The founder left, Cosmos internal strife

Editor's Note: This article comes fromHoneycomb Finance News (ID: fengchao-caijing), Author: Hoho, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

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

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

The price of the Cosmos main network token Atom thus started a turbulent road. From the opening price of US$4.35 at 0:00 on February 4, it fell all the way to the lowest price of US$4.01 at 16:00 on the same day, with a maximum drop of more than 8% throughout the day.

Honeycomb Finance News (ID: fengchao-caijing)

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

The news of Jae’s resignation first came out on January 29th from Twitter netizens’ revelations. However, Jae himself stood up and responded at the time, saying that he will not leave now, “and the current Cosmos team is basically working without my participation. Yes.” Jae’s statement temporarily dispelled the market’s worries. After a few days of silence, Zaki Manian’s public accusation brought the matter back to the public’s attention again.

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

The price of the Cosmos main network token Atom thus started a turbulent road. From the opening price of US$4.35 at 0:00 on February 4, it fell all the way to the lowest price of US$4.01 at 16:00 on the same day, with a maximum drop of more than 8% throughout the day.

The departure of the soul is destined to experience some labor pains for this project. The development progress of IBC has attracted the attention of investors, and the community began to ask about the launch time. So far, Cosmos officials have not responded to outside concerns.

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The founder "leaves" the community and the currency price are turbulent

The news of Jae’s resignation first came out on January 29th from Twitter netizens’ revelations. However, Jae himself stood up and responded at the time, saying that he will not leave now, “and the current Cosmos team is basically working without my participation. Yes.” Jae’s statement temporarily dispelled the market’s worries. After a few days of silence, Zaki Manian’s public accusation brought the matter back to the public’s attention again.

In addition to publicly expressing dissatisfaction, Zaki also pointed out that in the past 6 months, Jae has been overly focused on the Virgo project and neglected 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 pay attention to the development of blockchain technology, Cosmos, as a representative of cross-chain technology, is called "cross-chain" together with the Polkadot project. Chain Hutch".

According to the official vision, various types of blockchain networks, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, can use the Cosmos-SDK (development framework) to build their own blockchain partitions, and then use the IBC protocol to interact with the Cosmos Hub to break each The network is fighting independently and developing independently.

The internal division of Cosmos made the community tense and asked about the development progress of IBC. At present, the Cosmos official has not responded to the concerns of the outside world. Honeycomb Finance tried to contact the Cosmos team through email, social media and other platforms, but as of press time, no reply has been received.

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Atom dropped to as low as $4.01 on the day

The market price of Atom has entered a turbulent period, falling from the opening price of $4.35 at 0:00 on February 4 to the lowest price of $4.01 at 16:00 on the same day, with a maximum drop of more than 8% throughout the day. As of 18:00 on February 5, the price of Atom has recovered to $4.21.

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The project director lists the founder's "X sin"

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

In several tweets posted in the early hours of the morning, Zaki listed Jae’s several crimes. It boiled down to the fact that Jae had devoted his energy to his Virgo project in the past six months. The problem of inequality has caused a large number of excellent engineers to leave Tendermint. Finally, Zaki expressed that he would lead the Cosmos community to get rid of the adverse effects brought by Jae, continue to develop Cosmos and ensure the development progress of IBC.

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 Peter Haymond (developed by Tendermint). Developer Relations Engineer), Hans Schoenburg (Lead Web Developer, Handshake), Cyrus Goh (Frontend Engineer, Tendermint), Khoa Phan, Jacob Gadikian, and anonymous developer E.

Code Contributions to the Virgo Project

It is not difficult to find that the core contributors of Virgo are 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 makes the founder "empathize with each other"? What does it have to do with Cosmos?

There is a description of the project vision on the Virgo official website: I hope to provide the world with the best open collaboration technology, and the mission is to provide free and easy-to-use software and hardware, technical protocols, social communication, personnel coordination, etc. for open financial DeFi technical support.

Many members of the Cosmos community are puzzled by this abstract description. They pay more attention to how Virgo achieves its goals. The official promise is to "develop based on Cosmos and feed back the Cosmos project ecology".

In the face of external inquiries, Tendermint and Cosmos have never explained this clearly, which undoubtedly casts another layer of fog on the internal division of Cosmos. Aside from this unclear internal relationship, a question that the entire Cosmos community is more concerned about is how Virgo and Cosmos will develop in the future after Jae resigns as CEO. This has become a "question to be answered by time".

Star projects are often abandoned by founders

In fact, there are many examples of founders of star projects in the currency circle leaving. The most typical representative is EOS founder Daniel Larimer (BM).

He successively left the graphene public chain Bitshares (bit shares) and the social platform Steemit, and co-founded the famous DPoS public chain EOS. In BitShares, BM innovatively proposed the DPoS consensus algorithm, which is to elect governance nodes through 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 project BMs persisted until the end, and instead developed EOS. Judging from the results, Bitshares and Steemit are still alive so far despite the departure of the founders.

The outside world always has mixed opinions on the departure of a project founder from the project. It is undeniable that the departure of the soul person has made these projects experience some short-term difficulties, and it has also increased the community's distrust of the project.

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