Behind the confidence of a century-old dream, what exactly is NeoSoul doing?

To be honest, the recent market conditions aren't really suitable for launching new coins. Bitcoin is grinding back and forth around $80,000, altcoins keep breaking below key levels, and the latest U.S. CPI report has people talking about rate hikes again.

Most project teams prefer to launch tokens when the market is good, or they simply don't launch at all—like StandX, the perpetual DEX founded by the former head of Binance Futures. A project that everyone had high hopes for announced it won't be issuing a token, and most users were very disappointed.

But some projects think differently—like NeoSoul.

Not only are they launching, but they immediately announced an airdrop for StandX's existing users. A portion of DNA is specifically allocated to long-term contributors in the StandX community, which helped them capture a wave of traffic.

When a new token launches, the first things people usually talk about are price and airdrops. Beyond the collaboration between NeoSoul and the StandX community, NeoSoul's buzz also centers on a plan called Believe. On TGE day, the official tweet about this plan surpassed 350,000 views.

On November 5, NeoSoul announced the execution of the Believe plan:

This plan embeds DNA into every layer of the project's capital flows, from inside to outside. Internally, daily operational settlements default to using DNA, a portion of team members' salaries is denominated in DNA, and employees can voluntarily increase the proportion of DNA in their compensation to align their returns with the project's long-term performance. Externally, settlements with suppliers and partners prioritize payment in DNA.

NeoTrade's Agent services, Skills services, and data sources only accept DNA payments. In future versions, holding or staking DNA will unlock higher trading limits and professional-tier capabilities such as institutional-grade data sources. Every DNA used for salaries, partnerships, and internal rewards is bought from the secondary market—with no lock-up—rather than allocated directly from the treasury.

On the team side, automatic time-based linear unlocking has been eliminated. The lock-up period is retained, and token unlocks are strictly tied to phased KPIs: tokens are released only when targets are met, and never exceed the original linear cap; if targets aren't met, the unlock for that period is zero. The specific KPI metrics are being solicited publicly from the community. Investors' existing unlock arrangements continue to be honored, and early investors willing to voluntarily extend their lock-up receive corresponding alignment incentives.

The core of the entire Believe plan is the very first sentence: "I want NeoSoul to live for 100 years."

This is indeed a somewhat fantastical plan—NeoSoul itself thinks so too. After all, CoinGecko data shows that as of the end of 2025, of the roughly 20.2 million tokens recorded on GeckoTerminal, 53.2% no longer have any trading activity. More than half of all tokens are already dead, yet NeoSoul is talking about a hundred years.

The most important aspect of realizing the hundred-year Believe plan is linking token unlocking with performance.

Farewell to the cryptocurrency industry's nightmare "unlock day"

Performance linkage is not new in traditional companies; the most famous example is Silicon Valley Iron Man Musk.

In January 2018, Tesla's board of directors proposed an unprecedented compensation plan. Musk would not receive a salary, cash bonus, or time-vested stock; all returns over the next ten years would be tied to Tesla's performance.

For every $50 billion increase in Tesla's market value, along with meeting a revenue or profit target, Musk could unlock one tranche of options, each about 1% of the company's shares, for a total of 12 tranches.

At that time, Tesla's market value hovered between $50 billion and $75 billion, and Model 3 production issues were still causing headaches for the company. The highest tranche required a market value of $650 billion, equivalent to creating ten more Teslas. Many people thought this plan was too harsh and that the board never intended to actually give Musk the shares.

However, Musk had already played this kind of bet in 2012. That year, Tesla's market value was only $3.2 billion, and the board set 10 tranches for him, each requiring a $4 billion increase in market value. Five years later, Tesla's market value had increased 17-fold.

Therefore, Musk accepted this time as well, and ultimately, by sleeping at the factory and working relentlessly, this Silicon Valley Iron Man achieved all the targets.

On Wall Street and among major domestic internet companies, this logic has long been common sense: how many options and shares management receives depends entirely on how much performance is achieved.

