In-depth interpretation of the power struggle within the Cosmos team

What I think of is a folk expert's evaluation of the public chain founders:

"Blockchain requires a founding developer with talent in computer theory and engineering development capabilities. Satoshi Nakamoto is the best. BCNXT Secondly, Gavin Wood and Jed are also available. Vitalik has a high theoretical talent, and large-scale development capabilities require training Class. Charles & BM is a good construction worker, and development can be. Jae Kwon is back on the old road of BFT, and is a strong developer.

Rchain Zilliqa Harmony's cattle will certainly not be achieved. Sharding is something that is almost impossible to do with simple principles. This is a technical bottleneck. In addition, Casper is difficult to do. Nervos is also very big, but it is an improved version of the ether. Difinity plays technical sci-fi and can't do it at all. If the team is more realistic, it is an improved version of EOS.

The founders of several relatively well-known spots, BM can only 'cheat money' and "BB What if", Lao Cha can only take selfies and spray people, Jae Kwon is self-closed, and Arthur B can't say good words 'eat wife soft rice', Zooko It's also 'White Left Silly', Yan Ni is 'violent mad'. One of the few blockchain heroes, Sun Yuchen, unfortunately, Yingnian Zaoshi. So cherish Vitalik. "

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Although it is a very subjective evaluation, it is not difficult for us to extract two possible characteristics of Cosmos founder Jae Kwon: strong development ability and self-closing.

According to my observations, Jae Kwon is a particularly idealistic person.

Some people say that Jae kwon has changed, just like the founders of junk projects that issued coins in order to collect money in 2017. After the money was collected, they became self-motivated and cheerful. But I don't think so, but I think Jae Kwon has not changed.

Why did Jae Kwon create Tendermint, the underlying consensus engine for PoS? Because the biggest difference between PoS and PoW is environmental protection and energy saving. Here we do not discuss whether environmental protection and energy saving are really the advantages of PoS. At least in Jae Kwon's mind, an excellent blockchain project must protect the environment and not consume a large amount of energy like PoW projects.

Vigro is a very utopian project. In short, it is to protect the global environment, fight against power, government and capitalism, and save the world. So the project of Vigro fits perfectly with Jae Kwon's idealistic color.

If you investigate a little, you will find that in Jae Kwon's introduction, there is a line "save the world" to save the world. In addition, Jae's comments on Twitter in the past year show that he is very concerned about environmental issues, although the relevant remarks are somewhat radical, which makes many people confused. Therefore, he feels that he has become a person.

Cosmos itself is an idealistic project. If it weren't for the idealistic temperament that founder Jae Kwon had, then I guess Cosmos would never have been born. Without judging the right or wrong of Jae spending energy on the project Vigro, just from the similar temperament of the two projects, Jae does not have any logic to do this.

According to the agency, when meeting with Jae last year, Jae had been talking about Vigro, which made the agency think that Jae was strange. And everyone generally does not understand what the Vigro project is doing, and they think it is environmentally friendly.

So what exactly does Jae want to do? Maybe everyone will be dazzled by the complicated media reports online. Let me briefly sort it out.

First, "resign as CEO" (why I double-quoted, I will say later). Second, spend time on the Vigro project. At the same time, Jae is the sole board member of Tendermint, which means he has actual control over the company. It is also one of the three committee members of the Interchain Foundation.

Jae also said that Cosmos has been operating normally without his involvement. The fact is the same. In the past two years, Jae has indeed faded from the front-line development of the Cosmos project and gradually retreated behind the scenes.

So why is Zaki Manian, one of Cosmos's core leadership members, director of Tendermint Labs firing on Jae Kwon on Twitter. Zaki said that Jae Kwon's previous statement that he "has not left and the Cosmos Hub project is working to achieve decentralization" is lying. Jae Kwon is not doing decentralization, he is obviously trying to avoid responsibility for the Cosmos project.

