The founder runs away, Cosmos strife

Text: 嚯 嚯

Source: Hive Finance

"It is never the enemy who defeats the entrepreneur, but himself."

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On February 4th, the internal cross-chain project Cosmos split. The founder Jae left the team. Another core member Zaki accused Jae of leaving a large number of outstanding engineers due to the uneven distribution of development resources, which affected the cross-chain agreement IBC. Development progress.

The price of the Cosmos mainnet token Atom has thus begun. From the opening price of 4.35 US dollars at 0 o'clock on February 4th, it has fallen all the way to the lowest price of 4.01 US dollars at 16:00 that day, the highest drop throughout the day is more than 8%.

The departure of soul figures is doomed to experience some pains. The development progress of IBC has attracted investors' attention, and the community has begun to ask when it will be online. As of now, Cosmos officials have not responded to external concerns.

Founder "runs out" Community, currency price turbulence

In the early morning of February 4, Zaki Manian, director of the distributed system software development company Tendermint Labs, posted a sudden post on social media, shelling his boss, Tendermint's founder Jae Kwon, saying that his departure as CEO was "avoiding responsibility."

The earliest news of Jae's departure came from the news of Twitter users on January 29th. However, Jae stood up at the time and responded that he would not leave now. "And the Cosmos team is basically working without me. "Jae's statement temporarily dispelled market concerns, and within a few days, Zaki Manian's public accusations brought the matter back to the public eye again.

In addition to expressing public dissatisfaction, Zaki also pointed out that in the past 6 months, Jae has over-focused on the Virgo project and ignored the development progress of the Cosmos cross-chain protocol IBC, resulting in insufficient investment in IBC development resources.

Cosmos is a blockchain cross-chain project initiated by the Tendermint team in 2016. For most investors who are concerned about the development of blockchain technology, Cosmos, as a representative of cross-chain technology, together with the Boca Polkadot project is called "cross-chain Chain Duo. "

In March 2019, since the main network CosmosHub was launched, the entire community has been looking forward to the launch of the IBC cross-chain protocol. In simple terms, the ICB protocol is a bridge between the Cosmos network and other blockchain networks, and its launch may have landmark significance for the entire blockchain industry.

According to official assumptions, various types of blockchain networks, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, can use Cosmos-SDK (development framework) to build their own blockchain partitions, and then use the IBC protocol to interact with the Cosmos Hub to break all The network is a situation of war and independent development.

At the beginning of November last year, overseas media reported that the ICB cross-chain agreement was about to go online. Perhaps due to this news, the price of the main coin Cosmos Atom at that time rose from $ 3.25 on November 1 to $ 4.37 on November 11. However, with the official silence, the news that the "ICB agreement is about to go live" has not changed over time. On the evening of November 11, the price of Atom began to show an inflection point, and in the following more than ten days, it went out of an "inverted V" trend and once fell below 3.25 US dollars.

The internal division of Cosmos made the community nervous, and asked the development progress of IBC one after another. At present, Cosmos officials have not responded to external concerns. Honeycomb Finance tried to contact the Cosmos team via email, social media and other platforms. As of press time, no reply has been received.

Atom fell to as low as $ 4.01 on the day

"Distressing my tens of thousands of Atom stocks" and "now looking at the cross-chain agreement and don't know when it will be online", the official silence is aggravating the anxiety of the community and investors.

Atom's market price entered a period of turbulence, from the opening price of $ 4.35 on February 4th to the lowest price of $ 4.01 at 16:00 on the day, the highest drop throughout the day exceeded 8%. As of 18:00 on February 5th, the price of Atom had picked up, rising to $ 4.21.

Project Director Lists Founder "X Zong Gui"

Another layer of Zaki's identity is a director of Tendermint. Like Jae, he is a core member of the Cosmos team.

In a number of tweets released in the early morning, Zaki listed several sins of Jae. In summary, it was mainly that Jae devoted his main energy to his Virgo project in the past six months, and the project was allocated for development resources The inequality caused a large number of outstanding engineers to leave Tendermint. In the end, Zaki stated that he would lead the Cosmos community to eliminate the adverse effects of Jae, continue to develop Cosmos and ensure the development progress of IBC.

