译文/Translated：
Block.one创造了EOS区块链，其ICO获得破纪录的40亿美元。现在，它被粉丝接管了。
11月一个周三早晨，EOS区块链社区的Yves La Rose在和中国用户的线上集会中说，“就目前的情况来看，EOS已经失败了。”EOS是开曼群岛企业Block.one利用开源软件创造的区块链，当时，EOS允诺它会比其它加密货币网络都高效。加密货币爱好者一度开玩笑说， EOS表示“磕了药的以太坊（Ethereum on Steroids）。”
2018年6月，EOS启动之前，Block.one获得了40亿美元的融资，这是史上最大的一笔ICO。（通过ICO，初创企业能够获得巨大的投资，作为交换，投资者能获得还未建成的区块链平台未来会发行的代币。）很早之前，La Rose就专注做EOS。他甚至掌舵超级节点EOS Nation，超级节点的角色类似数字仲裁人，他们要验证区块链上发生的交易。
但差不多四年以后，EOS几乎自由落体了。用户基础缩减，支持的主要应用寥寥无几，主要开发者不断离开，其代币（也叫EOS）价值也从2018年6月的十美元跌到2021年末的4.4美元。去年秋天的线上集会上，La Rose说，他和社区的其他人在这场征程中死伤惨重：公司赚得盆满钵满，他们穷困潦倒。
“Block.one故意玩忽职守，”这个39岁的加拿大人在会议中说，“这是渎职，是欺诈。”
La Rose依然相信EOS的潜力；他气的是Block.one，在他看来，这个公司把整个项目搞砸了。La Rose想拯救EOS：他启动了组织EOS Network Foundation (ENF)，其目标是让这个区块链恢复元气，更重要的是，要让Block.one对项目的衰弱承担责任。
他想让Block.one滚蛋——同时，至少也要还一部分钱。
一开始，Block.one根本没打算搭理他。2021年5月，它宣布即将启动Bullish，这个加密货币交易所的一大部分流量来自EOS ICO时的利润。Bullish 在开曼群岛注册—还在支持区块链的特拉华州、香港、新加坡和英国的海外领土直布罗陀设立了分枝—它想通过和特殊目的兼并公司Far Peak Acquisition Corp在3月8日价值90亿美元的兼并上市。两次延期之后，其日期推迟到2022年7月8日。
Bullish就是Block.one和EOS社区争端的表象。EOS ICO背后的法律文件认为这笔钱任Block.one处置，但是ENF却认为Block.one未能履行其承诺。2017年12月，Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer承诺要从ICO的利润中拿出10亿美元，通过其投资部门EOS VC进行投资，促进EOS背后的区块链技术发展、鼓励初创企业为EOS开发应用。但是La Rose却说，Block.one把钱投资到不相关的企业了，结果导致EOS边缘化。
“企业一直有计划做交易所，”Tama Churchouse说，Block.one还在初始期他就一直在公司担任要职，直到2021年2月才离职。Churchouse说，启动交易所的动作从2019年早期就开始了。
ENF还说从2021年初开始，公司竟然容许一些本来应该用来的改进EOS的代码输出的减少，且随着一月首席技术官Daniel Larimer和其他资深开发者的离开，这个问题更加严重。离职之后，Larimer在和Cryptonomist的采访中抱怨Block.one已经不能“构建和发展解放人类的科技了。”（Larimer拒绝了采访请求。）ENF认为，这都说明Block.one没有致力于此。
因此，2021年11月，La Rose的演讲之后不久，ENF对Block.one下了最后通牒：重新投资EOS区块链，把EOS区块链技术的知识产权赠与ENF。否则，超级节点会终止“授予”过程，这个过程会在十多年内连续为Block.one提供一亿个EOS代币。他们说，如果他们不想让Block.one获得代币，他们只要对区块链代码做点微调就可以。
在写给WIRED的一封邮件中，Block.one发言人Abby Kuhanez提到现在公开的关于Bullish文件、ERC-20代币出售条款、他们对社区提供的“多方面支持”、2019年高伟绅律师事务所和普华永道发布的代币销售审计报告。Kuhanez说，他们的“好几个”说法都“不过是重复Block.one诉讼的内容而已。”但他并没有回应要求，详细展开说明。
“Block.one玩忽职守，它几乎搞砸了一切，影响了每个人。他们做得很烂。”La Rose说。Block.one前内部人士却讲了故事的另一个版本。他们说公司因为法律问题陷入瘫痪，根本不能完成一个项目——这是一个失败，但一个维度除外：它确实获得了几十亿的加密资产收益。
该公司在2016年成立，当初它是在Brendan Blumer的香港房地产公司ii5中加入加密货币技术人员和意见领袖最终成立的，它第一次崭露头角是2017年在纽约的行业会议“共识（Consensus）中”。