What about our crypto industry?

Most team tokens are unlocked according to a calendar. They are locked for a period first, then released linearly on a monthly basis; regardless of how the project performs, they can be obtained once the time is reached. Therefore, "unlock day" has always had a poor reputation in the crypto world. Market makers have counted over 16,000 unlock events, about 90% of which were accompanied by price declines, with team unlocks falling the most, by around 25%, and often starting to decline a month in advance.

The most representative case was when Ethereum Layer 2 network Arbitrum unlocked about 1.1 billion ARB at once, equivalent to about three-quarters of the circulating supply at the time. Prices fell about 26% in the four days around the unlock. It is hard to say that the project team members were unethical, as this has been the industry's default rule all along.

Why has no one in the crypto world learned from Musk's approach? A very practical reason is that time-based unlocking is the best way to "lie flat and soft rug." A practice like Musk's, which tightly binds team returns to performance, is hard to find precedents for in the crypto industry.

This time, NeoSoul was the first to eat the crab.

What the Believe Plan aims to do

Tesla's compensation plan is hard to reference directly, after all, market cap, revenue, and profit all have clear scales in quarterly financial reports. The situation for crypto projects is very different. Teams receive tokens, products are mostly still in early stages, and revenue and profit often aren't even in the picture yet—token prices can swing by double digits in a single day. Copying Wall Street's options scheme as-is would likely not fit.

NeoSoul's approach is to anchor constraints on the two most sensitive things in the crypto industry: how the team gets tokens, and whether anyone is actually using the token. The Believe Plan is therefore divided into four parts, corresponding to company operations, product, ecosystem incentives, and the interest arrangements for the team and shareholders. The product and ecosystem parts are more closely tied to NeoTrade and will be detailed later. Among the four, the heaviest hand is on the team part.

The original linear unlock that released monthly on schedule has been canceled and replaced with KPI-linked unlocks. The actual unlock amount per period does not exceed the upper limit of the original linear plan; even if the team overperforms, they can at most receive only that portion from the original plan each period. And if the KPI for the period is not met, there is no unlock for that period.

A simple example. Suppose a team is allocated 100 million tokens, originally planned for linear release over 24 months, which is about 4.17 million tokens per month, arriving on schedule. Under the Believe rules, that 4.17 million becomes the monthly cap. If the KPI is met this month, they get at most 4.17 million; if not, this month is zero. No matter how outstanding the team's performance in a given month, they cannot make up for what was missed in the previous month, nor can they receive a single extra token.

Here we can compare with Musk again. Musk's plan has no upper limit—the better Tesla does, the more he gets. But the Believe Plan nails the ceiling to the original plan: no matter how well the team performs, they only get back what they were originally entitled to; if they perform poorly, they miss out period by period.

The reason given in the plan for why the team is willing to sign such terms is just one sentence: "The team's return should be determined by actual results. We are willing to accept such constraints."

Even more interesting is who sets the questions. In listed companies, executive KPIs are generally set by the board's compensation committee, and shareholders at most get a vote. NeoSoul has distributed the question-setting power, inviting KOLs and the community to jointly formulate the KPIs for team unlocks. Those being tested no longer decide what they are tested on—that in itself is an additional layer of constraint.

Of course, this is also a big lesson for the community.

It is said that there is a Goodhart's Law in economics, which roughly means that once an indicator becomes an assessment target, it no longer works well. Using coin price as a KPI will push the team in the direction of pumping the price; using the number of Agents as a KPI, a few events can inflate it. What is truly convincing should be those numbers that are very difficult to fake, such as how many people on NeoTrade are using it with real money, and how many businesses are actually settling with DNA. Whether the questions are well set tests the team and also tests the community.

If only the unlock rules were changed, the Believe plan would still just be a constraint. It goes further, putting the team's daily operations on DNA as well. The company's internal daily settlements will prioritize the use of DNA, part of employees' compensation will also be paid in DNA, and if they are willing, they can take even more. External cooperation will likewise prioritize payment in DNA, with stablecoins coming after. Even the annual best striver award is paid in DNA. All this DNA is bought from the secondary market, with no lock-up period.

