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Continued infighting within Cosmos, with the founder publishing a post fiercely criticizing the co-founders.

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It's difficult for an honest official to judge the matter of Cosmos.

Editor's note:

In February 2021, Cosmos founder Jae stepped down, and another core member Zaki accused Jae of uneven allocation of development resources, leading to the departure of many excellent engineers and affecting the development progress of the cross-chain protocol IBC. In May 2022, Cosmos development company Ignite will be split into Ignite and NewTendermint, with Jae Kwon as CEO of NewTendermint. The internal strife within Cosmos has continued to this day, but each party has its own views and reasons. However, in terms of specific project progress, Cosmos is no different.

Related reading: "The Real Story Behind the Resignation of Cosmos CEO"

In June of this year, the Cosmos ecosystem development team Informal Systems completed a $5.3 million financing round, led by CCMC Global, with participation from Nascent, Maven11, Celestia, and EigenLayer, among others. This funding will support the company's work as the core development team of the Cosmos ecosystem.

In September, Cosmos released the IBC 2024 roadmap, stating that the two main themes for next year's development are scalability and usability. Scalability goals include shortening the time required for native implementation of IBC, reducing IBC maintenance costs, and enabling multiple blockchains to form IBC connections.

And in a recent airdrop by Celestia, developers in the Cosmos ecosystem also received a substantial income.

This article is compiled from a recent blog post by one of the founders of Cosmos, Jae Kwon. In the article, Jae Kwon revealed a series of problems he has encountered within the project since he joined in 2013. The main problems are concentrated on another founder, Ethan Buchman, whom Jae Kwon believes planned the project's split and misappropriated funds.

At first, the two worked together harmoniously, but as the project developed, Ethan gradually became estranged from Jae and the core team left under Ethan's operation, causing chaos in project management and misappropriation of foundation funds. Jae Kwon tried to stop it but to no avail.

He said that Ethan conspired with unknown forces behind the scenes, premeditatedly infiltrating and sabotaging the project. Despite Jae Kwon's repeated warnings, the problem has not been resolved, and he believes that action must be taken to correct the situation, otherwise the project's prospects are worrying.

Original author: Jae Kwon (@jaekwon), Cosmos founder

Original article compiled by: Kaori, Luccy, BlockBeats

(This article) was originally a reply in another thread, but it is worth creating a separate thread for it. This is not just a historical issue, but also the root cause of the problems that plague Cosmos today.

In 2013, I began participating in the Artificial Intelligence Blockchain (AIB) project and created the FtNox trading platform. Perhaps I wrote the first trading platform that could prove its reserves, but it was never officially launched because just as I was preparing to launch, I discovered the 1988 BFT paper.

From 2015 to 2016, CryptoEconomicon was held in the South Bay area of Southern California. I met Chris Harborne and Ethan there.

In 2016, as a seconded employee, I worked with Ethan because I wanted to build an EVM on top of Tendermint, and Eris wanted a permissioned EVM. I shared all my knowledge about Tendermint with Ethan, and he consulted his mentor on whether he could write a paper on this topic.

During this period, Ethan was still working at Eris Industries. It is said that Eris Industries has five co-founders, but two of the publicly known co-founders are Casey and Preston Byrne.

The license at that time was not well defined. I said it would be released with "at least Copyleft" but obviously I was also interested in more liberal licenses, as I mentioned that I am a Kopimist believer. Please see the code repository (repo).

I spent three months trying to convince Preston and Casey to allow me to release Tendermint under the Apache2 license, but to no avail. Preston, as a lawyer, completely misunderstood and pretended that dual licensing did not exist.

I spent time developing ABCI just to abandon the EVM and permission control I wrote, in order to retain the right to release Tendermint under the Apache2 license.

During this period, I learned that Chris Harborne admitted to saving George Soros during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) incident in Thailand. He had worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and used jet fuel to launder money for Obama. Later, I found out that he was also a major supporter of Brexit. He is apparently also a major supporter of Ethereum. He also seems to have played an important role in the Tether project, which was founded by the infamous Brock Pierce. I don't even want to talk about the situation of my friend in a series of death incidents related to him.

