Fans of the NEO cryptocurrency may have noticed that last week’s uptrend has broken suddenly. In fact, it appears there is a lot of selling pressure across the exchanges supporting NEO. It seems some discussions on Reddit may be influencing the NEO price right now. At least one user has claimed that the NEON wallet changed the address to which they were sending money right before completing the transaction. The majority of the community feels that the allegation is utterly bogus.
What is Going on With the NEO Price?
The past few weeks have been nothing short of amazing for anyone holding the NEO currency. After successfully rebranding from AntShares, NEO has proven that the coin certainly has a lot of value to the right people. A few days ago, one NEO was valued at just over US$50, but that price has since come down quite a bit. In fact, the price per coin has fallen to US$35.84 and continues to decline across supporting trading platforms. There must be an ulterior reason as to why this is happening right now, yet no one seems to know what is going on exactly.
If a discussion on Reddit is to be believed – and it is probably not entirely accurate – there is something wrong with the NEON wallet. For those who are unaware, NEON is a wallet solution for the NEO currency. We all know cryptocurrency wallets can pose major security risks when it comes to safekeeping funds and sending money to the right addresses. This latter aspect is quite important, as it would not be the first time cryptocurrency wallet users have seen a recipient wallet address change out of the blue when transacting. This particular discussion seemed to indicate something similar was happening to multiple users of the NEON service.
The poster in question claimed that a Bittrex deposit had suddenly been redirected to an unknown address. When the user (allegedly) reported this strange occurrence to the NEO team, he was – allegedly –promptly banned on Slack for spreading “FUD”. We do not yet know the full story of what was said by both parties in this case, but bans are usually only handed out when users are either spreading outright lies or trying to aggravate other users when they feel they do not receive the help to which they are entitled. Either incident could have occurred here, but we cannot tell for sure.
[UPDATE] Afong from CoZ reached out to us with the following statement:
“Actually, when the user reported this, we spent several hours a day for over a week trying to help him out. We always make sure to hear people out and see if we can help. We take a very light hand on banning in our Slack channel (for better or for worse) so it takes quite a bit to get banned from there. In this case, taking up a massive amount of our time on an unsubstantiated claim when we could have been developing warranted the ban eventually.”
So far, the NEO community does not seem to believe this story one bit. One of the NEON developers in the Slack channel noted that the user had claimed the wallet had a secret bug which was patched later on. The same user also claimed that multiple bugs had been discovered in the NEO blockchain which would allow for this alleged bug to occur. Details regarding said bug were never provided, which does not make the job easier for developers by any means. Without evidence and with just a story that could have easily been made up, the ban on Slack appears to have been more than warranted. Again, we do not know the entire story, but the developer’s words would seem to be a more credible recollection of what was said.
It is certainly possible this particular user has seen his or her funds transferred to the wrong NEO address. Whether or not that is the fault of the wallet or due to the user’s computer having been compromised is unknown. In similar cases, a computer is compromised whereas the wallet works just fine. Cryptocurrency users need to learn to take better care of the tools they use to store wallet balances. Regardless of whether that is a computer or mobile phone, all devices are prone to malware attacks which often go by unnoticed until it is too late.
For the time being, it is unclear if these allegations have effectively driven the NEO price down. It is certainly possible users are concerned about the missing funds and how they could potentially be dumped across exchanges. Then again, there are no other credible records of anyone having similar issues with the NEON wallet right now. The most likely explanation is that there is no wallet bug, whereas the user’s computer was infected by malware or a keylogger which allowed a hacker to alter the transaction’s recipient address. This happens a lot more than most people realize, but it is not the fault of wallet developers.
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