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Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)
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The epidemic is fierce, and the turbulent disease dynamics obviously overwhelmed a blockbuster news that happened in the encryption industry a few days ago: Tendermint, a cross-chain star Cosmos development company, ushered in the founder's "departure" before building a prosperous ecology .
According to the original plan, Jae Kwon originally wanted to quietly complete the identity conversion before making it public, but unexpectedly, on January 29, the encryption analysis account "dailydefi.eth" suddenly had a showdown with the parties in public and announced the news.
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dailydefi announces screenshot of Jae Kwon's resignation Source: Twitter
Jae Kwon had to come out and respond. Under his strong explanation, the resignation is only in progress and has not come to an end, and Cosmos is also on the normal track. In short, it's not a big deal.
On February 4th, Zaki Manian, director of Tendermint Labs, bluntly stated on social media that Jae Kwon's previous public reply, which sounded nice on the surface, actually told a big lie to avoid responsibility to Cosmos. Zaki's words were fierce and full of gunpowder.
What happened to the universe? This project, which competes with Polkadot for the title of "King of Cross-chains", is ahead of the launch of the mainnet in March last year. The total market value of the native token ATOM is now about 800 million US dollars, and it is only one step away from the top 20 in the world.
But this seemingly steady progress of the project, but at this time news of "civil turmoil" came. What kind of inside story is hidden behind this? Block Beats BlockBeats tried to restore Jae Kwon's resignation: when Virgo was started, which Cosmos/Tendermint colleagues he took away, and what impact it would have on Cosmos.
sudden news
If it weren't for the disclosure of "dailydefi.eth" and the verification of netizens, perhaps everyone would not know that this star project is undergoing drastic changes.
Below this tweet and other channels, the protagonist of the incident, Jae Kwon, basically confirmed the news of his resignation, and revealed three pieces of information: First, according to him, Cosmos is undergoing internal reforms-removing the role of CEO to disperse Tendermint’s right to “achieve internal checks and balances”, even without a CEO, the project can operate independently; second, he will wait for the Cosmos network to be stable before leaving completely, and will continue to serve as a member of the ICF council and participate in affairs; third is the future He will be in charge of a project called Virgo - which is also part of the Cosmos ecosystem.
Screenshot of Jae Kwon's keynote speech at CESC2017 Source:: YouTube
What needs to be explained to readers who do not know the situation of Cosmos is that Interchain Foundation (ICF), as a non-profit foundation, is responsible for promoting and developing technologies and DApps focused on the Cosmos ecosystem, and Jae Kwon mentioned in his resignation information that the new The project "will be advanced with the support of AiB", which can prove that he has not left Cosmos because AiB (this name is interoperable with Tendermint Inc) is a software company authorized by ICF to contract and develop Cosmos Hub. After he resigned, he focused on projects in the Cosmos ecosystem and will continue to serve as a member of the council. Naturally, he is not "leaving Cosmos", and it is even more inaccurate to say that he is stepping down.
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After Jae Kwon announced his departure, screenshots of polarized attitudes on social media regarding the matter Source: Twitter
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On January 30th, Jae Kwon clarified the resignation Screenshot Source: Twitter
He emphasized that the reason for leaving the CEO position was to ensure that he would focus on another project called Virgo, and he had indeed begun to shift his energy to this new project as early as several months ago.
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Jae Kwon going away with the team?
According to the information on the official website, Virgo is an open association of individuals and organizations that creates open tools for coordination of all sizes. The DAO organization (UDV for short) responsible for the management of Virgo's joint DAO.
It seems that this is an on-chain DAO platform with ambitious goals that may be unrealistic at present. Based on Cosmos and its symbiotic win-win and common development, the vision may be somewhat like MolochDAO of Ethereum, and its role may be somewhat like Google’s Google X.
Currently, Jae Kwon is the person in charge of project disclosure. Last October, in an article on GitHub, he tried his best to explain that Virgo is a project that is completely transparent and will be brought together by people with the same values as Jae Kwon. Many ideas It has not yet been formed, "it has not been written down", "please wait patiently."
Screenshot of Jae Kwon introducing the Virgo project Source: GitHub
Zaki accuses Jae Kwon of turning his attention to Virgo instead of Cosmos, not without showing signs.
As early as the end of September last year, Jae Kwon started contributing code to the new project as the first batch of developers. From the perspective of GitHub, there are currently 9 code contributors to the project, ranked from high to low in terms of contribution, they are nylira, jaekwon, haymond, hschoenburg, lovincyrus, kphed, jdshutt, faddat, and cryptnotiq. Among them, nylira contributed the most, especially after mid-November, the contribution of the code base increased rapidly.
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Their actual identities correspond to Peng Zhong (Tendermint Chief Design Officer), Jae Kwon (Tendermint CEO), Peter Haymond (Tendermint Developer Relations Director), Hans Schoenburg (Handshake Chief Web Developer/Cosmos Code Contributor) ), Cyrus Goh (Tendermint front-end engineer), Khoa Phan, John Shutt, Jacob Gadikian, and E. Anonymous.
In other words, many contributors to the Virgo project code come from Tendermint.
In fact, as early as January 15th, "Peng Zhong", who was certified as the chief design officer of Cosmos/Tendermint, said on Twitter that he was committed to a new project - Virgo, and there were 4 other "talented" from Cosmos/Tendermint , Passionate partner” (including the code contributor haymond above), he hopes to get everyone’s attention, “Let’s change the world together.”
