Why I built Node Neo.
This started as a personal project. It became the AI client I use every day — and how I cancelled most of my subscription bills. Here's the why, the goal, and where it's going.
Morpheus was great. Getting in was unusable.
The Morpheus-Lumerin-Node project has progressed fast. The protocol works, the providers work, the on-chain economics work. But the consumer-side journey — install a node, configure it, generate or import a wallet, top it up, point it at the right RPC, debug the failures along the way — was a wall. If you weren't already comfortable in the space, you didn't get past it.
I wanted a single, embedded, cohesive client. One app. Open it, create a wallet, chat. Everything chain-side hidden behind a thin layer that just works.
Privacy that holds up under real-life prompts.
TEE-attested models — Max Privacy, in app terms — are great in principle. But there wasn't a UX where you could honestly drop a medical record, a financial statement, or a question you'd never want logged against your name — and feel confident about where it went. The Morpheus API Gateway helps people understand the network, but it's still a centralized hop.
Self-custody + TEE-attested inference + a polished consumer client = the missing piece. Nothing centralized between you and the provider; conversations encrypted at rest with a wallet-derived key; no inbox to subpoena, no support team to social-engineer.
I was paying four AI subscriptions. I want zero.
Grok. ChatGPT. GitHub Copilot. Cursor (with Claude). The bills add up — for me, and for the team. Each of those is a great product. Each is also a permanent monthly bill, paid forever, on someone else's servers, with the price ratchet always going up.
With Node Neo on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, I have a chatbot that handles the questions I used to send to Grok and ChatGPT. Frontier-class models, just rented through an open market instead of paid through a monthly seat.
Concrete progress
ChatGPT and Grok subscriptions: cancelled. Node Neo handles those flows on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS today. Two recurring bills off the books. Permanently.
The AI Gateway is the developer escape hatch.
The macOS build (and soon Linux) ships an embedded AI Gateway — an OpenAI-compatible HTTP endpoint plus an MCP bridge, served from your local machine. Configure your IDE the way you'd configure any other OpenAI-compatible model: paste a local URL and an API key. Zed, Cursor, Continue, Cline, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Claude Desktop — anything that takes that interface works.
With a daily MOR stake, that means perpetual access to coding-grade models like
Qwen3-Coder and GLM-5.1, all day, without a recurring Cursor
or Anthropic bill. Want more parallel agents? Stake more MOR. Stake, not spend
— you don't lose the MOR, you just hold more of it. And you can switch which
model your IDE talks to whenever a better one shows up on the network.
Concrete progress
I've been running Zed instead of Cursor for a few weeks now, pointed at my local Node Neo gateway. Once file attachments and image processing ship, I can drop Cursor entirely.
Freedom from the swipe-card-every-month tax.
You buy MOR once. Each chat locks a tiny piece as a right-to-use stake; it returns to your wallet when the session ends. The same MOR funds the next chat. The next thousand chats. It's a library card on the Morpheus network — in your wallet forever, lets you check out as many "books" (sessions) as you want against the same loan. ETH is the postage stamps you use to mail each request through the network — cents per use, the only piece that genuinely depletes.
Heavier usage over time = more MOR locked at once (more parallel sessions, more agents). But it's never a recurring bill. Never a tier upgrade. Never an account that can be suspended. And as the Morpheus network grows TEE-attested model coverage, more of your conversation qualifies for hardware-level privacy by default. Your conversation stays your conversation.
A few items on the roadmap that earn their place here.
Not everything we're building — just the items that ladder directly into the thesis above.
- File attachments + image processing. The two missing pieces between Node Neo and a complete Cursor replacement. Drop in a codebase or a screenshot, get help on it from a Morpheus model.
- Linux build + AI Gateway. Brings the developer escape hatch to where most developer workflows actually live.
- In-app fiat → MOR onramp + ETH→MOR swap. Tap "Buy MOR," enter card, MOR shows up. The words "ETH," "Base," "Uniswap," and "swap" can disappear from the new-user vocabulary entirely.
- Plain-language model labels. Today the model list reads like a hex dump to a normal user. Categories, taglines, and a starter recommendation make "pick a model" boring instead of intimidating.
- More TEE-attested model coverage. The privacy story improves every time a new provider attests their hardware. Max Privacy mode keeps getting more useful as the network grows.
If your AI subscription bills look like mine did, this might be your exit too.
Try it. Drop your first chat. If it doesn't replace anything yet, the wallet still works in MetaMask, Rainbow, or any standard wallet — you've lost nothing. If it does, you've found a way out.
Stake MOR on the Node Neo builder subnet.
The Morpheus capital subnet has a clean answer for "support a project without writing a check": stake MOR on the Node Neo builder pool. The stake increases my yield as a builder, which directly funds the development time and hosting costs that keep this app shipping.
It's a stake, not a donation. Your MOR stays yours. Unstake any time after a 7-day lock period (the countdown is visible on the dashboard) and it returns to your wallet.
Stake on the Node Neo subnet →