之后，团队开始全球路演，兜售EOS—未来，这些以太坊加密货币可以在当时还是理论的EOS区块链中转化为代币—这是一场持续了341天的线上拍卖。之后几年，监管方和学术界对这次拍卖做了详细分析。2021年8月，德州大学金融教授John Griffin发布的一项研究说EOS ICO有“洗仓交易”的几个特征。他说，有21个账户看起来在一起行动，同时购入大量的EOS代币，但不到一小时就全部出售，Griffin说，这种做法就会导致代币价格上升。
Griffin认为，这些账户的所有人在每次购买和销售中都在多个钱包转移代币，从而掩盖了自己的做法。Block.one在一篇博文说，这是无稽之谈，并指出2019年的审计调查并没有发现任何串通的证据。但Griffin还注意到，审计报告只调查了Block.one所有的账户，却没有调查企业高管的相关账户。但不管是哪种情况，揭露账户的所有人需要他们使用的加密交易所的合作。“我也只能做到这里了。”Griffin说。美国司法局没有承认也没有否认他们在对此进行调查。
Block.one一位前高管说，尽管EOS的营销手段非常激进，尽管它是由联合创始人、加密货币投资人、童星出身的潜力政客Brock Pierce领导和设计，但是Block.one根本没想到ICO能赚到这么多钱。这位前高管说，一开始，公司主席Kokuei Yuan就明确Block.one是“出售代币的市场组织：我们需要做一点点必须的软件然后撤离。”另一个熟悉该公司的信息源也确认了这个说法。（大多数Block.one雇员都要求匿名，要么因为保密协议要么是担心被报复。）
然而，40亿的收入引起了人们的关注。“我们开始认为，或许我们不单单应该就卖代币、随便做一点软件、然后转身离开，”这个前高管说，“或许我们该做更多。”
Larimer团队做了一个可行的区块链，虽然ICO前承诺的一些功能未能成形。比如，代币出售9个月之后，公司就不说它每秒能处理几百万加密货币交易了。这个前高管还说，哪怕是有了技术之后，Block.one的领导层也没能构思一个合理的愿景。Block.one最高领导层里包括首席策略官Andrew Lewis，它是Blumer的老友；Blumer的妹妹Abby负责通讯；而行政主席Kokuei Yuan也是Blumer的老友，他们2005年就一起创立了第一个企业Okay.com。“Blumer就喜欢身边都是对他好、不质疑他、不做让他不爽的事情的人，”这个前高管说，“但是CEO是要做决策的。”他说，公司花了好几个月在想美国办公室要开在哪里，到了2018年10月他们才选定了佛吉尼亚黑堡——这个镇子只有4万多人，除了一个居民以外就没有任何科技含量了：Larimer。
一个前任雇员还提到他们当时被要求做一个企划，他们花了好几百个小时，最终没有什么解释就被企划就被搁置了。“他们只想看起来在做点什么，”他说。Glassdoor的一些评论也讲了类似经历。Block.one香港（2020年Blumer放弃美国公民身份定居香港）办公室另一个前任雇员说，Blumer是一个杰出的销售，但却不爱做CEO。“他很少出现在办公室，”他们说，“他就坐在那里，了解问题在哪里、怎么解决。很快他就没兴趣了。”他说，这样的工作态度下，Blumer很快就把很多责任塞给了法律团队。“（Block.one在做的）很多事情都来自Brendan Blumer，所以你肯定需要有人在现场指挥。”
这就导致了每个商业决策的执行都过分谨慎——考虑到加密行业面对的监管问题，这也是可以预见的情况。2017年到2019年间，证监会不遗余力地指控组织ICO的公司：公司筹钱运营区块链，但是如果它过分关注业务，代币销售就可以被当作是在发行未注册的证券。Block.one要对股东（包括贝宝创始人Peter Thiel和Mike Novogratz等投资人）负责，而不是EOS代币持有人负责。
2019年彭博社一篇报道引用了Block.one给股东的一封信，披露了在一次回购中，早期投资者获得了高达6567%的利润，而Block.one大多数资金都被重新投资在政府债券和比特币中。根据其在一个投资者关系展示中提供的数据，到了2021年7月，Bullish持有141951枚比特币，价值高达60亿美金。2018年初离开公司（就在John Oliver在Last Week Tonight吐槽了技术闹剧之后不久）的Pierce说，因为合规和法律要求，Block.one有些“束手束脚。”比如Pierce认为是证监会导致了Voice失败，这个建立在EOS区块上的去中心化社交平台在2019年5月启动，当时Block.one已经给它准备了庞大的粉丝基础。“Voice失败的原因是 证监会不允许它发行代币,”Pierce说。到了2022年，Voice却开始出售NFT了。