Screenshots of Peng Zhong’s tweets mentioning the new project and four Cosmos/Tendermint colleagues Source: Twitter
However, at this blockchain week, Jae Kwon gave a keynote speech on "Virgo" on the spot, which also confirmed that he has begun to turn his energy to new projects at this time. The time from preparation to being announced to leave was more than three months.
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Before this resignation incident, Jae Kwon was the co-founder and CEO of Tendermint, and also the head of ICF. No matter what aspect, he can be regarded as a pivotal core figure for Cosmos.
In 2008, the financial crisis swept the world, so Jae Kwon learned about Bitcoin. In 2013, he was determined to enter the blockchain industry. In 2014, he studied how to apply the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) concept in the academic field to practical applications based on Proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain, and then jointly established All in Bits Company (AiB), focusing on research and development.
Before this resignation incident, Jae Kwon was the co-founder and CEO of Tendermint, and also the head of ICF. No matter what aspect, he can be regarded as a pivotal core figure for Cosmos.
As the first team to propose the concept of cross-chain, in 2016, Ethan Buchman, chief technology officer of Tendermint, described for the first time the relationship between Tendermint and other blockchain projects in a paper "Tendermint: Byzantine Fault Tolerance in the Blockchain Era". relation. In June, the Cosmos project launched to solve cross-chain issues released the first white paper.
Cosmos consists of two parts: Hub (hub) and Zone (partition). The partition adopts the Tendermint consensus and supports multiple blockchains. At the same time, the number of partitions can be expanded; the partitions follow the IBC (inter-blockchain communication protocol, cross-chain communication) through the hub. Agreement) for transactions, and defines blockchain registration, data packet format, transaction type, and data packet delivery confirmation process, etc.
Screenshots of Cosmos founder Jae Kwon and developer Sunny Aggarwal: YouTube
Since then, ICF has started to fund a series of cross-chain development projects, such as Agoric Systems Operating Company (investing in it in the form of traditional equity) and Tendermint, hoping to promote the rapid development of IBC in this way. Through the continuous efforts of developers, in March 2019, the Cosmos main network was successfully launched, and the token ATOM was launched on the trading platform one after another.
Cosmos consists of two parts: Hub (hub) and Zone (partition). The partition adopts the Tendermint consensus and supports multiple blockchains. At the same time, the number of partitions can be expanded; the partitions follow the IBC (inter-blockchain communication protocol, cross-chain communication) through the hub. Agreement) for transactions, and defines blockchain registration, data packet format, transaction type, and data packet delivery confirmation process, etc.
About a year later, in April 2017, under the background of noisy financing, Cosmos quickly gathered a large number of fans. Even though the project party released a large number of documents, "warning participants that tokens cannot be received as scheduled", they swarmed investors, the project team successfully raised more than 16 million US dollars in just half an hour, and less than two weeks later, the project team established a Chinese community.
Since then, ICF has started to fund a series of cross-chain development projects, such as Agoric Systems Operating Company (investing in it in the form of traditional equity) and Tendermint, hoping to promote the rapid development of IBC in this way. Through the continuous efforts of developers, in March 2019, the Cosmos main network was successfully launched, and the token ATOM was launched on the trading platform one after another.
As the founder of Cosmos, Jae Kwon, as the spokesperson of the project, constantly conveyed the vision and technology of Cosmos to the outside world. Under his preaching and influence, many excellent teams based on Cosmos development began to emerge.
For a long time, Jae Kwon never seemed to show his interest in public. Until the end of October last year, he was still invited to live broadcast as the founder of Cosmos. Neither Cosmos investors nor related parties seem to be prepared for his sudden departure.
Zaki Manian publicly accuses Jae Kwon Screenshot Source: Twitter
Zaki directly pointed out that the latter lied, and the resignation was actually to evade responsibility for the adverse leadership of Tendermint. He mentioned that Jae Kwon has completely ignored the attention to IBC development in the past 6 months, and has continued to point fingers, hurt developers, and has also carried out serious religious discrimination, loyalty tests, and insults within the company.
However, Jae Kwon has not yet responded to these allegations, just leaving a message "For reference, I do not have any verification nodes... More than 98% of my net assets are either from ATOM holdings, or in the form of AIB stocks... Speaking of Staking, I am the biggest supporter of ATOM.”
Screenshot of Jae Kwon's response Source: Twitter
After the incident was made public on January 29, BlockBeats tried to interview relevant insiders, but failed; after the disclosure of Cosmos high-level disagreements on February 4, the price of ATOM fell by about 5% in 24 hours, and the secondary market fell .
Regarding this incident, Harriet, the head of Cosmos China and the founder of IRISnet, posted in Moments that growth will experience "labor pains" and this "storm" will pass, which seems to refer to the incident.
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Harriet, the founder of IRISnet Screenshot Source: WeChat Moments
The most worthy of our close attention is whether Cosmos can safely and smoothly pass through this "storm".
In addition to accusing Jae Kwon, Zaki especially emphasized that although "Jae left Cosmos behind", many excellent engineers are still working hard for the iteration of Cosmos, and the enthusiasm of the core team has never diminished. In addition, on social media, most people are The message expresses support for Zaki's pragmatic style.
In addition, Harriet also stated that the cross-chain success of Cosmos does not depend on one or two individuals. Many outstanding engineers and teams around the world have long been co-developing IBC and Cosmos SDK, and Cosmos' blockchain Internet vision will succeed with hard work. The Cosmos ecology seems to be far more "powerful" than imagined.
