IOTA Founder D. Sonstebo Reveals Details On Leaving The Foundation

IOTA founder D. Sonstebo addressed the community and the board members by giving an answer to why he left the IOTA foundations but there were a few contradictory statements about the split as we are reading more in today’s IOTA news.

IOTA founder D. Sonstebo sees to “quench all concern” about his state of mind saying that “If the IOTA Foundation is not broke”  and hinted future plans for the ecosystem being hatched in collaboration with investors, community developers, and DLT-project leaders. Earlier in December, the IOTA Foundation board revealed that Sonstebo had been removed from the organization in a “unanimous board vote”. David Sonstebo served as a co-chair of the Foundation since 2017.

His blog post wants to clear up ambiguities about the IOTA announcement which he referred to as “clumsy, panicky, and downright unprofessional, allowing ample room for rampant speculation.” However, his post raised more questions than answers. The founder made it clear that he believes the split between him and the foundation was not the result of the contradiction between his interests and the ones of the organization and that he sees this characterization as false, defamatory, and dubiously motivated.

Later in the post, he described there were a pair of disagreements that provided a fertile ground for the drama to evolve including an instance where his internal campaign for the Foundation to appoint a new CEO was stopped by the board as well as many other disagreements about the ownership of several future IOTA ecosystem projects like the profitable governance of the committees in the IOTA smart Contracts.

Sonstebo said that the board started panicking about the negligence of the IF’s finances and that many stepped in to claim these projects to ensure a growing runway at the cost of IOTA’s ecosystem actually growing. He refused the board to take ownership of these projects and future revenue streams implying there was disagreement as a part of the separation. He continued to address multiple Board members personally and asked one to cease referring to themselves as co-founders:

 “There will be further details on my plans for IOTA coming early next year. Don’t worry. I will continue to work on IOTA with Foundation members, community members and external partners. This is not the dot at the end of the final chapter’s last sentence; it’s merely a comma.”