Ethan assisted in developing Tendermint's testing suite and fixing errors (although he did not design Tendermint, credit should be given to him for helping with the testing suite), while I am dedicated to formulating investment strategies, attempting to raise funds from Bitcoin-savvy venture capital firms. However, they do not understand what proof of stake is.

As a last resort, I proposed the Cosmos whitepaper based on my own ideas about inserting light client proofs in the blockchain. Tendermint has always been designed for efficient light client proofs, while most blockchain projects have given up on this.

In 2016, I almost single-handedly wrote the Cosmos whitepaper, delegating only the non-technical and Tendermint-related parts to Ethan. I was the only person in contact with up to five law firms and ultimately chose MME to create a foundation, using Ethereum as a model. I created PLAN.md, fundraising documents, and almost everything about Cosmos, ICF, and both technical and non-technical plans were created by me.

MME represents that I need at least 3 members in the Fund Committee (FC), and they indicate that they can provide the third member from the Swiss Neutral Board of Directors. I said okay, I can invite Ethan as the third member.

Please note that I have generously allocated his equity in AIB as he is a co-founder. I started this company before Ethan joined, but I gave him half of the shares.

I traveled around the world to promote Cosmos, to the point where I swore off international flights. Ethan, on the other hand, has never done so.

At the end of 2017 to around 2018, I took a few months off. I have been working in this industry for four years. When I returned to full-time work, I found that Ethan had hired a large number of managers. Well, I can handle it.

Around 2018, things became very strange.

· Since I mentioned it once, Ethan has been talking non-stop about me leaving ICF. He said I needed to leave due to conflicts of interest. We will discuss hypocrisy in detail later.

· Executive retreat with Ethan, Zaki, and three others. Zaki explicitly stated that he doesn't care about the mission, only about making money.

· At a cryptocurrency conference, a scammer presented OpenLibra and posted my photo and Sunny's photo, making it seem like we were core members of his project, which was not the case. Ethan and Zaki were aware of this, but I warned them not to be associated with this scammer, but they didn't care.

· During the inspection of OpenLibra, I commented on their proposed voting system and pointed out that it was easily manipulable, but they didn't care.

· I saw Zaki start calling himself a co-founder of Cosmos, even though many of the founding software had already been completed when he joined and he wasn't even part of the coding team. I asked him to stop, but this situation continues. Among the engineers developing the core software are Sunny, Dev, Chris Goes, Ethan Frey, Alessio, Rigel, and myself. Ethan and Zaki were not involved.

· Jessy Irwin approached me and boasted that she invited her ex-boyfriend to her apartment as an excuse, and then she hacked into his computer and stole his Bitcoin. She also showed me the wallet she purchased with these Bitcoins.

· I told Zaki about this matter, and he insisted that we need Jessy to complete the work. Her job is basically interfacing with HackerOne. I made an exception for Zaki, but refused to provide Jessy with full super admin privileges for Tendermint's Google application because having these privileges would allow her to perform operations far beyond her job responsibilities.

· Despite knowing the above situation, Zaki began spreading rumors that I imposed a glass ceiling, discriminating against the entire company based on gender. Prior to this, he told me his favorite book was "The Eight Rebels" and even said things like "I am like a god" and "that plan is not evil enough." Clearly, he is using black magic for personal gain.

· I proposed the idea of Virgo, which was approved by Zaki. He liked it very much and even wanted to personally introduce it to the company. This was after we agreed on our respective roles; I will focus on new projects like Virgo, while he will help manage Cosmos. The division of labor is very clear.

· I had Ethan and Zaki take over the routine negotiations of AIB/ICF, because this is routine work. At this time, ICF's treasury holds over $100 million worth of ATOM, as well as cash and cryptocurrencies. AIB is also included, but in smaller quantities. Everyone should be clear that there is absolutely no problem. Next, I heard the engineers lamenting that their job security was being threatened. This makes no sense at all. ICF should obviously support us, and Ethan and Zaki are responsible for this. In the end, this will all fall on me.

· The main reason for engineers leaving is the lack of certainty in funding, and in an open letter, they mentioned some other unclear issues. Interestingly, this happened after I started asking everyone to transparently report their conflicts of interest.