Block.one本想避免所有的法律问题，它失败了，但这也不怎么要紧。2019年，证监会说Block.one并没有成功阻止民众参与出售代币（代币被认为是未注册的证券），随之而来的案子Block.one花了一年多才解决。而其解决方法也让整个行业都震惊了，毕竟考虑到对ICO的影响，行业一直关注本案：Block.one被罚款2400万美元，当然比起40亿的ICO，这笔钱微不足道。“他们请到了好律师，”加密货币投资人Katherine Wu 当时写到。作为和解条件，公司没有承认任何违法行为。
La Rose认为，监管风险确实存在，但是Block.one是把它拿来当做自己不作为的替罪羊了。“Block.one打着证监会的由头，避免履行自己的承诺，”他说。他说尤其要注意，EOS VC投资的公司—比如NFT平台Immutable和游戏公司Forte 和Playable Worlds—最后都用了其它区块链。更可怕的是，Block.one还投资了一些根本不怎么使用EOS系统的现目，包括比特币挖矿公司Northern Data和Loopland，后者是波多黎各的度假村，这也是Pierce2018年之后居住的地方。
Pierce说Block.one在风投项目上就选错了领导人。“其普通合伙人和聘请的监督人都是搞贸易的，但是风投是一个很复杂的行业，”他说，“他们就没把足够的钱花到正确的项目中。”Michael Alexander在2018到2020年曾经担任EOS VC的CEO，这位香港投资银行家拒绝对此进行评论。
Block.one的EOS VC通过和其它投资人的合作伙伴关系部署资金，其中包括Novogratz的 Galaxy Digital、亚洲投资人Michael Cao和Winnie Liu，伦敦基金会SVK Crypto和德国的FinLab。这位香港前任雇员说这样等于把任务“外包”给这些合作伙伴，而不是花时间寻找使用技术加强EOS的企业，据这名员工说，Blumer认为这么做“会分散注意力。”
“在加密领域，用EOS的都是小公司，”他们说，“但是Brendan不想做这些小的风投。”
Crunchabase数据和Block.one自己的新闻稿中显示，Block.one给合伙人注入了6.75亿资金，但有些资金的去向不明：PitchBook数据显示，其中有5000万投资给合伙人TomorrowBC，这个公司由Eric Schmidt的TomorrowVentures的常务董事Derek Rundell运营，但是这笔钱2022年之后就没被使用过了，这也导致一笔对加密交易新兴企业LogosBlock的75万美元的投资无法提取。Rundell和Schmidt对诸多提问不做回应。
ENF发起最后通牒之后，Blumer和Pierce前往加拿大和La Rose会面。在一篇博文中，La Rose表示，他反复要求部分ICO收益应留给ENF，但他的要求“每次都被断然拒绝。”
会议之前，Block.one转了4500万EOS代币（时值2.16亿美元）给Pierce，交换他在Block.one的股份。Pierce在Twitter上建议应该通过启动投资公司Helios拯救EOS，他会把刚获得的代币注入公司。“我已经不是Block.one股东了，这就是说我也不再受什么限制了。”11月，Pierce告诉WIRED，“现在我可以自由地做一些我认为对生态有意义的事情。”
但是，谈判中其状态却成了一个问题。购买Pierce股权的大多数代币还在“被授予”的过程中。“网络相信这些代币是他们的，而Block.one觉得是自己的，”La Rose说。
谈判无果几周后，12月7日，EOS超级节点执行脚本，停止授予Block.one代币，包括卖给Pierce的代币，最终也终止了这场股权收购。这个决定之前，Pierce告诉WIRED，这个决定会在EOS生态中“对信任造成很不好的影响”，因此他希望能取消该决定。
La Rose认为Pierce不喜欢这个决定，“他肯定不开心，”他说，“他快气死了，甚至对我进行人身威胁。”12月底，区块链新闻网站Bywire News采访了Pierce，当时他在波多黎各一个俱乐部里，背景乐声喧嚣，他带着草帽，说他不记得威胁过La Rose，不过如果真这么做过，他要道歉。
“从Block.one来看，这次分手很彻底，”La Rose说，“他们就不需要关注网络了，他们从来就不关心网络，网络也浪费了他们的时间。”Larimer和其它自身开发者现在又开始做EOS代码了，这次是在ENF领导下。基金会宣布会给为网络创造应用的公司提供补贴。
在La Rose看来，启动Bullish就是Block.one最大的政变了。“他们花了90亿就断干净了，”他说，“而且这么做还是合法的。”
2月19日，ENF在媒体页面上宣布它们在寻找律所希望“让Block.one对它之前的行为和违背承诺负责。”La Rose另一个推文也明确了这个说法。“我们正在采取一切可能的法律资源，寻找我们损失的41亿美元，”帖子写道，“让我们携手！#40亿DAO 来了。”
“我们市受害人。”La Rose说，“社区正在靠自己夺回区块链。”
附加报道作者：Greg Barber
