SORAMITSU, Fearless Wallet, and the Kusama Treasury
Addressing claims and presenting SORAMITSU’s side of the story
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First of all, we would like to note that it was not SORAMITSU who started making grandiose and misleading public statements about Noᴠa Ꮤɑllet (hereafter, NW) and their dealings, nor has it been SORAMITSU who keeps escalating the matter. We don’t really care about NW and we don’t see them as a competitor. We are focusing on our own work and not interested in others, who have copied us, as we are confident in our original and interesting ideas.
We would also like to note that these ongoing accusations and demands, recently accompanying each SORAMITSU proposal to the Kusama Treasury by a contingent of participants in the Dotsama community, are a waste of time and it is a steady distraction from our focus on building applications and working towards improving life for humanity on our wonderful planet, and beyond.
Our aim with this final statement on this topic, is to provide a clear overview of certain events and analyse both sides of the story, in a manner that hasn’t yet been done by us in public. This is our side of the story and an account of things as they happened. Plenty has been said against us, much of it being complete nonsense, so we are compelled to say something as well. What we write is a list of facts and not really opinions to be debated. By doing so, we hope to provide clarity on our relationship to NW.
We start from the “Kusama Direction” Matrix chat room, where a certain thread of questions was put forward by a community member and core developer working on Substrate, as well as many others, including Raul R., asking us to “review this message”, so here we go:
- [WT:] Regarding the failed referendum #241, I hope the Fearless team is not dissuaded by the result. For me personally (and I think also for many community members), the only main point that blocks me from voting for the proposal is the DMCA claim. I wish Fearless can understand my (our) insistence on this issue — it’s a really important thing for open source, and false fillings [sic] really hurt everyone involved a lot.
- I think this is also just the only point your “opponent” [NW] team wants to address (see post, section “how it affects the proposal”), which I copy here for visibility:
[ᗅntοn Khѵoroѵ (hereafter, AK):] We would like to open a dialogue with the Polkadot and Kusama community regarding the use of treasury funds used to support the development of software / code for our ecosystem. The open source movement is pivitol [sic] not only to the Polkadot ecosystem, but to the greater crypto community at large. If we as a community fund projects which decieve [sic] the community by claiming that they are producing open source code, when in reality they will file false DMCA / Copyright claims, the continued development and improvement of our ecosystem will be in jeopardy.
If Soramitsu filed this false DMCA claim against a project which did not have the same runway that [NW] had, the project would not be able to continue development. We at [NW] want to stress the importance of this issue, as it can affect the future status quo for working with open source code in the future [sic].
To this date Soramitsu have never clarified for the community their exact reasoning for filing this DMCA complaint and instead continue to attempt to gaslight the situation by blowing the unintented [sic] use of the fearless wallet logo on a single screen in [NW] (in a release which is over 1 year old), and which was never part of the original DMCA complaint.
- My point is, I hope that Fearless not to treat [sic] the result of this referendum as “the community completely rejects the proposal”, but “the community thinks that there are things that must be addressed before the proposal is passed”. Once the DMCA issue is clarified, I’d be really happy to vote Aye on the proposal when it’s tabled again!
Official Response by SORAMITSU Regarding “False DMCA Filing” Claims in Regards to NW Forking Fearless Wallet Apache 2 Licenced Open-Source Code
This has been explained and answered ad infinitum in several messages to the community and those involved. So to make this very clear yet again: the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act; this is a law protecting digital IP rights) enforcement had nothing to do with the Fearless Wallet open-source Apache 2 licensed code, and it was in no way a false filing — if anyone would like to claim so, then they should be ready to prove it legally.
The DMCA was in fact about internal IP (intellectual property) rights that only current and former employees of SORAMITSU could have access to, as well as the trademarked logo of Fearless Wallet [1], use of which simply and clearly violates the Apache 2 licence, no matter how trivial it may be in any given context. It certainly wasn’t the primary aspect, but it definitely also illustrates the general manner of which actions were taken and processes were handled by the newly created NW team, who were still contractually SORAMITSU employees while they were preparing their future plans in secret.
SIMPLY USING ANY OPEN-SOURCE CODE PROVIDED BY SORAMITSU IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE APACHE 2 LICENCE WOULD NEVER BE ANY ISSUE FOR ANYONE. THAT IS WHAT IT IS CREATED FOR, AND APPROPRIATELY LICENSED AS.
