NEO is Rising on Comments by the Founder on Possible Collaboration

NEO seems to have been making quite a bit of headway over the past few days. This was on some news that the founder of NEO, Da Hongfei advised the Chinese government on a possible "collaboration".

The comments were made during an interview with the Dutch financial news outlet, Het Financieele Dagblad. In the same interview he also disputed the assertion that the government could ever ban mining.

According to Du Hongfei, the regulators asked him for "suggestions" on how to regulate the nascent financial field. This was prior to the announcement by the government that they would ban ICOs in China and eventually close down Bitcoin exchanges. In the interview Du Honfei said

NEO has often been likened to the "Chinese Ethereum" that was used by other companies to raise funding through ICOs. Despite this, Du Honfei says that he does indeed support the government's effort to clamp down on some of them. He claimed that the vast majority of these were fake and a fraud. He also sees that there is substantial growth opportunities even if there is no approval by the government.

When you started a business that ended with ‘dot com’, you could easily attract capital. The same is what you see with the ICO buzz,

No Truth to Mining Ban

There have also been some rumours floating that the Chinese government would eventually move in on Bitcoin miners. However, Mr Hongfei took a similar position to a number of other cryptocurrency commentators that this was nothing but speculation. He claimed that the main motivation behind the ban was to control capital flows of the retail investors. This makes sense given the strict rules that the Chinese have previously had in place on capital controls.

Working with the Government

Du Hongfei was also quite optimistic about a potential collaboration with the government. He did not see this happening in the short term but took the view that in the medium term the regulators could use NEO as a platform for the backbone of the country's blockchain infrastructure.

This interview by the NEO founder particularly the comment about the government consultation created great optimism in the price. Over the past 2 days, the price of NEO has increased by over 36% as shown in below chart from coinmarketcap.

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