent structure to improve logistics and go-to-market needs.
This year, COZ will formally adopt a number of operating changes to address efficiency issues have been ongoing problems within our organization since its inception.
Notably, we will be adopting a more rigid corporate structure that will allow the team to scale effectively, while preserving clear communication channels across the large number of initiatives that our team supports. This change will require us to focus more on strategic planning rather than the tactical "all gas, no breaks" approach that has defined COZ in the past.
Additionally, we will be running a go-to-market initiative to resolve issues identified with the way we package our products which impact our ability to sell on the retail side as well as onboard on the developer side. This initiative also includes a brand refresh, new corporate website to properly reflect our capabilities, and sales funnel with brand ambassadors.
Platforms
COZ currently maintains 4 platforms with distinct charters, roadmaps, and leadership.
Each platform's roadmap is broken down into initiatives, which communicate areas of focus for the team and provide strategic planning emphasis across the organization. Initiatives are grouped across platforms into campaigns.
An initiative is highly flexible in that it could include anything from a long term research project to multiple end-user product deliveries. In short, they represent the "north star" for each platform and facilitate task prioritization and resource planning.
Corporate initiatives that extend across platforms are tagged in this document as campaigns to facilitate legibility by the community. An identical approach (including common tags) is used in the ITEM Systems roadmap document to help with clarity on joint operations.
Campaigns
Token Listings & Protocol Support
This campaign drives product support for protocols and interconnectivity between blockchains.
Intelligence & Tooling
A campaign focusing on developer tooling or algorithmic features that enhance retail products.
Brand & Experiential
Work that targets branding of our products and those of collaborators as well as our live experiences.
Retail Products
Retail product initiatives that target commercial users both inside and outside of the web3 ecosystem.
Core Technology
Core Technology is our tooling and infrastructure platform. It is responsible for our various SDKs, contract compilers, and smart contracts as well as our public node and API infrastructure. This is also the team that facilitates incubation of new technology-focused products like Non-Fungible Items before hand-off to the other platforms.
Core technology deliverables
Dora Infrastructure API
Native Migration Path
PROPS Repack
Intelligent Systems
Cathode
Dora Indexer Enhancements
PROPS Series 2
Token Listings & Protocol Support
Intelligence & Tooling
Brand & Experiential
Retail Products
This initiative supports Neon platform needs and other retail providers by extending API services for aggregate data.
Dora is the primary API provider for wallets and exchanges that support the Neo ecosystem with support for Legacy, N3, and X. Integration is provided through a typescript SDK that is actively maintained for ecosystem integration.
This campaign also includes support for ecosystem full node infrastructure. COZ maintains a fleet of secure public full nodes across all three ecosystem protocols for every network in each as a public utility for all community members.
This initiative implements a scope-limited, cross-chain bridge to support Neo Legacy users migrating to Neo N3.
The new high-performance bridge will have native integration in the Neon platform and facilitate a 2 block migration period. Over 90% of the cumulative ecosystem migrations since the N3 genesis block have been facilitated through the Neon platform and it is absolutely critical for us to provide a good migration experience for our community.
This campaign specifically targets the significant support and product experience burden encountered by reactivating dormant ecosystem members using existing workflows and will include a reactivation campaign to reengage dormant community members.
The PROPS initiative was originally created to modularly extend dapp features by introducing basic infrastructure contracts into the ecosystem. As a secondary motivation, these contracts were designed to be reference materials for developers.
The monorepo architecture of this project has a number of issues for developer infrastructure and templating. Additionally, tooling (like CPM and the neon dappkit) have significantly enhanced the overall product development experience since this initiative began. We are completely overhauling the PROPS dApps into nuclear product templates including scaffolding for a front-end with wallet interfaces.
We are confident that this change will significantly improve the developer experience, specifically for newer ecosystem members who may not have forkable examples to start from.
We also believe that building out complete dApps will resolve unreconciled developer pain points associated with front end integration. Some additional dApps will also be implemented as part of this initiative to intercept feature needs for the Neon Wallet platform.
Standardization of code is a major consideration and all components are designed to highlight best-practices and core features as well as maximizing value as context for algorithmic training so we can push the bar on prompt-based dApp templating ("vibe programming") and technical support within the Neo ecosystem.
Last year, we debuted the boabot and antbot products as exploratory agents within our discord server.
Boabot was a developer support resource, primarily focusing on boa and neon-js developer questions. Antbot was a "Neo Encyclopedia", pulling from the body of content produced in the ecosystem over the past 8 years (heavy lifting from NeoNewsToday). Over the past year, we have been working to structure our products to support intelligent systems.
