Formally request full financial transparency from the Interchain Foundation

The interchain foundation is a Swiss foundation created to manage the assets in the fundraise process described here:

The ICF (Interchain Foundation, hereafter “the foundation” or “the ICF”) has not issued any reporting to the Cosmos community on its activities in nearly two years. Numerous current and former, ICF funded teams have come to me to voice distress. They fear retaliation if they speak out, just like I did when I spoke out.

vote YES to formally request full transparency from the interchain foundation

9 Likes

Would be good to add the No options as well, although it might be a little bit rhetoric.

It would be needed to get a full statement of the position of ICF and how it is managed. Is it a non-profit? Is it a company seeking profits? Etc. That would also make their position clear for future cases. Mainly because current statements and behaviour not completely match up.

2 Likes

This needs to happen 200%

1 Like

Something that I should note here, in the original text for the proposal, I mentioned informal systems, and I said something about them receiving some disproportionate amount of funding, however, in the absence of transparency there’s nothing that I know for certain, so I have updated the text of the proposal and I’d like to make it very clear that at this time I can know literally nothing for certain.

Due to litigation against Grace Yu by https://twitter.com/Allinbits_inc/status/1639410529943920640 I have been advised that I should not put this on chain. Anyone can do that, though.

It’s been here for >1 week and I think it is quite fair game.

Just I can’t do that.

The easiest way to make gov props is this:

https://proposals.subtract.fi/

2 Likes

No one else has done this, I’m electing to take the risk and get back to work.

prop is live:

Edit: All of this is ofc IMO - and should not be seen or understood to be a formal statement from the foundation, etc etc…

I do not understand the point of this prop, aside from making us - i.e. Hub/Cosmos - look bad for media, investors and hodlers.

First off, this prop - yes or no - can’t be enforced in any way. Of course, the Foundation won’t ignore the vote - social consensus is key in our passionate community - but just pointing out that the vote on this is almost meaningless…aside from negative publicity.

Secondly, on the “randomly listed” points on the prop…which IMO doesn’t form part of any cohesive argument…much of it is written in bad faith. My thoughts:

  • The ICF (Interchain Foundation, hereafter “the foundation” or “the ICF”) has not issued any reporting to the Cosmos community on its activities in nearly two years.

This is almost true. Almost in that, this statement would have been 100% true as of a few weeks ago. But this Funding Overview for 2023 was published in Feb’23.

Additionally, I personally believe this statement is being made in bad faith - you are fully aware that we are about to publish our annual report for 2022 - something that will probably happen during this vote or straight after - COMPLETELY unrelated to this governance proposal.

  • Numerous current and former, ICF funded teams have come to Notional to voice distress. They fear retaliation if they speak out.

In light of the above bad faith, I’m calling BS on this. Granted the Foundation maybe should adopt a whistleblower policy or something to formally protect the rights of whistleblowers, but I think it’s in the Cosmos-spirit for people to speak their mind. And I strongly believe we won’t be “litigating disclosures”.

So please, ask these people to speak out! Anonymize their statements if you have to - but lets hear what they want to say. We can’t address criticism and correct out issues if we don’t know what they are.

  • Teams applying for grant funding have informed Notional that grant funding is not open to non-incumbent teams.
  • Notional has been informed by the the Interchain Foundation that grant funding is not open to non-incumbent teams.

Both of these statements are correct in that our small grants program is closed, and has been since last year. The application form has been removed from the website, anyone who approached directly has been told its closed, and we even wrote 5 paragraphs worth of why its closed, when will it open, and what you can do in the meantime in the aforementioned Funding Overview for 2023.

Once again, this seems to be some type of bad faith messaging going on - like you are trying to imply something shady happening!

  • The interchain foundation owns around 10% of the total supply of ATOM.
    This too is a bad faith statement IMO, cause:
    a) I know you know our total holding is about 14M atoms
    b) I know you know how to use a calculator

14M / 336M = ~4%. Substantively different to 10%.

The 14M figure has been mentioned numerous times, but concretely, I can point to page 6 of the Atom Delegations Policy, published in October 2022.

Of course a valid question is “Foundation started with X atoms and now hold Y atoms” - what did it spend it on? But that’s not the question being asked on the proposal.

And while I know you are aware of what the foundation spends money on - developing the stack!!! - and in Feb’23, we said our spend even in this market will be ~$40M for the year, you can quite easily estimate the cost of the stack over the past few years.

That being said, of course you shouldn’t have to to the calculations yourself, the Foundation should have been publishing reports regularly. But it didn’t. It messed up. But it’s fixing it - and you know that intimately.

tl;dr

This prop is written in bad faith, with statements that can lead to misleading and wholly incorrect assessments.

To the larger audience of atom holders - i.e. those who haven’t got any idea about even our delegations program (check posts on Reddit - i.e. not in our twitter bubble) - a prop like this reads as follows:

  • ICF holds 10% of all atoms
  • ICF is being shady - they aren’t giving any grant money
  • So what are they doing with this money
  • Oh look, all their atoms are also liquid rn - non staked
  • If the ICF doesn’t believe in atom and being shady, why should I have confidence in this?
4 Likes

It’s a formal request.

You are also aware that I’ve been told that this is about to happen long ago. It didn’t and now cosmos has two markets with respect to software – one which is fully transparent and available to anyone and the ICF, which… is available only to incumbents.

  • When was the first time I was told that the ICF would publish this information?

It’s bad that I got this wrong in my proposal. I was going from genesis amount.

I fully understand the cost of developing software. There are numerous community members claiming that Notional is expensive. They do this because they aren’t being given complete information.

https://twitter.com/gyunit_/status/1642624867374866433

No, I don’t, I’m sorry, but I don’t.

I won’t know it till it’s done.

https://twitter.com/gyunit_/status/1642624867374866433

No, I cannot do that. The proposal isn’t designed as a hit-job.

But since you’re a member of “the hellscape” twitter group, you know it’s true. And that hasn’t been everything.

The funding overview, as you’re aware, lacks numbers. Thus, total opacity.

1 Like

I did not write this for the reddit crowd.

My company holds a whole bunch of atoms. It was not written for the purpose of harming the price of atom, nor for making atom look bad, nor for making the hub look bad.

It was written to get to a better place than where we are today.

2 Likes

that’d be silly, wouldn’t it?

https://twitter.com/gyunit_/status/1642624867374866433

Proposal doesn’t look bad this looks bad

https://twitter.com/gyunit_/status/1642624867374866433

lotta litigation going around

and in my case I’m certain there’s been retaliation and I reckon you’re aware of that too. It wasnt taken kindly, the questions I asked.

Bad faith? This looks like bad faith:

Don’t even know what you’re talking about here

Wasn’t aware that we publicly mentioned a timeline for the report previously…so thanks for sharing the tweet and correcting me.

On my “bad faith” comment - it was based on seeing the prop on chain, with the text that’s on chain right now.

Of course since then, there seems to be a lot more “stuff” to unpack with this prop. Would have been good if there was a way to amend on-chain text.

So you mean to say it wasn’t written in bad faith and I have every good reason to demand financial transparency from the ICF?

What text would you amend?

And what needs unpacking? The shadow market must go

Tired of hearing that my organization is expensive you see

That’s never going to happen until there’s financial transparency out of the ICF

ps what’s that stank?