Judging from the submissions of Jae's Github codebase, Zaki is right. After September 2019, Jae successively submitted codes for the Virgo project. So far, he has submitted seven codes, and his contribution to the Cosmos project has been decreasing in the near future. This is also, as Jae himself said, "Currently Cosmos basically works without my participation."

Since the establishment of the Virgo project in September 2019, there have been 8 code contributors to the project. Their actual identities correspond to Peng Zhong (Chief Design Officer of Tendermint), Jae Kwon (CEO of Tendermint), and PeterHaymond (Developed by Tendermint). (Relationship Engineer), HansSchoenburg (Chief Web Developer at Handshake), Cyrus Goh (front-end engineer at Tendermint), Khoa Phan, Jacob Gadikian, and anonymous developer E.

The code contribution of the Virgo project

It is not difficult to find that Virgo's core contributors are just some of the core members of Tendermint. This may be why Zaki is angry with his former boss. So, what exactly is Virgo, the project that made the founders "fell in love"? What does it have to do with Cosmos?

Virgo's official website has a description of the project vision: hope to provide the world with the best open collaboration technology, and its mission is to provide open and financial DeFi with free and easy-to-use software and hardware, technical protocols, social communications, personnel coordination and many other aspects Technical support.

Many members of the Cosmos community are puzzled by this abstract description. They are more concerned about how Virgo achieves its goals, and its official commitment is "to develop based on Cosmos and to feed back the ecosystem of the Cosmos project."

Faced with external inquiries, Tendermint and Cosmos have never explained this point, which undoubtedly casts a mist on the internal division of Cosmos. Aside from this unreasonable internal relationship, a question that has made the entire Cosmos community more concerned is how the future of Virgo and Cosmos will develop after Jae leaves the CEO. This has become a "time to answer" question.

Star projects are often abandoned by founders

In fact, there are not a few examples of the founder of the currency star project leaving. The most typical one is EOS founder Daniel Larimer (BM).

He left the graphene public chain Bitshares (BitShares) and the social platform Steemit, and co-founded the well-known DPoS public chain EOS. In BitShares, BM innovatively proposed a DPoS consensus algorithm, which elects governance nodes by voting; in Steemit, BM uses a three-token mechanism to try to balance the contradiction between the volatility of digital currency and the constancy of incentive value.

Neither of these two projects BM persisted to the end and instead developed EOS. From the results, despite the founder's departure, Bitshares and Steemit are still alive so far.

The outside world has always had mixed opinions about the way a project founder left the project. It is undeniable that the departure of souls has caused these projects to experience some short-term difficulties and increased the community's distrust of the project.

Although Cosmos has changed its team as a cross-chain pioneer, the industry still looks forward to cross-chain technology. Because each public chain is developed independently, it is like an island of value. Cross-chain technology is to build a bridge between these value islands so that the chain and the chain can send transactions to each other, thereby forming the value interconnection of the entire blockchain.

Cosmos uses the Cosmos-SDK to reconstruct the blockchain ecosystem. Cosmos-SDK is a development framework that can be understood as a universal toolkit. Any block chain built on it can use this set of common modules. Developers can also simply add some new modules to achieve extensions.

Cosmos's cross-chain conjecture

At present, more than 80 projects in the Cosmos ecosystem have been developed based on the Cosmos SDK, the most famous of which include the Binance Decentralized Exchange and the IRISnet project that supports data and computing cross-chain services.

The current progress is the most important module IBC cross-chain protocol in this framework is still under development. Although Cosmos has successfully launched the main network, it is still a long way from its vision of realizing China Unicom's blockchain network.

"The success of cross-chain does not depend on one person and two people. The growth of the project still depends on the entire community, but from the perspective of other projects on the blockchain, how much the core soul of a project leaves will cause the project a period of pain. "Irisnet co-founder Harriet said in a circle of friends.

Lost Jea's Cosmos, and the community, at least for now, Zaki Manian, who vented his dissatisfaction on Twitter, has stood up and is willing to go along with the community.

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