Introducing TokenManagement on Neo 4.
Neo has added a major piece of protocol-level infrastructure: TokenManagement, a native contract designed to provide a secure, unified, and extensible foundation for both fungible tokens and NFTs.
TokenManagement is a single native contract that supports both fungible tokens (NEP-17 style) and non-fungible tokens. Both token types are implemented on top of the same underlying primitives: deterministic asset identity, shared accounting logic, unified storage models, and standardized events and callbacks. This dramatically reduces duplicated token logic across the ecosystem and raises the baseline security of all applications.
Neo introduced VM-level protection for token callbacks. The runtime now enforces that onPayment, onNFTPayment, onTransfer, and onNFTTransfer can only be invoked by native contracts. This prevents spoofed callback calls, forged token interactions, and an entire class of reentrancy and logic-spoofing attacks. Token callback security is now enforced by the VM itself rather than by convention.
TokenManagement represents a shift in how token infrastructure is built on Neo. Instead of every contract re-implementing its own token logic, the network provides a shared, audited, protocol-level foundation. This results in stronger security guarantees, better composability between protocols, less duplicated and error-prone code, cleaner smart contracts, and faster innovation at the application layer.
By moving core token mechanics into native contracts, Neo enables developers to focus on application logic rather than low-level accounting. TokenManagement lays the groundwork for safer DeFi primitives, richer NFT ecosystems, more expressive DAO and governance models, and long-term maintainability at the protocol level.
Source code:
github.com/neo-project/neo