These two details show sincerity. Buying from the secondary market means that every time salaries are paid and every cooperation payment is made, it is real buying pressure, without using newly issued tokens. No lock-up means employees can sell at any time once they receive it. Choosing to take more DNA becomes a decision that must be made anew every day, and how much employees still hold is itself a vote on the company.

A comparison with major internet companies shows how different this is. When big companies issue stock, it usually vests over four years, and if employees want to leave, the unvested portion has to stay behind; stock here is more like a pair of "golden handcuffs." NeoSoul does the opposite: once the coins are in hand, they are free, and employees can leave at any time. How much employees are willing to keep says more about the team's true internal confidence than any announcement.

On the shareholder side, the original unlock mechanism remains unchanged, and shareholders who voluntarily extend the lock-up period will receive a certain token reward from NeoSoul. Using constraints for the team and incentives for shareholders, the two approaches aim at the same thing: letting early chips enter the market a little later.

In this way, team members' income, the company's operating costs, and the long-term performance of DNA are put on the same boat.

The confidence behind the Believe plan is premised on there being something real behind DNA. So next let us look back at the NeoSoul project itself.

What exactly is NeoSoul doing

In the past two years, AI Agents have evolved faster than most people think.

Take one more step forward, and for many products, the users may no longer be human. The ones placing orders are Agents, the ones calling APIs are Agents, and the ones ultimately paying are Agents too. People only need to clearly state what they want, and everything else is left to the Agents to run. By then, Agents will become participants in economic activity, and even the primary group.

New problems follow. People choose restaurants by checking Dianping, and choose funds by looking at historical performance—so what should they look at when choosing an Agent? There are more and more Agents on the market, and each one claims to be smart, reliable, and capable of making money. Gartner warned last year that a large number of products on the market are merely ordinary AI assistants and chatbots rebranded with the Agent label. In its view, among the thousands of vendors claiming to do Agents, only about 130 truly live up to the name. It is hard for real users to distinguish which one genuinely has ability and which one is just talk. The market needs a way to help people clearly see which Agents are more trustworthy, and then decide whom to entrust their money to.

What NeoSoul wants to solve is exactly this problem: evaluating an Agent's capability based on what it has done before.

NeoSoul positions itself as AI economic infrastructure, with products running on BNB Chain and 0G. The project started from EvoEvo, which can be understood as a training ground for Agents. Agents first make judgments about real-world events, and when the results come out, they use the results to calibrate their next judgment. Their level is entirely determined by their historical track record. This approach of letting real results speak was later carried over in full into NeoTrade.

If EvoEvo is a driving school, NeoTrade is getting on the road.

NeoTrade, launched on August 17, is currently NeoSoul's core product. It is a general Agentic Trading workbench where traders can define their AI trading agent's trading logic, capital rules, and risk boundaries themselves. Without writing code from scratch, they can have the Agent continuously read market conditions and automatically execute trades.

On September 1, NeoTrade launched Skill Builder. It helps users explain their trading ideas simply through chat, and the system organizes it into a reusable trading Skill, equivalent to teaching their own trading methods to the Agent.

When AI trades for us, what everyone fears most is that it moves money recklessly, and NeoTrade has put considerable effort into this. First, learning permissions and capital permissions are managed separately. New versions of the Agent first enter shadow mode, where they can read real market information but do not have permission to trade real money. If market conditions go wrong, each Agent also has its own stop button, as well as a master switch to halt all Agents with one click.

On the underlying code level, NeoSoul has open-sourced part of it on GitHub. In the public wallet SDK, capabilities such as wallet derivation, encrypted key storage, order signing strategies, and EVM chain interaction are visible. To put it plainly, the goal is to prevent users from handing over their entire private key to a bot as much as possible—what the Agent can do and how much money it can move are all scoped in advance.

