Farewell

We started Lamden back in May 2017 when things like Lisk and Poloniex were still a thing. The space was absolutely crazy. Cryptopia was still around with a market for 42 coin. This was the landscape that had excited me about the space: experimentation, open-source software, and fun.

We started Lamden because the barrier of entering the crypto space was very high for a new developer. The initial idea was a set of tools that people could use to deploy their own chains, etc. However, we pivoted to building our own chain (for better or for worse) because it seemed like a much more fun challenge than some basic tooling that would be hard to perforate into the community and didn’t have much rationale for its own cryptocurrency.

Regardless, over the last five years, we have had a tumultuous ride. I had just come out of college and had found myself at the helm of a tech company that had to build a distributed network. In hindsight, it all sounded like I bit off more than I could chew. But, that had never stopped me in the past.

The strategy of Lamden was to create a platform that was easy to use and allow developers to onboard their own user base, creating a flywheel and mass adoption. What we focused on was the technology. For me, cryptocurrency was this 2012–2017 space of experimentation and fun. It was all about the technology. Things that were interesting from a tech perspective ended up bubbling up to the top of the market. Our strategy was to build something that was DIY, fun, and easy to use. From there, we would organically build a community of great developers who would onboard a ton of great users. It was an amazing vision.

However, hindsight is 20/20. In 2017, we saw a massive shift in the market. Things became less DIY, way less maker-focused. The values that attracted me to crypto began to die out and were replaced with the usual suspects of big firms, big institutions, and big fences. And so, to compete, we had to play that game. However, this was a game I never set out to play. It is a game I do not know how to play, nor ever wanted to play. However, what I do realize is that perhaps I should have flipped sides. Maybe flipping sides would have granted us more access and more visibility. Who knows. It’s hard to imagine hypotheticals when there were so many other factors in play at the time.

We were also dealing with the challenges of building a team from scratch, managing them, producing code, dealing with HR issues, code quality, blah blah blah. Millions of things that were a first-time experience for me that put me under a lot of pressure. And, under pressure, I tend to stick to the plan to gain a sense of control over the situation.

This is not an excuse. Merely, an explanation so you may be able to imagine yourself in my position and empathize with how things went. But, as it stands, the current state of Lamden has to do with several factors:

1. A strategy did not align with the changing market
2. Initial mismanagement in terms of expanding too fast
3. Learning as we went, which made the development slow and prone to issues
4. Lack of access to key opinion leaders/decision makers that could raise our project to new heights

I take responsibility for these failures. If I could rewind the clock, knowing what I know now, I would do things vastly differently. But, during it all, my goal was always to make Lamden the best piece of software that I could and to give it my all. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always mean success.

At the current state, we are in a bind. As some community members know, we took our treasury and put it into a loan product. That loan has not made payments over the last six months. It is currently in default. The entire treasury was placed into this product, and the entire salary of the team was derived from the interest payments on this loan. With no interest payments being made over the last six months, our runway has dried up. We had less than enough funding to get the

And so, we have no choice but to move forward with the strategy of decentralizing and distributing the responsibilities to the community, fully. If this means that the protocol will collapse, then we have to face that reality. No project in crypto can exist if it cannot be upheld by the majority of the community. That is the core tenant of decentralization, which has been the goal of Lamden since the start. This has been a tough pill for Jeff and me to swallow, but at this point in time, we do not have another choice.

Sorry for the mistakes I made in the past. We will continue to develop the protocol until it can be handed off to the community. We will make sure the technology is stable for the public to run the infrastructure. We will place the Lamden Labs Tau in the DAO so that you all can steer the ship and make Lamden into something that we could not. We believe that this is the best course of action. We also spent the last five years of our lives devoted to this project, and so it breaks our hearts to be at this point.

We will also be opening the license of the software so that anyone in the community can use it for their own projects. I hope that you all take Lamden to the heights that we were not able to.

To all those who have stuck with us, we thank you for your commitment to us. Our biggest regret is not being able to live up to your expectations. We hope you forgive us for our mistakes.

Godspeed,
Stuart