Since its inception, SORAMITSU has been continuously contributing to open-source code development with projects like Hyperledger Iroha (C++), and Iroha 2 (Rust), KAGOME (C++ implementation of the Polkadot Host), FUHON (C++ implementation of Filecoin), the Klaytn Open-Source DEX, the SORA network and Polkaswap DEX, and Fearless Wallet. SORAMITSU has been an open-source software contributor to the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project and SORA since 2016 [2] [3] [4] and to the Web3 Foundation and Polkadot since early 2019 [5], as well as Filecoin [6], Klaytn [7] [8], and Kusama. There has never once been any licensing or copyright issue with any of our work, including award-winning innovative software on a global scale created for central banks, governments, universities, as well as various crypto and blockchain communities [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14].
The following took place in early October 2021:
The employees working at SORAMITSU who stated their intent of leaving the company and starting the production of a new mobile wallet using the Fearless Wallet open-source code were asked to prepare the handover of all of their creations, of which SORAMITSU owns the IP (intellectual property), using appropriate processes inside the company, as well as the handover of all technical accounts data, support and communication channels credentials, internal technical documentation and both internal/external meeting minutes/recordings, any accounts used to organise and hold meetings, as well as to organise community management, social media channels, etc., a complete overview of technical statuses of every aspect of the project development and design, and established business relationships in the ecosystem with partners, clients and any other collaborators.
Instead of pursuing to work out and organise this swiftly, so that both parties could move on, the aforementioned employees stalled this process and kept information from SORAMITSU, including contact and collaboration details, various technical statuses, as well as some credentials for technical, social media, and support accounts.
Specifically, as an example, acting against company policies, AK decided to organise appointments and register subscriptions for work tools under his personal email. He also hid meetings from senior management. Additionally, AK asked the team to make a fork of Fearless Wallet while still working at SORAMITSU under the fearlesswallet name, however this was deleted shortly after.
All of this was completely unprofessional behaviour from contractually obligated employees (many jurisdictions would consider these actions a violation of non-compete policies as well), but also from the perspective of basic business ethics and trustworthiness, even if it were a casual group of good friends doing something together not bothering to set up any contractual obligations, it would have been ugly. In a corporate business world however this is unacceptable, since contracts are made for specific purposes.
Small to medium-sized companies like SORAMITSU, that work almost exclusively on open-source software projects with permissive licences for the overall good of humanity and collaboration need to treat and protect all of their IP rights with utmost seriousness.
SORAMITSU is a completely independent company with a mission to use blockchain technology to promote innovation to solve pressing societal challenges, and a vision to design a better world through decentralised technologies. Every project that we work on is carefully considered and matters to us greatly.
On October 12th, 2021, then still officially a SORAMITSU employee, AK, put out this Medium post [#]
There are many misleading declarations in this post:
- Firstly, AK claims that the “Fearless Wallet core dev team” migrated from SORAMITSU to create NW. Technically this doesn’t make sense, since they simply weren’t allowed to take IP owned by SORAMITSU with them, hence there should have been no migration. Instead they should have had to start from scratch, like any other team, or individual, who wishes to use the Fearless Wallet open-source code would have had to do. We have strong reason to believe, with evidence, that the NW team indeed violated this process and took with them much more than they should have. In addition, just the fact alone that they claim publicly to be migrating from SORAMITSU with what they repeatedly call the “ex. Fearless Wallet core dev team”, is already harmful to our company as a statement on its own. To make matters worse, they also claim in the same breath that their new venture is “an unbiased” and “community-oriented” mobile app [for the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem]. This simply cannot be accepted by anyone with basic critical thinking skills and sensible moral perspective as an ethical, friendly, unbiased, and collaborative statement towards one’s former employer (actually technically still current employer at that date) to begin a new professional business venture with, one that is a carbon copy of the employer’s product at the time, only somehow supposedly instantly better? Moreover, the key feature factors for the yet to be released NW, claimed as “convenient UX/UI, fast performance & security”, are just as well carbon copies of what Fearless Wallet has been providing and is well known for, since its inception.
