My side of the story about parting ways with David Sønstebø

David’s side can be found on https://medium.com/@DavidSonstebo/letter-to-the-iota-community-76c940cbc315.

I’ll try to be concise.

I joined the IOTA Foundation because I wasn’t satisfied with the pace of IOTA protocol finalization. I founded Omega team because Alpha team’s practices didn’t suit quick prototyping methodology. Lack of funding led to deficit of Omega programmers (I informed the IOTA Foundation directors numerous times about that) so not everything was finished by Omega team within the planned 6 months of operation, and even the completed work was abandoned for a reason unknown to me.

I quitted the IOTA Foundation and tried to finalize the IOTA protocol on my own. Several times I tried to explain the design choices but that was leading to endless debates so at one point I stopped explaining anything and coded my own version of Ict. That version didn’t contain the code allowing to move iotas because I wanted to avoid even rumors about forking IOTA. I accepted that Ict operators needed by Paracosm Platform will be paid in iotas hosted by a different architecture having the same name. It wasn’t critical, because IF’s IOTA was intended to be run on the Internet only, not on the Internet-of-Things.

I tried to believe David that his plan will work despite of not getting a clear answer to this simple question: Why would big companies adopting IOTA use its native tokens instead of creating own ones? Does anyone know the answer, it’s still actual.

At one point David said that the IOTA Foundation was going to add binary and quantum-vulnerable cryptographic schemes. This was the last straw and I insisted on parting ways and funds. He refused to give me 50% of the assets which we owned with him equally (he was controlling most of the assets), one can see the confirmation of this in his own words:

I’d give him all Jinn IP, engineers, advisors, brand, whatever, and we’d split Jinn Labs’ token assets on the respective networks. He gets his portion of the tokens on his fork (which I will call Triota until he comes up with a name), while I keep mine on the network he has denounced, divested from and gone to war against.

Yesterday we touched this topic again and I promised that if he refuses to pay me what he owes I’ll make this fact public. There were no another option, if one breaks trust that ought to be made public, otherwise such things will be happening on daily basis.

Now he has 3 days to give me my 50% of Jinn Labs’ assets. If this doesn’t happen a civil/criminal lawsuit will be initiated against him. This is another promise I give, so David can be sure it will indeed happen. The IOTA Foundation should distance itself from him in this case by making him resign unless they want to drag the whole foundation into the legal troubles.

One can track the iotas I’m talking about by following https://thetangle.org/transaction/AEM9TJGYOGJTWPTDSMJWSLFZSQYTGZLBFZXIXDPKLPZXGPFXIYHSF9DGOJTILQRPFTGEIHJEGKOKZ9999 transaction. In the both directions.

I’ll be answering constructive questions in the comments.