Zaki said that in the past 6 months, Jae Kwon has been focusing on the Virgo project, while ignoring Cosmos's IBC development and not providing resources for IBC, which has caused many talented engineers to leave the company, which has given the resources of the core software team Seriously insufficient. People in the community asked Zaki when they would hire more developers. Zaki's answer was "seperate Jae from development then hire".

At this point we can basically deduce exactly where the contradiction is.

Jae just said that in the future Tendermint will not set up the CEO seat, but it does not mean that he is not in control. Although Jae spent his energy on the new project Vigro, he is still the actual controller of the company. At the same time, he ignored the development of Cosmos, which included not recruiting more developers. So the current progress of Cosmos development is a bit slow.

According to Zaik Twitter, in the past month, Jae has made religious discrimination, loyalty tests and abuses on every channel of internal communication. In the end, he built a Byzantine fault tolerance system, but Tendermint risked him a single point of failure. After Zaki tweeted, two other members of the team reposted this tweet to accuse Jae of tyrant behavior.

The conclusion is that Jae is unwilling to delegate power and is also fascinated by his new project. This severely hinders the team's development progress.

Jae Kwon is indeed the inventor of Tendermint. The initial development of the Cosmos project was also supported by Jae. His personal influence has attracted many investors, developers and community enthusiasts. But the project has now reached a certain stage, the founder does not have to occupy a seat, because the historical task is completed, it is time to move on. It seems Cosmos is not lacking him, and many people want him to leave. He is an excellent visionary in technology products, but his leadership is indeed problematic.

This type of problem is actually relatively simple. Jae does what he wants to do, and the team should do it. The goal itself is very clear, just as everyone knows the division of labor. And Jae, as the founder obediently do a good job as a project mascot.

Zaki deserves to be called the hero and soul of Cosmos. His ability is relatively comprehensive. He is a core developer and at the same time knows how to maintain relationships with people in his circle. His Twitter has also won the support of many insiders. His ability is more suitable for becoming CEO, of course, if he really becomes CEO, there may be some criticism. After all, he is the protagonist of this tearing event.

Some ideas about the solution. The first is that it should be handled internally. If you continue to tweet each other on Twitter, this will not benefit the project at all, because everyone has to stand in line. In this regard, I also asked the project members, and he said that this is a matter that should be resolved internally and will not be pushed in public in the future.

There is another problem here. Since tearing in public will affect the project, why did Zaki choose to tweet? This question is worth thinking about. The answer may be that he wants to expose the problem to the public eye, because the internal resistance is relatively large, so try to look at external forces. Why internal resistance is large, this involves governance issues within the company. Jae is the sole director of Tendermint and one of the three committee members and chair of the Interchain Foundation, and co-founder Ethan is the vice chair.

After public disclosure and media reports from various parties, Tendermint and the Interchain Foundation finally had to come out and make public announcements. Let's take a look at the contents of the two declarations.

Tendermint's statement can be summarized as that more developers will be recruited in 2020 to accelerate the development of IBC.

The Interchain Foundation's statement appears to be very neutral, beginning with recent statements that Jae has severely hindered the progress of Cosmos project development. Secondly, the statement stated that Interchain had signed a development contract with Tendermint, and Interchain commissioned Tendermint to develop Cosmos software. There are also many third-party teams helping Cosmos development.

Furthermore, the foundation's operations will not be affected by recent events. Its decision-making and financial management involve multiple people. No individual can act unilaterally. Because the Cosmos network belongs to everyone and is not owned, controlled, or operated by any single group.

The implication of the foundation is that we all understand these things, and Tendermint's priority is to work hard to keep development going. If Tendermint does not complete the development task well, the foundation may find other contractors to engage in development.

It can be seen that the development of Cosmos is already in the process of decentralization. At present, the external development team of Cosmos has Agoric Regen and so on. In fact, most projects are also the same, there are many development teams, rather than a single development team.

Look at the attitudes of former team members, node service providers and institutions after the incident. The two founders of Cryptium Labs, Ava and Adrian, are also former developers of the Cosmos team, and tweeted their views. Ava said that the Tendermint team ’s developers are seriously understaffed, the proportion of developers is very small, and the CEO has been Failure to speak up does not fulfill my due obligations. Adrian said that the internal governance issues of the Tendermint team finally broke out. It's only a matter of time.