- Secondly, AK goes on to state that they are willing to “continue collaboration” with ecosystem partners such as Karura, Moonbeam, Kilt, and SubQuery. Again, technically this doesn’t make sense, since they simply weren’t collaborating as an entity with such partners previously, instead these were collaboration partners of SORAMITSU. It is unethical to put out this kind of a public message, as well as of course be acting on it. However it is more or less common to do so in practice, certainly in the Silicon Valley (and Russia) where non-compete clauses do not exist, but generally business partners and former employees agree on such conditions on friendly terms, since it is better to do so. In this case however, nobody expects entities in our shared ecosystem not to collaborate, but on the other hand putting out a misleading statement about “continued collaboration” is what is again not professional and not an ethical way of starting such a new business.
- Thirdly, AK goes on to say that the NW team has supposedly been working on the Fearless Wallet project with SORAMITSU. Again, this is completely misleading and inaccurate. Sure, it may be a poor choice of words as English is not AK’s first language, but he does claim to have full professional proficiency of English on his LinkedIn profile page, and we can only assume that he had somebody, like a lawyer or at least a copy editor, take a look at his big announcement to the world prior to putting it out. In any case, let’s make it clear: the NW team did not work on the Fearless Wallet product with SORAMITSU — AK and others were SORAMITSU employees at the time.
- Then, AK declares that SORAMITSU will continue to develop Fearless Wallet “on its own” with a “new engineering team behind it”. This is again a vague and misleading statement (nor is it his place to announce such things), since SORAMITSU has always been developing Fearless Wallet on its own, so why the need to state the obvious? Unless of course AK was again confused and figured that he, as a SORAMITSU employee and the other people, also SORAMITSU employees, that he worked with, were somehow separate from SORAMITSU as a standalone team, which he keeps calling the “ex. Fearless Wallet core dev team”, and that, of course, is not the case. SORAMITSU is a company with few hierarchical levels, i.e., an horizontal organisation with a flat structure and we rely heavily on the use of cross-functional teams. The Fearless Wallet team was quickly restructured inside of SORAMITSU, and missing roles were absorbed by resources from our cross-functional teams, until specific positions were filled.
- Finally, not all people that worked with AK on Fearless Wallet at SORAMITSU left with him either.
So, with all these points broken down, it is quite safe to conclude that this article was hastily designed to put SORAMITSU in a very negative light and representation, as well as make it sound like we would struggle with Fearless Wallet development going forward. The “good luck wishes” and declaration of “willingness to help, support and partner”, come off as empty words and platitudes.
- For the rest of the article, AK goes on to repeat the same misleading claims while throwing additional unprovoked punches at SORAMITSU. Once again, he is unable to understand the difference between his newly formed NW team and the people that he worked with at SORAMITSU, presenting it in his words as “our team” and mentioning “their promises to the Kusama community” to deliver certain features as the outcome of a recent proposal — he is obviously talking about promises made by SORAMITSU and a grant from the Kusama treasury given to SORAMITSU. It makes no sense that he claims his newly formed NW team to have anything to do with this, it simply is not how professional business works. For organisations that work on open-source projects, nothing is more valuable than the intellectual property created and held by the company. He knows that he is in a position with a huge advantage, and plans to take every benefit of it. Specifically, he is talking about the “multi-asset & new tokens feature” as he puts it, making absolutely no secret out of the fact that it was about to be rolled out by Fearless Wallet, but ended up being greatly delayed, while of course the same was not the case for AK and his newly formed NW which rather shortly released their version with the aforementioned multi-assets features. They were holding all the cards to cause us delays while making advances with their app using the IP gained from us.
- The biggest irony within the article must be at the end, where AK calls for community members to “eliminate any misinformation” plus the declaration of “willingness to provide transparency”. Talk about hypocrisy.
In response, SORAMITSU posted a clarification on Medium, shortly after AK’s pompous post:
- Notice how it is simply titled “Team Restructuring”, and how all the feature and ecosystem partnership claims made by AK are exactly the same as what Fearless Wallet had been focusing on, and was, and still is, well known for.