On the trading venue side, according to public information, NeoTrade currently supports a simulated trading environment using real market data and simulated funds for practice, as well as prediction markets like predict.fun and Polymarket.

Beyond products, NeoSoul is also moving toward payments and credit between Agents. It has partnered with self-custodial stablecoin neobank AllScale to research potential payment needs between Agents. For example, one Agent buys data from another Agent, calls tools, asks it to help make judgments, and then settles with stablecoins. It has also partnered with AI financial operating system Infini to use Infini's corporate card to pay for daily expenses such as SaaS subscriptions, AI APIs, and cloud services. The model processing and market analysis behind NeoTrade utilize Alibaba Cloud's AI model services.

On the basis of these products, NeoSoul has also announced the completion of a $11 million Pre-A funding round amid the crypto "economic downturn," with participation from MH Ventures, crypto financial services provider Amber Group, ArkStream Capital, 0G Foundation, Kirin Capital, CatcherVC, and New Oak International. The funds will mainly be used to advance NeoTrade, expand AI trading infrastructure, and develop markets in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

What to Watch Next

At this point, there is one more thing that hasn't been detailed—DNA itself.

According to the tokenomics materials disclosed by the project team, DNA has a total supply of 1 billion tokens, with 13% circulating at TGE, followed by monthly releases, fully unlocked by the 39th month. Under the Believe plan, NeoTrade will only support DNA payments, technical partners paying with DNA can enjoy discounts, and in the future, holding or staking DNA will unlock higher-level product permissions. Community incentives will also gradually tilt toward DNA holders and continuous contributors, and NeoSoul will also launch an Agent developer program to reward developers and quality Agent Owners.

Putting these pieces together reveals the role NeoSoul intends DNA to play. Users buy NeoTrade services with DNA, developers earn DNA by building good Agents, partners receive DNA, and employees are paid in DNA. If one day Agents also settle data purchases and judgment calls among themselves in DNA, it will truly become the unified unit of account in the AI Agent economy that the official narrative describes.

Of course, whether the Believe plan can hold up depends on several things going forward.

The first thing to watch is what the final proposal will set as KPIs. Who represents the community, how much weight KOLs and ordinary token holders each carry, what counts as completion, who verifies whether it was completed, and how the unlocked portion of tokens is handled if a given period's KPIs are not met—whether it rolls over to the next period. These are all details the community should pay attention to.

Second, how far NeoTrade's data can be made public is equally critical. How many Agents are actually running, how much was paid in DNA, and whether Agents actually made money after deducting fees and slippage—the earlier and more completely these numbers are disclosed, the more basis the community has for setting tasks.

Of course, the short-term circulation pace also deserves attention. Only 13% circulates at TGE, new tokens enter the market every month afterward, and the StandX community airdrop will also be distributed gradually. In the first few months after a new token launches, volatility tends to be greatest. After team tokens are switched to an assessment-based system, whether market expectations can be stabilized during this period is the first hurdle the Believe plan must clear.

At this point, the author is reminded of a Japanese company.

Kongo Gumi of Osaka is often called one of the world's oldest companies. In 578 AD, Prince Shotoku invited a carpenter named Kongo Shigemitsu from Baekje to build Japan's first official temple, Shitenno-ji, and Kongo Gumi started from there. For more than 1,400 years since, it has been repairing temples and building shrines, surviving wars, natural disasters, and repeated changes of regime. In 2006, Kongo Gumi was acquired by Takamatsu Construction due to debt problems and has continued to this day as a subsidiary.

Looking back, those companies that have survived a hundred or a thousand years all began as just a dream.

On TGE day, NeoSoul wrote in a tweet: "day 1 token. 100 year dream." A hundred years is still far away, and no one can say for sure now whether it can get there. But at least on day one, it first tied the team's returns to this dream.

In the words of the Believe initiative's own plan, "A hundred-year dream requires a hundred years of perseverance, and we must first be accountable for today's commitments."

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