RChain Synereo split aftermath
I supported Greg Meredith in a kick starter project several year ago. It was an awesome project offering social networking with proven privacy and verifiable social contracting. Greg is surely a mathematical genius and thought leader in process calculus with a clear vision of how we might achieve trustworthy processing on the internet.
When Greg joined forces with Dor Konforty to build Synereo having the AMP token engineered for the disintermediated attention economy in a network nobody owned or controlled I jumped on the chance to join in the first crowd sale. Since then I’ve been an active promoter of Synereo and it’s community of supporters. See my article Synereo reinvents the attention economy and the internet.
Doug Rushkoff had warned us in a fireside chat with Synereo that if we took money from investors the company would pivot from its mission. but Synereo launched a BnkToTheFuture.com sale anyway. I thought Synereo might be different. In that second crowd sale Synereo brought in 4.7 million dollars to make the dream a reality and Doug’s warning rang true. Greg resisted a pivot but Dor supported it. As the only two board members their fight became bitter. I prayed they would enact reasonable governance to resolve the issue.
But on Monday investors fired Greg as CTO and removed him from the board. None of the money raised will go toward building the proven verifiable social contracting environment RChain that was promoted to investors and was my primary reason for supporting Synereo. Instead of being a network nobody owns or controls it is becoming the intellectual property of the company. They questioned whether Greg’s grand vision could ever be finished. They are redesigning the Synereo platform to quickly get a decentralized social network product out the door.
I was devastated. I could not fathom synereo without both founders Greg and Dor. My investment in AMPs was primarily in Greg, not Dor. It seemed that the worst Synereo was happening.
Three days later there is light at the end of the tunnel. Greg is heading up the RChain cooperative with enthusiastic support from investors who will be setting up an RChain incubator and providing support for the coop. The AMP currency ties together Synereo and RChain in a way that was not possible otherwise. Investors will be given a choice of keeping their AMPs betting in Dor’s decentralized social network leading the pack or converting their AMPs to RChain coop RCoins and betting on Greg.
All this controversy has devastated to price of the AMP on the market. However both RChain and Synereo are in good positions. RChain funds rolling in are in addition to the crowdsale money. The prospect of building both RChain and the Synereo decentralized “facebook killer” in short order are real. I expect there will be a Synereo beta within 6 months.
Now with two chances to win the time to buy AMPs may be right now. Recovery may be slow but the long term prospects are looking good to me.
Update 2017–09–03: The Synereo amp is above its pre-split level and RChain is raising their own $5M easily having their own RHOC currency having utility to run a world computed algorithmically constrained to obey your rules.
