Campaigns
Those following the situation will know that AiB is being targeted by an ongoing distributed disparagement and disinformation campaign. This type of coordinated and malicious attack is not only harmful to our reputation and ability to conduct business but creates a toxic culture that is detrimental to Cosmos as a whole. Building an ecosystem with good culture is crucial to our survival. Without good culture, we will lose our way and become the problem we sought to solve in the first place.
On multiple occasions, AiB has been the target of untruthful allegations. We have tried to defend ourselves against these attacks but have reached a point where the only option is to take legal action to correct the record. A breach of contract lawsuit has been filed today against Grace Yu, a former AiB contractor who worked as a consultant for less than three months. Ms. Yu has knowingly and relentlessly made false, disparaging statements about AiB online while promoting a competing fork of one of our products and attempting to unfairly transfer its goodwill.
If we fail to take a stand we are effectively incentivizing an unethical, unfair culture of public dispute, drama, and disparagement campaigns. We wish that a lawsuit could have been avoided but given the harmful nature of the ongoing disparagement campaign, it is clear that we must follow an established legal process to reveal the truth and restore our reputation. It is time for AiB to be evaluated on facts rather than false and misleading statements made for personal gain. While the lawsuit is available at the aforementioned link, we provide a brief summary of its contents below.
The lawsuit states: “After AiB terminated the defendant’s services under the Consulting Agreement she [Ms. Yu] began an aggressive and brazen campaign to disparage AiB, its development team, and its executive team including AiB’s CEO Jae Kwon.”
“…[Ms. Yu falsely alleges that] AiB uses unenforceable non-competes, NDAs, and severance packages to bully non-English speakers in violation of California law… [(She) called AiB] pathological, sociopathic, and hostile…[she] continued her disparaging attack on AiB by making more false accusations of coercive practices and anti-competitive tactics.”
These assertions are all demonstrably false, and Ms. Yu knows this. Ms. Yu herself did not have a non-compete clause, even though we could have insisted she signed such a contract under New York law, where she lives, and where such clauses are legal. Instead, we negotiated an agreement with her to work under California law.
AiB’s contracts with independent contractors and employees alike only contain non-compete provisions where they are permitted by law in the jurisdiction where the worker resides. None of AiB’s agreements governed by California law include non-compete provisions.
Also demonstrably false are the statements that AiB uses NDAs and severance packages to bully workers, and that we use coercive practices and anti-competitive tactics. Our company’s culture and practices are the antitheses of this description. We value our workers and go out of our way to treat them fairly. We have never denied anyone a request for a waiver, and we never will.
In the spirit of transparency and open source, we plan to share publicly best practices for solving the challenging incentive problems for team-building for the benefit of the ecosystem.
AiB has been accused of using anti-competitive tactics to prevent Denis from forking the Ignite CLI. This too is false. As soon as Denis requested a waiver to allow him to fork the Ignite CLI, AiB immediately began discussions to allow him to do so. He first requested a waiver from his contract with AiB on Jan 29, 2023, on Twitter:
“Hey, @jaekwon from @Allinbits_inc! Denis here. Do you mind if I fork ignite/cli (Apache 2.0 licensed) and continue working on it under a different name with friends?”
We reached out to discuss a waiver with Denis two days later on Jan 31, 2023, that would allow him to continue his work on a fork of the Ignite CLI. A conversation on Signal began on Jan 31 at 11:18 am PDT and ended at 1:19 pm PDT between Jae and Denis. Below are the terms agreed upon during that conversation which were included in the waivers we sent Denis:
- Link back to Ignite CLI from the README
- Put effort to make upstream PRs where appropriate
- Keep in touch regarding any security issues that might be found
- Make an effort to find common and distinct vision components with us and see if it makes sense to create common interfaces, rather than two drifting implementations
- Remove public communications regarding this deal from Twitter
- Denounce communications from others like Zaki Manian calling AiB/Jae Kwon an “abuser” of Denis Fadeev, to put an end to misinformation.
The #FreeDenis campaign started immediately after an agreement with Denis was seemingly made and intensified by the end of the day putting unfair pressure and blame on AiB and Jae. We never understood why this campaign was necessary when we had already agreed very early on to issue a waiver for Denis, but we decided to not sustain or respond to it publicly, instead continuing to work on the waiver that we sent Denis on Feb 15.
In response, Denis tweeted:
“(I) … received a lot more than a waiver. The waiver is now contingent on me signing a large document that further restricts what I can say and do, ‘allowing’ me to fork on very strict conditions.”
For transparency, here is the second version of the waiver sent to Denis, which Denis has also refused to sign due to the inclusion of a standard non-disparagement clause. However, the unfair and damaging portrayal of the #FreeDenis campaign along with the fact that Ms. Yu together with other former AIB workers created a fork of our product called Spellshape and passed off AiB’s work as their own to transfer goodwill makes it clear why non-disparagement clauses are needed.
AiB is not, as has been stated multiple times, “anti-open source” but as demonstrated by our words and actions, one of its greatest advocates. Core contributors should absolutely have the right to fork an open-source project, but there should also be a minimal expectation that former contributors do not attempt to sabotage the original product and unfairly transfer its goodwill by resorting to unethical means (such as disinformation and disparagement attack campaigns).
In spite of all the attempts to damage our reputation, AiB continues to work on providing Denis with an agreement containing terms that are acceptable to him.
The various disparaging and derogatory remarks made by Ms. Yu (and others acting with her) have substantially harmed:
- AiB’s reputation within the blockchain development industry and the Cosmos community by creating a false narrative regarding AiB’s policies and commitment to open source.
- AiB’s ability to develop its current business partnerships and foster new economic opportunities.
- AiB’s ability to recruit and retain talented software developers to be responsible for the support, maintenance, and innovation of AiB’s blockchain products. Most recently, we lost a talented candidate who rejected our offer to join our team due to Ms. Yu’s false and disparaging online statements.
The loss of goodwill in our industry due to the spreading of false allegations has real-world consequences. Disinformation actively harms our business and the facts that we have published here and throughout our filings prove this. AiB values the free flow of information; Cosmos can only thrive by promoting a culture of transparency, fairness, and mutual respect. The Proof of Stake protocol we rely on demands accountability for making wrongful statements. The same is true for our culture and identity to stay true and secure, rather than replicate the problems we originally sought to solve.
AiB remains deeply committed to open source. We value current and past contributors and strive to uphold relationships based on reciprocity and respect – even when our differences take us on alternative paths. Building open protocols for human liberation requires innovation in our code and in our contracts, with mutually beneficial agreements that go beyond standard terms. We believe the best way to achieve this is through constructive dialog between the two parties rather than disparagement and disinformation campaigns on public forums.
Thank you for reading.