原文/Original：
Block.One created the EOS blockchain and raised $4 billion in a record-breaking ICO. Now, its members have taken over.
On a Wednesday morning in November, Yves La Rose, a member of the EOS blockchain community, addressed a virtual gathering of China-based users. “EOS, as it stands, is a failure,” he said.
Built using open source technology created by a Cayman Island-based company named Block.one, EOS promised more efficiency than any other cryptocurrency network at the time. At one point, a running joke among crypto enthusiasts was that EOS stood for “Ethereum on Steroids.”
Ahead of the launch of EOS in June 2018, Block.one had raised over $4 billion in the biggest initial coin offering of all time. (ICOs let startups rake in eye-popping sums in exchange for cryptocurrency tokens to be used on a not-yet-built blockchain platform.) From those early days, La Rose devoted himself to EOS. He had even helmed the EOS Nation “block producer,” a kind of digital umpire responsible for validating the transactions taking place on the blockchain.
Nearly four years later, EOS was in free fall. Its user base was shrinking, it supported just a handful of popular apps, key developers were leaving, and the value of its token, also called EOS, had plummeted from $10 in June 2018 to $4.40 in late 2021. In the virtual session last fall, La Rose said that he and everyone else in the community had become the casualty of a venture that profited off their work and left them with nothing.
“Block.one knowingly misrepresented their capabilities,” the 39-year-old Canadian entrepreneur said in the meeting. “And this amounts to negligence and fraud.”
La Rose is still a believer in EOS’s potential; his grievance is with Block.one, which he believes has driven the project into the ground. La Rose has a plan to save EOS: He launched an organization called the EOS Network Foundation (ENF), with the goal of nursing the blockchain back to life, and, importantly, to hold Block.one accountable for the project’s decline.
He wanted Block.one to go away—and to give at least some of the money back.