- The SORAMITSU response simply states what happened. AK left, along with 5 more employees, with plans to start a new app using the same open-source code. Also, some brief information about a failed smooth transition attempt is shared. It’s made clear that SORAMITSU considers the course of action taken by the employees who plan to leave, technically still employed by SORAMITSU at the time, as unethical — not because of the fact that they wish to go on their own, but how they are doing it. It’s noteworthy to mention also that many of them had worked together at SORAMITSU for years, with a solid start to their careers.
- The response from SORAMITSU is straightforward and sincere. No mention of suspicions about AK’s plans, his newly formed NW team is given the benefit of the doubt, once again, as was common with AK often, even when he was an employee of SORAMITSU. The experienced executive team of SORAMITSU was aware of AK’s ambitions already, for a very good while, based on his behaviour patterns and various requests made to advance his position along with more executive control.
- Finally, we remind the reader that SORAMITSU is focused on creating the best applications and solutions for the ecosystems that we participate in, and simply aim to provide the best products and services with a strong emphasis on adoption and a growth-driving, friendly and stylish UX/UI, arguably the number-one aspect of blockchain technology adoption.
AK at SORAMITSU, An Approximate Incomplete Timeline
- Started working at SORAMITSU in August 2018, age 24;
- Right after he had graduated from the Innopolis University’s MSIT-SE program;
- The MSIT-SE program Director at Innopolis was the CTO of SORAMITSU; [15] [16] [17]
- Many SORAMITSU employees have been Innopolis graduates;
- AK had some prior work experience with mobile applications, working for a telecom company, though not specifically notable and relevant;
- When he began at SORAMITSU, he worked on the early stages of the SORA project, consisting primarily of a mobile app and a blockchain network, both of which were purpose built for other SORAMITSU projects, primarily for Bakong, the central bank digital payments application and blockchain network built with the Hyperledger Iroha platform, same as SORA, which was built with Iroha as well back then, as well as using SORAMITSU’s Capital mobile wallet application framework that later was also used for Fearless Wallet;
- SORAMITSU started collaborating with the Web3 Foundation in early 2019, with the KAGOME project, the C++ implementation of Polkadot Host; [18]
- In July 2019, the Iroha blockchain based Bakong CBDC app was soft launched in Cambodia (and later fully launched in Oct 2020); [19]
- AK was assigned to the Fearless Wallet project in May 2020, at the time when the Polkadot network was just being launched and Kusama had been running for a few months;
- Fearless Wallet was positioned and branded back then as the Kusama wallet primarily, according to the vision of Dr Makoto Takemiya, the CEO and Co-Founder of SORAMITSU (and personally one of the largest early investors in Polkadot), as well as SORAMITSU’s CTO at the time, and received its first grants from the Kusama Treasury shortly after;
- At around the same time, SORAMITSU also received grants from the W3F grants program to start building Polkaswap, which was released in April 2021, along with the Iroha-migrated new SORA network, now built with Substrate, featuring a two-way bridge (named HASHI) between the Ethereum and SORA networks;
- Fearless Wallet quickly became the most popular and unique mobile wallet in the Dotsama space thanks to it’s amazing UX/UI, native app performance, superb security, and features such as simple smart Staking and Crowdloans participation, along with Fiat-to-Crypto On-Ramps, Analytics, Alerts, and more;
- AK left the company in Oct 2021, after slightly over 3 years with SORAMITSU, and just before Fearless Wallet multi-asset parachain support was supposed to be launched (instead, it was delayed, along with problems caused by unpreparedness for expected runtime upgrades).
Product Handover, What Really Happened
There have been many public claims by AK that he and the NW team “provided lots of assistance” to ensure a smooth transition and transfer of IP and assets to the restructured Fearless Wallet team at SORAMITSU, however there are a few discrepancies to that claim.
In fact:
- Only a handful of meetings ever took place with people who had secondary roles within the NW team and ended up leaving NW shortly thereafter;
- There were 300+ codebase issues raised, all of which had an overall lack of structure and almost no concise descriptions;
- There was a tremendous technical debt left by AK as the previous team lead, which still hurts us and slows down our development up until today;
- Approximately 6 months were spent sorting out all of the issues that were left. In spite of all the difficulties, we successfully completed the multi-asset and parachains implementation grant and prepared the report for the community;
- Finally, all of this came at a hefty financial toll for SORAMITSU, absorbing the hiring, onboarding and support costs in order to effectively fill the restructured Fearless Wallet team while making sure the cross-functional resources were utilised in a sensible manner, meaning that various other projects being worked on by SORAMITSU are also able to fulfil their planned targets on time.