This initiative will either seed or yield the following initial value propositions for our ecosystem by leveraging standardization of tooling:
- Encyclopedic ecosystem exposure for community platforms including social advocacy
- Live developer and retail support in products as well as community platforms
- Bespoke dApp templating (Business Case and User Needs → prototype) using prompts
- Intelligent Self-Custodial wallet notifications and executions
- Wallet Signing Guardrails
Cathode is an e2e encrypted messaging service and interop standard for our products and those of our integrators.
Cathode is a local and cloud deployable, OS agnostic messaging service. COZ will host a default node. Over the years, a number of critical features have required this functionality. For example, the ability to synchronize mobile and desktop wallet configurations in multiple formats (like hot/cold wallet) in either a hosted or self-custodial manner.
This initiative will also enable downstream projects like our intelligent systems campaign which allows ecosystem members to produce algorithmic interaction proposals to user wallets on a white-list basis.
Performance improvements to support ecosystem scaling.
Over the next two years, we anticipate significant increases in transaction volume on Neo N3 and X. This initiative adds additional storage layers and query improvements to support current and future transaction volumes.
Additionally, with increased focus by the Neo Council on competing on L1 performance with enhancements like a 3 second block time, we are motivated to proactively accommodate resource scaling to ensure the ecosystem is prepared.
PROPS S2 will introduce a new set of reference contracts for developers and agentic tools.
The initial PROPS contracts have been widely used in our experiential products and have acted as developer reference points for complex contract design patterns for the past two years.
This initiative will deploy a new set of reference contracts for developers and agents based on feedback from the PROPS Repack and Intelligent Systems initiatives. This initiative also includes scope for extended PUPPET utility.
Neon
One of the longest continuously developed self-custodial wallets in the industry. Neon has been the secure, open-source gateway for hundreds of thousands of users. With the release of Neon 3, for desktop, the platform is architecturally aligned to quickly deploy its secure product offerings across many different configurations in parallel.
Neon deliverables
Native Migration Path
Cross Chain Atomic Swaps
Transaction History
NFI MFA
Fiat Ramp
Atomic Swaps
Smart Notifications
Native Protocol Suite
Retail Payments
Nero Aero
Token Listings & Protocol Support
Intelligence & Tooling
Brand & Experiential
Retail Products
As part of an ongoing set of features to enhance wallet user experience and reduce technical support load, a COZ native migration bridge between Neo Legacy and Neo N3 is being deployed.
There are a significant number of outstanding legacy NEO and GAS holders, which use/used Neon. This campaign will internalize the bridge implementation to simplify technical support complexities in addition to implementing native migration support for all products in the Neon platform.
This initiative will focus on deploying cross-chain atomic swap capabilities within Neon.
Initial focus will be on enabling swaps between Neo ecosystem native tokens. As we add protocol support, this will expand into other ecosystems. This initiative is strategically focused around building a narrative that motivates NEO, GAS, and other ecosystem token listings on swap providers by stimulating swap volume to motivate listing.
This campaign will significantly overhaul the activity feed features of Neon products to enhance the communication quality for on-chain interactions across all protocols.
Primary focuses of this initiative includes:
- Execution clarity and context for all transaction types including super-routines like cross-chain swaps, and bridging which encompass multiple transactions.
- Enhanced search, filtering, and sort capabilities.
- Extended export features which consider downstream accounting formats including basis tools.
This initiative will focus on creating a collaboration channel between Neon and ITEM Systems by allowing NFI owners to use their hardware products as a chain-bound MFA solution to authorize transactions using an encrypted HTLS solution.
As this feature matures, it will expand to support multi-user, multi-hardware, and hybrid solutions as a native utility for all ITEM Systems products. This feature will eventually transition to a fully decentralized solution(via PROPS contract infrastructure) to expose equivalent utility to all product integrators.
The Neon Platform will be integrating a low-fee fiat ramp alongside its improved activity/accounting and swap features.
This functionality, like swaps, will be exposed to dApps. These features can be used in combination to significantly expand available wallet features that are available to decentralized applications.
This feature will introduce native integrations for the new order book product by our collaborators at Flamingo for all Neon products.
Users will have the ability to execute swaps directly from their wallet without navigating out of the application.
This joint initiative, in collaboration with the core technology platform, aims to integrate a modular, self-custodial recommendation engine into the wallet.