Block.one had no intention of complying with his request. In May 2021, it announced that it would launch Bullish, a cryptocurrency exchange whose liquidity derived in large part from the proceeds of the EOS ICO. It registered Bullish in the Cayman islands—with subsidiaries in the Caymans and in crypto-friendly jurisdictions including Delaware, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar—planning to take it public via a $9 billion merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Far Peak Acquisition Corp by March 8. After two extensions, the deadline is currently set for July 8, 2022.
Bullish is emblematic of the fallout between Block.one and the EOS community. The legal documents underpinning the EOS ICO assert that Block.one can use the money as it pleases, while the ENF says the company has failed to live up to its public pledges. In December 2017, Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer promised to invest $1bn from the ICO revenue through an investment arm called EOS VC in order to grow the blockchain technology underpinning EOS and fostering the startups building applications for it. But La Rose says that the company devoted much of its funds to investment in unrelated ventures instead, and kicked EOS to the curb.
“There had always been plans for an exchange in the background,” says Tama Churchouse, who worked at Block.one in various senior roles from its inception until February 2021. Work on launching the exchange, Churchouse says, had started sometime in early 2019.
The ENF also argued that Block.one had allowed the output of code meant to improve EOS to decline since the start of 2021, and that it was bound to get worse following the departure of chief technical officer Daniel Larimer and other senior developers in January. In an interview with Cryptonomist shortly after leaving, Larimer complained that Block.one had become unable to “to build and promote technology that frees people.” (Larimer declined a request for an interview.) All that, the ENF said, showed Block.one’s lack of commitment.
And so in November 2021, shortly after La Rose’s speech, the ENF gave Block.one an ultimatum: Reinvest money in the EOS blockchain, and gift the intellectual property of EOS’s blockchain technology to the ENF. Otherwise, block producers would put a halt to a process called “vesting,” which granted Block.one 100 million EOS tokens staggered over 10 years. All it would take to stop Block.one from claiming the tokens, they said, was a minor tweak in the blockchain’s code.
In an email to WIRED, Block.one spokesperson Abby Kuhanez pointed to publicly available documents relating to Bullish, the terms of the ERC-20 token sale, the “extensive support” for the community using their technology, and a token sale audit report conducted in 2019 by law firm Clifford Chance and professional services company PWC. Kuhanez said that “a number” of the assertions in this story “appear to be recycled from claims made in litigation at Block.One,” but did not respond to requests to elaborate.
“Block.one is the negligent one, Block.one basically ruined everything for everybody. They’re the bad actors,” La Rose says.
Former Block.one insiders paint a different picture. They describe a company paralyzed by legal concerns and unable to bring any project to completion—a fiasco, but for one metric: its billions in crypto profits.
The company, founded in 2016 by infusing Brendan Blumer’s Hong Kong real estate firm ii5 with cryptocurrency technologists and influencers, made its first pitch at the industry conference Consensus in New York in 2017.
The team then embarked on a global road show to peddle EOS tokens—Ethereum cryptocurrency that could later be converted into tokens to use on the then hypothetical EOS chain—in a 341-day online auction. Over the following years, the auction attracted scrutiny from regulators and academics. In August 2021, John Griffin, a professor of finance at the University of Texas, released a study alleging that the EOS ICO showed signs of a technique called “wash trading.” He alleged that 21 accounts appeared to have acted in concert, making large purchases of EOS tokens only to sell them in less than an hour, a practice that Griffin argues would inflate the price of the token for other buyers.
The owners of those accounts, Griffin says, concealed their actions by passing the coins between multiple wallets between each purchase and sale. In a blog post, Block.one said that there was no coordination, and it pointed to the 2019 audit, which found no evidence of collusion. But Griffin notes the audit only examined accounts owned by Block.one, and not those associated with individual officers at the company. In any case, unmasking the owners of the accounts would require the cooperation of the crypto exchanges they had used. “This is as far as I can go,” Griffin says. The US Department of Justice did not confirm or deny that an investigation is underway.
A former Block.one executive says that despite the aggressive EOS marketing campaign, fronted and stage-managed by cofounder Brock Pierce, a crypto investor, former child actor, and budding politician, Block.one did not expect to make so much money from the ICO. The former executive says that at the very start, the company’s chairman, Kokuei Yuan, had made it clear that Block.one was a “marketing organization selling a token: We need to put up the minimum software necessary and then get out.” Another person familiar with the company’s workings confirms that account. (Most of Block.one’s former employees asked to speak anonymously because of nondisclosure agreements or fear of reprisals .)
