9SnO 2 nanocrystals were prepared by precipitation in dodecylamine at 100 °C, then they were reacted with vanadium chloromethoxide in oleic acid at 250 °C. The resulting materials were heat-treated at various temperatures up to 650 °C for thermal stabilization, chemical purification and for studying the overall structural transformations. From the crossed use of various characterization techniques, it emerged that the as-prepared materials were constituted by cassiterite SnO 2 nanocrystals with a surface modified by isolated V(IV) oxide species. After heat-treatment at 400 °C, the SnO 2 nanocrystals were wrapped by layers composed of vanadium oxide (IV-V mixed oxidation state) and carbon residuals. After heating at 500 °C, only SnO 2 cassiterite nanocrystals were obtained, with a mean size of 2.8 nm and wrapped by only V 2 O 5 -like species. The samples heat-treated at 500 °C were tested as RhB photodegradation catalysts. At 10 −7 M concentration, all RhB was degraded within 1 h of reaction, at a much faster rate than all pure SnO 2 materials reported until now.Surface management is critical in such fields as heterogeneous catalysis, gas-sensors, photocatalysis and related applications, for obvious reasons of available reaction sites, and appears even more critical when complex systems are investigated. Indeed, several material features play a critical role in determining the final properties: the catalyst habit (i.e. size and shape, strictly correlated to dangling bonds of active species), surface oxygen vacancies (often correlated with in situ formation of active intermediates, such for instance peroxides), oxidation states of surface atoms are among the most relevant actors involved in reactant transformation during the process under investigation. It was recently highlighted 1,2 that classical heterogeneous catalysis can provide suggestive concepts of surface modifications. In fact, the nanocrystalline version of well-known combinations of catalytic oxides (COX) supported onto another metal oxide (support oxide, SOX) like TiO 2 -V 2 O 5 and TiO 2 -WO 3 , featured evident synergistic effects as concerns the enhancement of the gas-sensing response. It was argued that this occurred because, if the crystallite size of the SOX is decreased more and more, the relative electronic contribution generated by the reactions at the COX is increasingly important, due to the enhanced surface/volume atoms ratio in nanocrystalline materials. For extending this approach to surface modifications of materials, in this work