Is NW Truly an Open-Source Project?
Since their first submission in December 2021, up until May this year, only the Android APK files were publicly available, there was no source code in the NW repositories at all. When the first milestone completion was reported, a community member noticed this lack of information and publicly inquired about it. Only then did they add the repositories.
Currently, there is only a Master branch on their GitHub repository, which by now is out of date. Therefore, the current state of their development is hidden from the community and potential contributors. Please take a look at these alleged open-source repositories and compare them with SORAMITSU’s Fearless Wallet repos:
Commit Frequency Comparison:
Addressing AK’s Claims
As is evident from the simple yet thorough analysis of the Medium article made by AK on Oct 12th 2021, his presented account of events and facts is for the most part erroneous, to be polite. One thing is clear however, given that this post was one of his first public moves, if not the first, after deciding to depart from SORAMITSU, he has unfortunately been deceitful from the start, making every effort to position himself and the NW product as something they are not.
AK has been on an ongoing press caravan speaking to whatever outlet will provide time about how, in his opinion, “SORAMITSU’s behaviour toward [him and NW] has been detrimental to the community and ecosystem at large”. Within the messages where AK tries to defend himself publicly, he usually mentions that he was forced to sign an NDA agreement with SORAMITSU. Nobody forced him to sign anything. However, signing an NDA is common practice within businesses of any industry, especially since we work with financial software. The scope of this agreement is limited to discussions held and preserving their privacy. An NDA does not cover the use of code, under any circumstance, therefore accusations made by AK that he was forced into any limitations, other than keeping an internal conversation private are unfounded and simply wrong. Even without an NDA, it is proper business ethics and common sense to not talk about internal conversations that you had during employment with someone.
Just as with the article AK published last year, that we analysed, he has been repeatedly misinterpreting and misunderstanding statements put out by us as well as other entities in the community and making more outrageous claims on top of those.
Let’s look at this fragment from AK:
According to our former labor contracts, we remain to be the authors of the code (& can even patent it! Which we did, everything according to the law) we built for FW, but you can claim whatever you want saying that this is “your” code. And it is clearly obvious to everyone who read DMCA [sic] complaint that the [sic] Soramitsu filled [sic] it not because they were “happy” that we as the [NW] team continued to build on top of the open source code we developed, but to shut [NW] as a project & the team down.
As is typical, AK is gloating at SORAMITSU with zero remorse about taking advantage of his former employer of 3+ years, and for some reason he thinks that we should also be happy about his deceitful behaviour and unethical decision-making? The subject matter however is that we never made any issues about using the open-source code, and never will, once again AK is simply deflecting from the mistakes he has made and trying to blame us for something we never did. As has been made clear over and over, the DMCA had nothing to do with the code, but it did have to do with the Apache 2 licence and Fearless Wallet Terms and Conditions, which do not allow the use of internal IP, that only SORAMITSU employees have access to, as well as registered trademarks.
Addressing Community Members’ Claims
We have witnessed a good number of community members unfortunately making baffling claims with regard to SORAMITSU in a similar style and manner as AK, and similarly misunderstanding and making assumptions, as well as mistakes, while interpreting events, actions, and legal matters. We hope that this article has sufficiently cleared things up regarding what really happened and how AK has been mischaracterising as well as manipulating perceptions and opinions since day 1. The only thing we’ve done has been in reaction to protect our rights and make sure that our product can survive. We’ve certainly not been doing that for any kind of profit margin, but rather a strategic long term goal and investment in the Dotsama community. As we’ve made clear, we are and have been committed to Polkadot since its earliest of days. We truly hope to put this whole ordeal behind us finally, and instead focus on building technology that makes people’s lives better!
Claims that Google Play simply reinstated NW at a later date are misleading. The application was clearly changed sufficiently enough by NW for it to be accepted by Google Play, including the removal of any trademark infringement violation. We find it fascinating however, how certain community members seem to suggest that overthrowing your employer is somehow an honourable thing to do when you are working on an open-source software project? SORAMITSU is not even a large company by any means, not that it should matter either. As we’ve made clear here, SORAMITSU is largely focused on creating open-source software, with a specific mission and vision to improve the world. We believe open-source software and human collaboration is the key to that, and for a company to be able to function and be competitive in this context IP rights need to be respected, and if necessary, fought for, with utmost seriousness.