The $4 billion bonanza focused minds. “We thought, maybe we should be doing more than just selling tokens, putting up the bare minimum software, and walking away,” the former executive says. “Maybe there’s more to be done here.”
Larimer’s team created a viable chain, even if some features promised ahead of the ICO were not delivered. For example, the company back-tracked on the ability to process millions of cryptocurrency transactions per second nine months into the token sale. But even after building the technology, the former executive says, Block.one’s leadership never developed a vision for it.
Block.one’s C-suite included chief strategy officer Andrew Lewis, a childhood friend of Blumer’s; Blumer’s sister Abby, who was in charge of communications; and the executive chair Kokuei Yuan, who also had a close relationship with Blumer, dating back to their first joint venture, Okay.com, in 2005. “Blumer really likes to be surrounded by people who will be very gentle with him and not challenge him and not make him do things that make him uncomfortable,” the former executive says. “But a CEO’s job is to make decisions.” The former executive says that the company spent months deliberating where to open its US office until, in October 2018 it plumped for Blacksburg, Virginia—a town of just over 40,000 people with an unremarkable tech scene barring one resident: Larimer.
A former employee recounted their frustration at being asked to develop a business plan, putting hundreds of hours into it, only to see it abandoned without explanation. “They are only interested in appearing to be doing something,” the person says. Several Glassdoor reviews of the company echo this experience.
Another former employee from Block.one’s Hong Kong office—where Blumer, who renounced his US citizenship in 2020, was based—says that Blumer is a gifted salesperson but does not seem to enjoy his role as CEO. “He was rarely in the office,” they say. “He would not sit there and understand what the issues were and how to fix them. He would quickly lose interest.” That attitude, the former employee says, ended up entrusting a lot of responsibility to the company’s legal team. “A lot of the stuff [Block.one worked on] was just ideas that came from Brendan [Blumer], so you needed someone to be the adult in the room and try and figure out how to execute them.”
That resulted in an overly cautious approach to every single business decision— a foretold outcome, given the perilous regulatory landscape for crypto businesses. Between 2017 and 2019, the SEC was hell-bent on prosecuting companies organizing ICOs: a token sale can be construed as an issuance of unregistered securities when a company is too involved in running the blockchain it has raised money for. Block.one’s duty was to its shareholders, which include PayPal founder Peter Thiel and investor Mike Novogratz, rather than EOS token holders.
A Bloomberg report in May 2019, quoting a Block.one letter to shareholders, revealed that early investors had received returns as high as 6,567 percent during a buyback, and that most of Block.one’s money had been reinvested in government bonds and bitcoins. As of July 2021, Bullish owned 141,951 bitcoins, worth around $6 billion, according to an investor relations presentation.
According to Pierce, who left the company in early 2018—shortly after comedian John Oliver eviscerated his techno-hippie antics on Last Week Tonight—Block.one’s “hands were tied” due to compliance and legal requirements. For example, Pierce blames the SEC for the failure of Voice, a $150 million plan to build a decentralized social network on top of the EOS blockchain Block.one had launched with great fanfare in May 2019. “The reason why Voice wasn’t ultimately successful was that the SEC wouldn’t allow it to launch a token,” Pierce says. As of 2022, Voice has pivoted to selling NFTs.
Block.one’s dedication to staving off any legal quandary failed, but it hardly mattered. In 2019, the SEC said Block.one had not done enough to stop Americans from participating in sales of the tokens—deemed to be unregistered securities—and triggered a case that took over a year to resolve. The resulting settlement stunned the industry, which had been watching intently given the wider implications for ICOs: a $24 million fine, tiny compared with the $4 billion ICO. “Fuck, man, their lawyers are good,” cryptocurrency investor Katherine Wu wrote at the time. The company made no admission of wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
La Rose thinks that while the regulatory risk was real, Block.one might have used that as a cover for inaction. “Block.one uses the SEC card as a way to distance itself [from its commitments],” La Rose says. In particular, La Rose says that several of the companies in which EOS VC invested—such as NFT platform Immutable or gaming companies Forte and Playable Worlds—ended up using other blockchains. More gallingly, Block.one invested in projects that could barely be construed as fostering the EOS system—including bitcoin mining company Northern Data and LoopLand, a holiday resort in Puerto Rico, the US territory where Pierce has resided since 2018.
