Leaked Transcript Uncovers Fallout Between IOTA Leaders 🚨 This article is 6 years old...
Leaked Transcript Uncovers Fallout Between IOTA Leaders
2 min read
Updated: Nov. 25, 2019 at 4:24 am UTC
Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash
A leaked conversation has revealed a serious fallout among the founding members of IOTA, pushing the project’s most intimate workings into the public eye.
Centered around the appointment of two IOTA founders to the board of directors, the controversial transcript opens with co-founder Sergey Ivancheglo, a.k.a. “Come-From-Beyond,” providing a “vote of no confidence” in co-founder Dominik Schiener, the only delegate with the power to appoint new members.
In addition, Ivancheglo shared that Schiener should resign from the IOTA Foundation, the core administration of the 10th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Posted on text-hosting site Pastebin, Aug. 8, Ivancheglo stated:
“I inform everyone that I don’t longer trust Dominik Schiener and I think he should quit the IOTA Foundation for the better future of IOTA.”
While Ivancheglo did not spell out his reasons for distrusting Schiener, the transcript revealed a political stalemate between a number of founders, who discuss the “long overdue” election of Ivancheglo and Serguei Popov, another founder, to the board.
Schiener appears to have a conscious resistance to the pair’s nomination, according to his comments in the transcript:
“I don’t even know what they will be doing on the board. I have been trying to get this information out of [Ivanchelgo], but all I got was three bulletpoints. And one was ‘tbd.'”
The discourse seesaws between accusation and constructive discussion; yet, it settles on the issue of the foundation’s statue, which several members wish to alter–effectively removing Schiener’s power of vote delegation and his exclusive right to nominate board members.
Schiener did not hide his distaste for this proposed change:
“Good luck. IOTA AS will have some serious legal issues with the advisor tokens and the impending tax audit. I am done with this. I am done with being threatened. If this is the course of action that both of you want to take, then I’m all for it. If you want to be enemies, let’s fight.”
Damage Control
Presumably anticipating a public relations trainwreck, the IOTA administration followed up the leaked conversation with an official explanation.
According to the four founders and board members—all of whom were privy to the leaked conversation—Ivancheglo’s statement of distrust was an emotional response to months of pent-up rage at his lack of a nomination.
The foundation’s statement paints Ivanchelgo’s trust issues with heavy strokes of remorse:
“Sergey Ivancheglo has since stated that asking for Dominik to resign was an emotional reaction to the situation, which had built up over months. The situation did not feel fair to him, being an integral member of the team behind IOTA as we know it today.”
In addition, the foundation has decided to nominate Ivancheglo and Popov to the board no later than Aug. 10, based on a mutually signed Memorandum of Understanding.
Whatever divisions existed during the leaked conversation appear to have been dissolved and the board will be graced with two new members—and none fewer. Having swept the subject of Schiener’s impeachment under the table, the foundation would appear to let bygones be bygones.
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IOTA is focused on being useful for the emerging machine-to-machine (m2m) economy of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), data integrity, micro-/nano- payments, and other applications where a scalable decentralized system is warranted..
IOTA Foundation
The IOTA Foundation was established in Germany as a formal, non-profit organization (‘gemeinnützige Stiftung’) in 2017 by Dominik Schiener and David Sønstebø..
Dominik is an Italian entrepreneur and co-founder of IOTA, where he’s focused on building the Machine Economy through Open Source Software.