Addressing NW Community Members’ Actions and Behaviour
- After the DMCA filing by SORAMITSU, which resulted in NW being temporarily removed from the Google Play platform, the NW community actively attempted to tank Fearless Wallet app ratings on Google Play by filing numerous 1-star reviews.
This is a clear example of behaviour that is detrimental to the overall ecosystem. While teams should be focusing on building quality apps for the entire community to benefit from, we should not forget that promoting Web3 doesn’t mean that any of the rules in place for businesses to run smoothly, and for disputes to be resolved or avoided, shouldn’t be respected. In some jurisdictions people could serve prison terms for submitting fake reviews.
With the recent public voting on Kusama Referendum 241, for the Fearless Wallet Browser Extension funding, put forward with the treasury Proposal 212, we witnessed more of the kind of behaviour that really makes us scratch our heads, to be polite.
- The original proposal was put forward for discussion on September 15th, it did not receive any notable feedback for 11 days, then on the 12th day AK posted his now usual accusations on how SORAMITSU supposedly is violating our own Terms and Conditions for the Fearless Wallet product with the DMCA filing that was made towards NW on Google Play, almost a year prior;
- The proposal was then put to vote by the Kusama Council on October 3rd, in the end it received 8 votes in favour (Aye) and 4 against (Nay) as a result of AK actively lobbying once again against SORAMITSU during the voting period, none of which had anything to do with the actual proposal content, it being clear also from the comments left by some of the councillors that they only voted against because of the repeated claims vehemently put forward by AK, so they proposed to re-submit the proposal to the community with public voting instead;
- The proposal went then on to the public referendum on October 24th and 7 days later we had the result, this turned out to be one of the most contested referenda ever on Kusama, and we can see who voted last minute with large amounts of tokens and high conviction, and who let the community decide.
Echoing the words of Bruno Škvorc, a well respected Kusama/Polkadot council member, former W3F technical educator, best known for being the founder of RMRK, and a whole host of other things Web3, often vocal about crypto and decentralisation topics:
We would also strongly agree here with another statement recently put forward by Bruno — there’s ”[n]o sympathy for decentralization theater”. Web3 is not an excuse to break rules.
The Funding of Fearless Wallet
For the most part, the funding for creating the bulk of the Fearless Wallet open-source code has been supported by the Kusama Treasury, as well as certain grants from other projects in the Dotsama space, like Moonbeam and Moonriver to name a few. However, we should also point out that a number of features have been funded by SORAMITSU directly, specifically the Crowdloans feature, which was in large part developed with internal funding and given to the Dotsama community, being fully part of the Fearless Wallet open-source code under the Apache 2 licence. There have been other implemented features requested by the community that are also not directly part of any grants or outside funding that SORAMITSU has absorbed the cost for internally.
We should also consider that Fearless Wallet, the software that SORAMITSU as a company provides for Android and iOS platforms, is a fully functional product that tens of thousands of people use, and though it is a fully non-custodial mobile wallet, these users consider it more of a service by SORAMITSU, with customer and tech support having to be provided. So we are not simply talking about code, when we talk about Fearless Wallet, as it is a product and a brand. Providing support for that is another cost that SORAMITSU generally fully absorbs, along with education and marketing activities, website, social media, biweekly dev updates, onboarding new users to Dotsama, helping existing users with their questions about crowdloans and new parachains, and keeping the existing community happy. It has been a strategic decision for SORAMITSU to support the growth and adoption of the Polkadot ecosystem, even before the network was launched.
When it comes to the Fearless Wallet web browser extension and standalone desktop wallet, it has been long requested by the Dotsama community and SORAMITSU has been long planning to build it, well over a year at the least. Over the last 9 months we’ve managed to get this started and we’re very close to releasing the first version. For circumstances which we’ve explained before when applying for Kusama Treasury funding, we waited until the right time, having finished the previous, though unrelated, treasury grant, to present the project and apply for the treasury funds. So far all the costs have been fully absorbed by SORAMITSU.