· I once said in our internal Slack's #general channel that we should strive to write excellent software that will be considered valuable in the future. I only mentioned God once. Later, Zaki resigned and claimed that I was harassing everyone in every Slack channel with religion. This is a lie. Jessy Irwin vaguely claimed that I harassed her during the height of the #metoo movement. To this day, I have no record of any sexual harassment. Zero.

· Ethan and Jack participated in a damn "SKUNKWORKS project" called "DOUBLEDARE" at AIB. They decided to discuss deleting the key component AMINO of the entire project with each other instead of fixing it because they didn't want to fix it. I spent months thinking about how to make AMINO a complete part of protobuf, but they insisted on supporting protobuf and still wanted to delete it even if I fixed it 99%. If you want to understand what I mean, please check the difference between AMINO at that time and the new AMINO in the TM2 directory of gnolang. This is completely insane, not to mention fraudulent and illegal.

· Why did they change their name from Eris to Monax? Perhaps the connection to "destruction" was too obvious?

· Why do I always see a connection to elite backgrounds in all of these things?

But I shouldn't have listened to him; I shouldn't have created a Swiss foundation, trusted MME, or "neutral board members"; I should have fired Jessy on the spot; I should have fired Zaki; I should have said goodbye to Ethan; I should have fired Jack. I should have done many things, but each time there seemed to be a reason to think it was a bad idea. Maybe if I gave Ethan enough feedback, or had enough communication with Ethan, he would understand. But that wasn't the case.

This world has four types of people.

· Some people are born with a silver spoon, bathed in evil. · Some people sell themselves to those above them for wealth. · Some people grow up in poverty, but are lucky or privileged with the right upbringing, and feel responsible for alleviating human suffering. · And there are some who have never been given or given themselves a chance.

Choose wisely, for the moment of judgment has come.

Stick to your values and don't succumb to the pressure of others. Don't give them a third or fourth chance. Don't be intimidated by numbers, groups, or social engineering strategies. Some behaviors (such as double dare or theft) are sufficient reasons for expulsion. So far, I have not received a sincere apology. To be fair, Zaki apologized internally at AIB, but not for the things I mentioned above. When I resigned from AIB under pressure from all sides (although no rational person would agree with this decision if they were in my position), and then from ICF, because it was clear that ICF had been completely overturned (although I still regret this decision), I have been studying the best smart contract system in the world ever since. What drives me crazy is that after Ethan and I decided that we needed to create our own independent budget to make progress, I eventually agreed to create Informal, and the Virgo budget was also allocated in my direction; however, just because I chose to leave the funds in ICF (obviously for accountability), they decided to completely ignore this fact since I resigned from FC, pretending that such an arrangement never happened. At the same time, I later learned that the "cooperative" created by Ethan and Informal was not actually a cooperative, and Ethan had too much economic interest in it; so he actually had a conflict of interest, and he created this conflict under the same reason for forcing me to leave ICF; and all of this was after I had put in a lot of effort. The degree of hypocrisy, cunning, and fraud made me a Christian, which is the reason that prompted me to believe. The first letter of the last book of the Bible provided me with the inspiration I needed to listen to.

Message to the Church in Ephesus (Acts 19:8-12.1)

The message to the angel of the church in Ephesus, who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands, says this:

I know your deeds, your hard work, and your perseverance. You cannot tolerate those who do evil. You have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them to be false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.

Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.

But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

Jesus is the King of kings. If you only want to support the status quo under these revelations, it may be too late now. Don't be surprised if all righteous people start to evacuate towards a new center. I cannot support what has happened and is now deteriorating on my conscience. Unfortunately, the problem stops here. Believe me, if you don't agree with my point of view, it would be better to sell and leave now, don't say I didn't warn you.

It is foolish to conduct any form of psychological analysis on Cosmos without understanding the schemers and their works, as well as the true reasons behind their so-called Gore2020. Admitting the failure of ICF without taking action to counter it, or even suggesting that we simply ignore it, will only allow the current situation to persist. At this moment, the hub should take decisive action instead of becoming an advocate for evil. I have given them ample warning. Despite knowing the above facts, they still insist on brainwashing Cosmonauts on a large scale according to their script and continue to attack the integrity of the hub. They have turned ICF into a tool for embezzlement and boldly demanded more with ATOM2. Judgment day has come.