The internal strife within Cosmos continues, why did the founder lash out at the co-founder?

Original Title: 《The Origin of Cosmos Drama》

Author: Jae Kwon (@jaekwon), Founder of Cosmos

Compiled by: Kaori, Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

In February 2021, Jae, the founder of Cosmos, stepped down, and another core member, Zaki, accused Jae of uneven resource allocation in development, which led to the departure of many talented engineers and affected the development progress of the cross-chain protocol IBC. In May 2022, the Cosmos development company Ignite split into Ignite and NewTendermint, with Jae Kwon becoming the CEO of NewTendermint. The internal strife within Cosmos has continued to this day, with each party having its own views and reasons; however, there has been no noticeable change in the specific project progress of Cosmos.

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. This funding will support the company's work as a core development team of the Cosmos ecosystem.

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

Recently, during Celestia's airdrop, developers in the Cosmos ecosystem also received a substantial income.

This article is compiled from a recent blog post by Jae Kwon, one of the founders of Cosmos. In the article, Jae Kwon reveals a series of issues he has encountered within the project since he became involved in 2013. The main issues focus on another founder, Ethan Buchman, whom Jae Kwon believes orchestrated the project's split and misappropriated funds.

Initially, the two collaborated harmoniously, but as the project developed, Ethan gradually diverged from Jae and distanced himself from him. Under Ethan's operations, the core team left, project management became chaotic, and foundation funds were misappropriated, which Jae Kwon attempted to stop but to no avail.

He stated that Ethan conspired with unknown forces behind the scenes, deliberately infiltrating and undermining the project. Despite Jae Kwon's repeated warnings, the issues remain unresolved, and he believes action must be taken to correct the situation; otherwise, the project's prospects are bleak.

(This article) was originally a reply in another thread but deserves to be created as a separate thread. This is not just a historical issue but also the root of the problems currently troubling Cosmos.

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 BFT paper from 1988.

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

In 2016, I worked with Ethan as a seconded employee because I wanted to build an EVM on top of Tendermint, while Eris wanted a permissioned EVM. I taught Ethan everything I knew about Tendermint, and he consulted his mentor about writing a paper on it.

At that time, Ethan was still working at Eris Industries. It was said that Eris Industries had five co-founders, but the two publicly known co-founders were Casey and Preston Byrne.

The license at that time (LICENSE) was not well defined. I said it would be released under "at least a Copyleft" manner, but I was also clearly interested in a more permissive license, as I mentioned that I was a Kopimist believer. Please see the code repository (repo).

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

I spent time developing ABCI just to abandon the EVM and permission control I had written to retain the right to release Tendermint under the Apache2 license.

During this time, I learned that Chris Harborne admitted to saving George Soros during the IMF incident in Thailand, having worked for MI6, and had laundered money for Obama using jet fuel. Later, I learned that he was also a major funder of Brexit. He was evidently a major funder of Ethereum as well. He also seemed to play a significant role in the Tether project, which was founded by the notorious Brock Pierce. I don't even want to discuss what happened to my friends in a series of deaths related to him.

Ethan assisted in developing the Tendermint test suite and fixing bugs (although he did not design Tendermint, credit goes to him for helping with the test suite), while I focused on formulating investment strategies, trying to raise funds from venture capital firms that understood Bitcoin. But they all did not understand what proof of stake was.

As a last resort, I proposed the Cosmos white paper based on my own ideas about inserting light client proofs into the blockchain. Tendermint was always designed to be an efficient light client proof, while most blockchain projects abandoned this.

In 2016, I almost single-handedly wrote the Cosmos white paper, only delegating the non-technical and Tendermint-related parts to Ethan. I was the only one who engaged with up to five law firms and ultimately chose MME to create a foundation, modeling it after Ethereum. I created PLAN.md, fundraising documents, and almost everything related to Cosmos and ICF, as well as technical and non-technical plans.

MME indicated that I needed at least three members on the foundation committee (FC), and they said they could provide a third Swiss neutral board member. I said fine, I could invite Ethan as the third member.

Please note that I had very generously allocated him equity in AIB, as he was a later co-founder. I founded the company before Ethan joined, but I gave him half of the shares.

I traveled the world promoting Cosmos to the extent that I swore off international flights. Meanwhile, Ethan never did that.

By the end of 2017 - early 2018, I took a few months off after working on this for four years. When I returned to full-time work, I found that Ethan had hired a large number of managers. Fine, I could handle that.

Around 2018, things became very strange.

• Since I mentioned it once, Ethan started incessantly talking about my leaving ICF. He said I needed to leave due to a conflict of interest. More on the hypocrisy later.

• Executives, including Ethan and Zaki, withdrew, totaling five people. Zaki explicitly stated that he did not care about the mission, only about making money for himself.