A Word About SORA and SORAMITSU
Unfortunately, we tend to see people confusing SORA with SORAMITSU quite often, and vice versa. So to be clear, SORAMITSU is a global blockchain technology company with various entities all over the world and around 150 employees on the payroll, working on many different projects from institutional innovative fintech solutions to decentralised community based projects. All throughout this article we’ve been talking about SORAMITSU.
SORA, on the other hand, is a decentralised autonomous community-run project with no employees, only contributors. SORA is governed by the community, currently using the same Substrate network-based Democracy system as in other Dotsama networks. SORAMITSU has continuously been a contributor to SORA since the early days, along with other entities and a growing number of people in the community.
SORAMITSU doesn’t have a community, we are a company. SORA has a community, and it is a decentralised project, over which no one entity has any ruling power, or control of any kind. Therefore, we at SORAMITSU have no say nor sway over the SORA community members who wish to participate in the discussion on Dotsama issues, even more so because a very large part of this community is also fully and actively participating within the Dotsama community itself, as SORA is very much part of Dotsama.
SORAMITSU doesn’t pay anyone to shill anything, nor does SORA as far as we are aware of. “SORAMITSU team” does not participate in spreading lies, deceit nor misdirection, and any such claim is subject to libel, as it is a clear defamation against our company, and employees. Such claims are completely false and unfounded in reality.
Why Didn’t SORAMITSU Simply Talk to AK Instead of Filing the DMCA
As we’ve made very clear here, the way in which AK left SORAMITSU, as well as acted prior to leaving SORAMITSU while still a contractually obligated employee, then making claims and accusations against our company in public, didn’t leave us any choice. It was clear that he was not going to be able to be reasoned with, as he had already stated and made unethical actions and claims against us in his very first Medium article, where he announced his future plans for NW in public. We also worked closely with AK for more than 3 years, and came to know his character well. Upon close examination and learning about the mess that was left for us by AK as the Fearless Wallet team lead, we needed to make an executive decision on how our product, Fearless Wallet, could survive the next 6+ months that would take to clear up the tremendous technical debt and backlog of poorly managed and described issues. As was made clear by AK himself in his public Medium article, he was not planning to wait around and wanted to take quick advantage of the IP gained from us. We had full legal right to file the DMCA, so that is what we did. We firmly believe this was the correct course of action and have no regrets whatsoever, especially because there are many bad actors in the blockchain space and it is important that blatant examples of teams not following clear guidelines and rules be met with resistance, so they can correct their actions. Unfortunately, the NW team clearly shows no remorse for their actions and repeatedly demonstrates that they have not learned anything at all from this experience.
In Conclusion
Having put all of this forward, we wish to make one thing very clear: we are not interested in the continued shaming of anyone, nor endless arguing, as it does nothing to help move the ecosystem, networks, nor humanity forward. We simply want to move on, and focus on the important things. We are creators, buidlers and designers. We never wished AK and NW any harm, we didn’t start this, and all we’ve ever wanted is simply for our IP rights to be respected and normal business ethics to be followed. We don’t find NW interesting whatsoever as a product and we don’t consider them a competitor. The DMCA complaint we filed was a legal measure taken to enforce our IP rights, since we had no other choice, after the hostile and defamatory manner in which AK chose to announce NW and the state he left Fearless Wallet when he resigned. We also had no other choice than to put out this article with such an amount of detail within, to address every single type of nonsensical claim that has been made against us, as well as set the record straight about what and how exactly happened on the SORAMITSU side of things, and of course, most importantly, that there is absolutely no precedent here in terms of the use of open-source code released by SORAMITSU under appropriate licences. We repeat yet again:
SIMPLY USING ANY OPEN-SOURCE CODE PROVIDED BY SORAMITSU IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE APACHE 2 LICENCE WOULD NEVER BE ANY ISSUE FOR ANYONE. THAT IS WHAT IT IS CREATED FOR, AND APPROPRIATELY LICENSED AS.
Our company remains committed to making contributions to open source projects and our main goal is to put forth software that others can find useful and build upon. We even invite those with competing projects to use our source code and implore them to create new and exciting applications to push humanity forward.
