Glad

The Confidential Brief I could have written a 200-page novel about the events of this past week. I’m obviously not going to do that, but instead focus most of my attention on the power of the $COTI community. When the new team came in there was a clear and confirmed offer: Keep mods, ambassadors and a few other Key people until the end of October/November. To assist in making the transition smooth. No extra cost. Offer was rejected. Instead the new team, who had clearly not made the advance effort to understand our community, decided to bring in their own. And not only that. In a jaw dropping display of contempt and arrogance, proceeded to “shame” one of our most loyal members with some fake salary numbers. The guy, predictably, got crucified. The new community-facing crew promptly introduced North-Korean conditions in the main TG chat because they were getting overwhelmed by questions and complaints that they didn’t have an answer to. Those controls are still in place, mind you. Why was that? A team largely undoxxed - The old COTI team was fully transparent - all moderators, ambassadors, CEO, CTO, CMO, etc were fully doxxed and visible to anyone wishing to see who’s behind the project. New team won’t even go on camera and have a proper engagement with the community. We have their first names, but don’t know who they are - no social footprint whatsoever. The team behind the team - no clue either. Sure, some details will never be known but there could have been an effort to be a bit more informative. We’re gonna find out anyway!!! Roadmap - rather than focus on what was right in front of them, namely PoD live on Avalanche, relatively straightforward to copy to other chains, ChainLink of privacy. An absolute slam dunk - plenty of positive sentiment to be leveraged, and a real chance to generate meaningful revenue. What we get instead is “yeah of course we will do that, but what we really want to do is consumer-facing app, travel, VPN, etc”. This could all be very good - I don’t know enough about it to claim otherwise - but given the massive excitement that PoD had generated online and in the community, this should have been the headline. Everything else to come later. It’s called low-hanging fruits and is what every new CEO looks for initially. Transparency - to this day we still don’t have full visibility on who controls main wallets and what the security is like. What we do now know is that somewhere between 500-800 million $COTI was sent to a consortium partner/market maker. We don’t (yet) know who this is, but rather that the commitment to provide liquidity was “misrepresented” and instead resulting in a sustained sell-off, much to the detriment of everyone involved (see chart below). Ecosystem care - it’s been less than 10 days and already we are facing issues with liquidity on @CarbonDeFixyz . Maybe, instead of making the transfer of more than half a billion COTI to a dodgy MM the top priority, make sure the COTI ecosystem is looked after first. These are basically the most asked questions by our community - and questions that the team has not adequately covered - not in the chat group and not in yesterday’s Q&A. And make no mistake about this - the community will not back down. We saw this most recently on the “58%” issue. @shahafbg had initially given (on camera) a less than satisfactory answer, but with significant pressure from the community and some internal discussions between community leaders and core team, a better approach was agreed to. Perfect? No. Better that what we had? Yes. Ignoring the community and instead going with “trust me, fam” has been an unmitigated disaster, but it could have been so much different. Reach out to the 10-15 most influential community members, have a call and broadly lay out plans and understand where the pain points are, and what is needed to get the community onboard. I will always support @COTInetwork , and for sure old COTI wasn’t always a dance on roses, but I’m having a really hard time reconciling with what’s been going on since this takeover. What’s the point of having a community, if you don’t make an attempt to understand and make good use of it? Now, instead of a buy-in, you have a community full of distrust and opposition. How much time will be spent rebuilding that? I haven’t sold out, nor will I at this stage. I’m just too curious, and will always believe in second-chances. @RobbieVdg will get this right. For those who did sell out - I totally understand you. This has shaken the project at its foundations. Onwards and Upwards Soeren