• At a cryptocurrency conference, a scammer proposed OpenLibra, posting my photo and Sunny's photo as if we were core members of his project, which was not the case. Ethan and Zaki knew this, and I warned them not to associate with this scammer, but they did not care.

• Upon reviewing OpenLibra, I commented on their proposed voting system and pointed out that it was easily manipulable, but they did not care.

• I saw Zaki starting to call himself a co-founder of Cosmos, even though much of the foundational software was already completed when he joined, and he was not even part of the coding team. I asked him to stop, but this continued. Among the engineers developing the core software were Sunny, Dev, Chris Goes, Ethan Frey, Alessio, Rigel, and myself. Neither Ethan nor Zaki was involved.

• Jessy Irwin approached me, boasting that she invited her ex-boyfriend to her apartment under false pretenses, then hacked into his computer and stole his Bitcoin, even showing me the wallet she bought with that Bitcoin.

• I told Zaki about this, and he insisted that we needed Jessy to get the work done. Her job was basically to interface with HackerOne. I made an exception for Zaki but refused to give Jessy full super admin access to the Google app for Tendermint, as having that access would allow her to perform actions far beyond her job responsibilities.

• Despite knowing the above, Zaki began spreading rumors that I imposed a glass ceiling, engaging in gender discrimination against the entire company. Prior to this, he told me that one of his favorite books was "The Eight Rebellious," and he said things like "I am like a god" and "that plan is not evil enough." Clearly, he was leveraging black magic for personal gain.

• I proposed the idea of Virgo, which Zaki approved and was very enthusiastic about, even wanting to introduce it to the company personally. This was after we agreed on a division of labor; I would focus on new projects like Virgo, while he would help manage Cosmos. The division of labor was very clear.

• I let Ethan and Zaki take over the routine negotiations for AIB/ICF, as it was routine work. At this point, the ICF treasury held over $100 million worth of ATOM, along with cash and cryptocurrencies. AIB was also included, but in smaller amounts. Everyone should have been clear that there was absolutely no problem. Next, I heard engineers lamenting that their job security was threatened. This made no sense; ICF should clearly support us, and Ethan and Zaki were responsible, yet this was ultimately blamed on me.

• The main reason engineers left was due to a lack of funding certainty, and in an open letter, they mentioned some other vague issues. Interestingly, this happened after I started asking everyone to transparently report their conflicts of interest.

• I once mentioned in the #general channel of our internal Slack that we should strive to write excellent software that would be considered valuable in the future, and that we were doing God's work. I only mentioned God once. Later, Zaki resigned and claimed that I was religiously harassing everyone in every Slack channel. This was 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.

• Regarding cultural issues, let me tell you about a person named A in Berlin, who was very offended when I privately suggested that we needed to hire more concurrency experts; he was not a concurrency expert and could not stand the implication that he was not an expert. (Note: In the crypto field, experts in this area may apply concurrency programming techniques to improve the performance or security of cryptographic algorithms.)

• Ethan and Jack were involved in a damn "SKUNKWORKS project" called "DOUBLEDARE" for AIB, where they decided to discuss removing key components of the entire project, AMINO, from each other instead of fixing it because they did not want to fix it. This was after I spent months thinking about how to make AMINO a complete part of protobuf, as they insisted on supporting protobuf. Even if I fixed it 99%, they still insisted on removing it. If you want to understand what I mean, please check the differences between AMINO at that time and the new AMINO in the TM2 directory of gnolang. This was completely insane, not to mention fraudulent and illegal.

• Later, I learned that Zaki was sued for doing something similar to what I did. I believe the person suing him said Zaki threatened him: "Do you see what I did to Jae?" I didn't even mention Shaun.

• Later, I found out that Ethan set up excessive financial rewards for himself at Informal. This was absurd and extremely unethical, as the entire purpose of ICF (Interchain Foundation) is to support public funding. For the sake of the common fund, I did not give 20% of AIB (All In Bits) but half, which is reflected in the fundraising plan and related documents. It is illegal for FC members to profit in this way, but evidently, Swiss law is as full of holes as their cheese. I guess either MME (MME Legal Advisory Firm) is extremely corrupt (they are being sued by other projects), or their existence is to profit from a so-called neutral position.

• Later, I discovered that Jacob introduced Grace to Preston's law firm. Someone told me that Preston claimed he could help resolve the lawsuit faster because he knew me, but then Preston disappeared. Meanwhile, their law firm made absurd claims, such as refusing to mediate before the lawsuit was withdrawn. This was utterly ridiculous, and the entire community was outraged.

• After that, I found out that Brian Crain was also an employee of Eris Industries. If I had known earlier, I would never have accepted him into the FC, and I would never have handed control of the ICF to Eris, who were the ones who tried to frame me in 2016; it was absurd.

