Yesterday, shortly after I signed on for our regular meeting, I saw the post by Max on our Slack that he and Olivier would be shortly announcing their launch of a new project forked from Crypti. None of the rest of us had any idea or indication of this plan. Max had not responded to a private message I sent to him a couple of weeks ago asking for his feedback on a path forward mentioned later in this post, and I had not seen him or Olivier much on Slack for the last few weeks. When the public announcement was made with more details, it was even more of a surprise that it would be a relaunch with an ICO including conversion of existing XCR into a new token.

During out team discussions a month ago on how to move forward, Max and Olivier were adamantly opposed to relaunch as a new coin with an ICO allowing existing XCR to be converted to the new coin.

Their original proposal was to dissolve the existing foundation and replace it with a smaller new board consisting of themselves and new members actively working on the project, and take control of all remaining funds. They also wanted to move all discussion to the Rocket.chat forum and open source the rest of the code. Subsequent work would consist of adding BTC integration to Crypti, continuing promotion to build community, and encourage development of Dapps.

Overall, this seemed like a reasonable plan to me for the next phase of the project, but an alternate plan was also proposed to do a re-launch almost identical to what is now being done with Lisk to raise more funding to pay for continued development. Additional funding rounds are very common in start-ups, and the Crypti team has a proven track record of delivering a working product, so this approach is viable, as well as a means to continue development on a regular schedule, and to pay for much needed marketing and PR.

Unlike a traditional start-up, we made a commitment to the original investors that would be no more dilution after the initial pre-sale of XCR. In order to keep this commitment and still be able to continue, my proposal has been to do what Max and Olivier originally suggested - continuing Crypti as a completely open source, transparent project with active community participation, and launching the new project, which would be based on Crypti technology but focused on current trends in the distributed ledger technology space. Development in the new project would be released back into the Crypti project as open source code while business strategy for the new project can remain confidential as needed to optimize shareholder value.

Most critically, to avoid dividing the community and team members, instead of requiring holders of XCR to convert XCR into shares in the new project, we would do a share drop, which allows XCR holders to keep their holdings in Crypti while also receiving a stake in the new company. Share drops were originated by Bitshares with Protoshares and Angelshares receiving BTSX and other tokens. It has also been used by Swarm to issue Swarm holders shares in Manna along with other start-ups.

After this meeting, and my above proposal several weeks ago, discussion had been minimal, and some of us were working on the details of the plan so the team would have things detailed in writing and agreed upon to present to the community for review and comment. There was not any heated debate or argument on Slack, or even much discussion presenting different viewpoints. Also, the core developers have been very busy for the past couple of months meeting a deadline on another project which would use Crypti in an embedded application intended for mass distribution.

Then, yesterday, out of the blue, came the announcement from Max that they were launching this new project on their own, and it has caused the predictable confusion among investors and community members.

I strongly suggest to Max and Olivier that they at least consider doing a share drop as well, instead of the conversion of XCR to shares in Lisk. This would prevent confusion to stakeholders and reduce risk by allowing people to retain their stake in Crypti as well as have a stake in the new company based on the technology they invested in, along with current investors also having a stake in the new launch by the founding core development team of Crypti. Crypti itself can also continue as an established, fully open source project.

We will be posting more details on the new project, but it still needs to be fully reviewed and approved by the team prior to release.