Today, David Sønstebø published a letter addressed to the IOTA community to shed light on the situation that seems to have got out of hand with the project’s founders.
It was June 2019 when Sergey Ivancheglo, co-founder of IOTA, better known as Come-from-Beyond/CFB, resigned from the IOTA Foundation as an independent developer.
I notify the #IOTA community that I no longer work with David Sønstebø and am contacting my lawyers to get my 25 Ti from him. He refuses to transfer the iotas to make me act for his own benefit and against mine.
— Come-from-Beyond (@c___f___b) February 2, 2020
From the letter published today, it appears that disagreements over developments in the IOTA protocol have prevailed and it seems, upon reading the document, that it was only a matter of time.
As the Chrysalis update sees the light, the two founding partners are starting a private legal battle which, however, seems not to affect the project, at least not directly.
The IOTA update
Chrysalis is an intermediate upgrade that allows IOTA to offer a mature solution to companies approaching IoT which uses this technology.
The mainnet update anticipates what is described as a coordicide upgrade. The goal of the next developments is to remove the coordinators from the network, the nodes that have allowed the structure to come to life and take its first steps.
The term coordicide arises from the intention to symbolically kill the coordinators – a point of centralization of the project.
The removal will take place only when the system is secure and autonomous enough for it.
Chrysalis will also allow the birth of the colored coins on IOTA, the tokens are coming to Tangle as well.
It is worth mentioning that IOTA is not a blockchain. The structure based on Tangle completely differentiates it from the other projects, though it does have many similarities.
It is a decentralized ledger technology that, once the objectives are achieved, should allow transacting at zero cost with potentially infinite scalability – maintaining a degree of decentralization sufficient to make it censorship-resistant – and therefore immutable.
IOTA and the surge in the price of the crypto
In the meantime, the controversy surrounding the foundation and new developments seem to reward the project on a speculative level. In fact, there is a clear turnaround and a sustained price increase, a trend that is also evident in many other projects in recent days.
In the available documents, the Foundation strongly emphasizes the advantages of having excluded from the equation the role of incentives and miners when it comes to problems related to decentralized ledgers.
However, it seems that developments and the agenda of a project that has no real link with economically exposed actors such as miners can once again be dictated by forces beyond the control of those who have an interest. Deciding on developments and how the network will evolve is still an arbitrary matter without clear and reliable governance.
This does not mean that the great work done on this tech is not worthy of attention, parallel to the project there are also developments in the hardware domain capable of exploiting IOTA to its full potential.
According to one of its most affectionate founders, it is the software that dictates the rules to the hardware.