• When I left the FC, I unequivocally stated in the strongest terms that the person they wanted to replace me with should not join the FC because he was an employee of AIB, and I had worked with them, and they had not demonstrated the required expertise. I recommended Sunny. But they completely ignored my comments and decided to let this person join.

• I have not verified this point, but later I learned that this person's father was a close friend of Bill Gates and his ghostwriter.

• As far as I know, Brian Crain is married to the daughter of a former Turkish dictator.

• Ethan Buchman seems to have magically become best friends with Vlad Zamfir. He is a distinguished member of the Creative Destruction Lab from Canada. While I could elaborate more based on these clues, I will refrain from doing so here.

I haven't even mentioned the absurdities regarding Proposal 69 (VM on the Hub) and Proposal 82 (ATOM2), and now they even want to cancel the 2/3 collateral target for the IBC Hub. These are just some of the flowery words and fraudulent actions that have led to PTSD that I can recall. Please check Chjango's recent revelations about Jack Zampolin, which are a typical example of the culture I have been resisting. From my perspective, this project, or at least the Interchain Foundation (ICF), has been infiltrated and subverted by deep forces, which has become increasingly evident.

• Why is Preston frequently quoted in ZeroHedge articles as if he is the embodiment of truth?

• Who are the "five founders" of Eris, and what are their backgrounds?

• Why is their mascot a groundhog? Is it because they have always been planning to dig holes?

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

• Why do I always see connections to elite backgrounds in all these matters?

• Someone wants to know.

If they were fulfilling their duties, I wouldn't even mind, but they seem more concerned with Ethereum and Urbit. They should publicly disclose all their positions and potential conflicts of interest; in fact, they should all resign. Wounds cannot heal and disappear because silence is wrong. Gore2020 did not defeat me, nor did the ATOM2 with the nailed Pepe frog. In a timely manner, they should concede and leave. Ultimately, I was wrong. After George Soros destroyed Asia, even leading to the collapse of Daewoo, where my father was an executive, I thought it was a good idea to heed Chris Harborne's advice because he had extensive connections.

But I should not have listened to him; I should not have created the Swiss foundation, should not have trusted MME, or the "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 had given Ethan enough feedback or communicated with him enough, he would have understood. But that was not the case.

There are four types of people in this world.

• Some are born with a silver spoon, bathed in evil.
• Some sell themselves to those above for wealth.
• Some grow up in poverty but are lucky or privileged and feel a responsibility to alleviate human suffering.
• And some never get or give themselves a chance.

Choose wisely, for the moment of judgment has come.

Stand firm in your values, do not yield to the pressure of others, and do not give them a third or fourth chance. Do not be intimidated by numbers and gangs, or social engineering strategies. Certain behaviors (like double dare or theft) are grounds for expulsion. So far, I have not received a sincere apology. To be fair, Zaki did apologize internally at AIB, but not for the issues I mentioned above.

When I resigned from AIB under pressure from all sides (though no rational person would agree with this decision if they were in my position), and finally resigned from ICF, as it had become clear that ICF was completely subverted (though I still regret that decision), I have since been researching the best smart contract systems in the world.

What drives me crazy is that after Ethan and I decided that we needed to create our own independent budget to make progress, I ultimately agreed to create Informal, and the Virgo budget was similarly allocated to my direction; however, just because I chose to leave the funds in ICF (clearly for accountability), since I resigned from the FC, they decided to completely ignore this and pretend that arrangement never happened.

At the same time, I later learned that the "cooperative" created by Ethan with Informal was not a cooperative at all, and Ethan had excessive financial interests in it; thus, there was actually a conflict of interest, and he created this conflict under the same reasoning he used to force me out of ICF; and all of this was after I had made tremendous efforts. The level of hypocrisy, cunning, and fraud has made me a Christian, which is the reason for my faith. The first letter of the last book of the Bible provided me with the revelation I needed to hear.

To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands: I know your deeds, your hard work, and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them 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—unless you repent. 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, then perhaps it is already too late. If all the righteous begin to withdraw to a new center, do not be surprised. I cannot, in good conscience, support what has happened and what is now deteriorating. Unfortunately, the problem stops here. Believe me, if you disagree with my views, it would be better to sell now and leave; do not say I did not warn you.

It is foolish to conduct any form of psychological analysis of Cosmos without understanding the tricksters and their works and the real reasons behind their so-called Gore2020, as this will only maintain the status quo. While acknowledging the failures of ICF, there is no action taken to counter ICF, and some even suggest we simply ignore it. However, at this moment, the hub should take decisive action rather than become an evil defender. I have given them ample warning. Despite knowing the above facts, they continue to insist on following their script, massively brainwashing the Cosmonauts, and attacking the integrity of the hub. They have turned ICF into a tool for misappropriating funds and boldly demanded more with ATOM2. The day of judgment has come.