As the blockchain ecosystem continues to evolve, users face increasing challenges in tracking and executing essential maintenance transactions necessary for active participation. This is exemplified by the transition from Neo Legacy to Neo N3 and the introduction of voting as a requirement for earning measurable GAS. By implementing a modular system that enables the wallet to proactively support users while also equipping the community with tools to develop their own notification solutions, we can enhance engagement and ensure that our community is maximally effective in their web3 endeavors. When coupled with Cathode, smart notifications supercharge the Neon platform with self-custodial algorithmic execution capabilities.
The Neon platform is protocol and login agnostic by design as a means to support the technology needs of the rapidly evolving blockchain market.
Philosophically, we subscribe to idea that web3 users operate within many different ecosystems and its important to have a wallet that empowers them in a secure, reliable and self-custodial way with minimal cognitive load. This campaign will enable support for ecosystems that our users commonly migrate between in order to improve the overall user experience within the product.
This campaign will introduce retail payment (e.g. Apple Pay) features to Neon with the intent of enabling use of any Neon supported tokens with sufficient liquidity to be a payment option on most major retail point of sale and virtual checkout systems.
As scoped, this campaign requires a number of critical interfaces with technology partners and may have a follow-up initiative for complete deployment.
A familiar format with improved utility for the Smart Economy.
This product configuration will leverage the enhanced Neon architecture to quickly deploy features into a new product configuration, leveraging the value proposition of the entire platform and facilitating the needs of our retail-focused platforms.
Product Experience
The product experience platform is responsible for our experiential and brand work. Whether they’re rebranding a bleeding edge web3 ecosystem, deploying a 1000+ unit custom blockchain experience in a weekend, or designing a world class booth for the most prestigious event in the industry. The Product Experience team are champions at tactical deployments and pushing the envelope for Web3 experiences. This team is also key to deploying technical marketing campaigns like the numerous hackathons in the Neo ecosystem.
Product Experience deliverables
Safari Zone
Do You Know Neo?
Special Project
Product Branding
Go to Market
Spot Products
Token Listings & Protocol Support
Intelligence & Tooling
Brand & Experiential
Retail Products
This initiative merges features from multiple previous event-level activations to address some previous issues with onboarding while also increasing the number of participants. The concept is broken down into two distinct phases in the activation life-cycle.
Gear up, train hard, and battle for glory!
Step into an epic generative NFT scavenger hunt, where adventurers traverse the conference in search of on-chain gear and powerful upgrades for their digital companion. By unlocking hidden waypoints and exploring the interactive map, adventurers will discover rare enhancements to strengthen their companion for arena battles against other challengers—with exclusive prizes on the line!
Once fully equipped, your companion’s spirit can be bound to an Aeroglyph card, transforming them into a true battle-ready warrior. Take the fight to interactive tabletops or challenge rivals through the companion web app to prove your dominance.
Victory won’t just earn you bragging rights—climb the leaderboard and redeem experience points at the on-site ITEM Shop for exclusive gear and collectibles.
Will you rise to the top and claim your reward?
Since 2022, COZ has run bespoke live product experiences on Neo Mainnet for strategic marketing needs. Our team remains one of the only organizations in the industry capable of delivering on the belief of showing instead of telling in live run scenarios.
This conference season, we will refine the museum activation design from Token2049 2023 by delivering museum quality Non-Fungible Items to represent ecosystem products and teams alongside an accompanying app to inform users about the products. Running the entire experience will reward users with a great (as usual) merchandise offering that represents the Neo ecosystem.
IYKYK
COZ retains one of the best product design teams in the industry and openly provides these services to our collaborators.
We provide continuous product design and branding coverage for the Neo ecosystem as a support facility. Whether we are branding a major L1, sidechain or providing support for a collaborator project like Ndapp or Grantshares, our product design facilities provide exceptional results for our community. We maintain this facility as a service for ecosystem projects to enhance their product differentiation.
Presentation and messaging are critical to cut through the noise.
Neo has a reputation for best-in-class targeted blockchain campaigns. We provide conceptual, design, and messaging services for tactical marketing deployments with specific emphasis on live events like conferences. This facility includes content production ranging from booth and marketing materials design to video production and event staffing.
Narrow scope on-chain experiences provide engagement opportunities for ecosystem evangelists.
Community-focused micro experiences like the "Naughty or Nice" app and the "Red Envelope" that focus on on-chain commmunity engagement are delivered periodically to engage the community and provide reference points for experiential deployments.
Item Systems
ITEM Systems is a joint initiative and formal subsidiary of COZ and AxLabs that was formed to drive adoption of Non-Fungible Item technology. The deliverables for this platform will be outlined in a separate strategic document for the ITEM Systems company using a similar format. Technology intercepts will be similarly formatted to inform the community on cross-organization collaborations.