Pierce says that Block.one simply chose the wrong leadership for its VC initiative. “The general partners and the people that were brought on to oversee it were really more traders, and venture is a really hard business,” he says. “They just never ended up putting enough of the capital into the right organizations.” Michael Alexander, a Hong Kong-based investment banker who worked as EOS VC’s CEO between 2018 and 2020, did not reply to a request for comment.
Block.one’s EOS VC deployed its money through partnerships with other investors, including Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital firm, Asia-based investors Michael Cao and Winnie Liu, London-based fund SVK Crypto, and German firm FinLab. The former Hong Kong-based employee says this was a way to “outsource” the task to these partners, rather than spend time looking for companies using the technology that underpinned EOS, which according to the employee, Blumer regarded as “a distraction.”
“In the crypto space, people using EOS are small companies,” they say. “Brendan wasn’t really interested in doing these small VC deals.”
Crunchbase data and Block.one’s own press releases show that Block.one injected around $675 million into the partnerships. But the whereabouts of some of the funds are unclear: $50 million invested in a partnership with TomorrowBC—a company run by Derek Rundell, a managing director of Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures—has not been used as of 2022, barring a $750,000 investment in crypto-trading startup LogosBlock, according to PitchBook data. Rundell and Schmidt did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
Following the ENF’s ultimatum, on November 10, Blumer and Pierce flew to Canada to meet La Rose. In a blog post, La Rose says that he kept asking for a part of the ICO proceeds to be given to the ENF, but his requests were “swiftly rejected each time.”
Just before the meeting, Block.one had transferred some 45 million EOS tokens (worth $216 million at the time) to Pierce, in exchange for his stake in Block.one. On Twitter, Pierce suggested rescuing EOS through the launch of an investment firm called Helios, which would be endowed with the newly acquired tokens. “I’m no longer a [Block.one] shareholder, which means I don’t have any limitations,” Pierce told WIRED in November. “I’m free to do whatever I think is necessary for the ecosystem at this point. “
However, his status soon became a problem during negotiations. Most of the tokens used to buy out Pierce were still in the process of being vested. “The network believed that those tokens are theirs, and Block.one believed they’re theirs,” La Rose says.
Following weeks of futile negotiations, on December 7, EOS’s block producers enforced a script that stopped the vesting of Block.one’s tokens, including those that had been sold to Pierce, effectively blocking his buyout. Ahead of the decision, Pierce told WIRED that such a move would “have a very negative impact on trust” within the EOS ecosystem, and therefore he expected that it would be called off.
La Rose says Pierce did not take the eventual decision well. “Clearly he wasn’t happy,” he says. “He was pissed off. He made death threats against me.” In an interview he did in late December with blockchain news website Bywire News, Pierce, donning a fedora in a Puerto Rican club while disco music blasted in the background, said he did not recall making threats, but apologized if he did.
“From Block.one’s side the divorce was quite clean,” La Rose says. “They now no longer need to worry about the network, which they didn’t really care about and that was costing them time.” Larimer and other senior developers have now started working on EOS code again, under ENF. The foundation has announced grants for companies creating apps for the network.
The launch of Bullish, in La Rose’s opinion, is Block.one’s greatest coup. “They are essentially getting away with $9 billion,” he says. “And they did it in a legal way.”
On February 10, a post on ENF’s Medium page announced that it had hired a law firm with the goal of “holding Block.one accountable for its past actions and broken promises.” An accompanying tweet by La Rose hammered the concept home. “Review of ALL possible legal recourse to seek $4.1B in damages underway,” it read. “Let’s do this together! #4BillionDAO coming.”
“We’re victims,” La Rose says. “The community is reclaiming the chain for itself.”
Additional reporting by Greg Barber
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