Node service providers have expressed their support for Zaki. It is also reasonable to think about it, because the benefits of being a node are deeply bound to the entire project. Well, this is in the interest of the node itself.

Agency 1confirmation told the media that the emergence of such internal tensions was a positive sign.

The sooner this kind of internal personnel problem occurs, the better. If it happens earlier, it can be resolved internally. Now the words have mixed the interests of the development team and the node ecology. Relatively complicated.

What can be determined so far is that Jae must have delayed the development of the project. At the same time, there are two factions within the team. It would be good for the project if this matter could be resolved as soon as possible.

But it's not too bad. After all, all large projects have experienced problems with team governance. The transfer of power belongs to the transfer of power, let the development do its own thing, and let the external forces of the node ecology maintain patience and don't participate too much.

After all, the team's personnel struggle is just appearance, and whether the IBC can be developed in the end is the most critical thing. After all, the key to Cosmos is the IBC cross-chain communication protocol.

The direct impact of the tearing event was that the price of Atom coins dropped by 10% and the pledge unlocked nearly 2 million Atom tokens. But after two short days of decline, the price has now returned to the level before the event. As Jack Boka said on Twitter, the price of the currency has fallen by 10% because of this incident, which indicates that the entire market of the currency circle is very inefficient, or the Cosmos project is currently very decentralized And solid.

After the incident, there are still several good news. The first is that the fund depository institution supports Atom, and then the node that Coinbase made Atom. It is estimated that it will be officially announced after testing the node. There is also the Atom 50x contract that Binance launched yesterday. And BitMax will soon announce that it will be an Atom node.

Judging from the current market performance of Cosmos, it can be explained that Cosmos is anti-fragile , that is, the ability of the project to face the Black Swan incident itself. As for how strong this anti-fragility is, we need to continue to follow up. After all, it was only about 3 days after the event was heard. This time is not enough to draw too clear a conclusion.

Cosmos' fundamentals are still very good.

Cosmos has many first-mover advantages.

The first is professional node resources. Cosmos's first Game Of Stake test incentive network has set a good example for subsequent cold start of PoS network projects. The difference between the PoS project and the PoW project is that before the project starts, it is necessary to recruit professional node service providers. The way to attract them as nodes is to start a testnet competition with incentives. In the competition nodes need to meet some of the conditions listed by the project party.

You will find that the node service providers of the mainstream PoS projects are basically the same, and these nodes are all Cosmos nodes and have a strong sense of participation in the Cosmos network, with large chips and powerful voice.

The second is the node support of the exchange. Major exchanges such as Binance, Huobi, Coinbase, and Ok have all made Cosmos nodes, and the underlying DEXs of these exchanges have used the Cosmos-SDK development framework. This laid a direct or indirect foundation for the mutual communication between chains after the development of the IBC cross-chain communication protocol.

The third is the brand and mental occupation of PoS projects. Now that you talk about PoS projects, there are only two typical and representative: Cosmos and Tezos. Plus an upcoming Polkadot. At the same time, about 40% of the projects use the Tendermint PoS underlying consensus engine.

The fourth is a strong ecological network effect. At present, four ecological projects of Cosmos: Atom / Iris / Kava / Terra have been listed on mainstream exchanges. This is very rare. Later, more Cosmos ecological projects will be launched on the main network and exchanges. Cosmos's ecosystem is clearly getting stronger and stronger.

For investors, rational decision-making is to continue to follow up the team's subsequent power transfer, benefit distribution, and IBC development progress. For me personally, I will continue to support the ecology of the Cosmos project. It is easy to do the icing on the cake, but the hard part is sending charcoal in the snow. Give technology innovation projects more tolerance and confidence, instead of ridiculous cynicism when things happen, and arbitrarily draw conclusions without clarifying the context.

I think the quality and cultivation of the entire industry still need to be greatly improved.

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