Dear Juno Community
As for Stakedrop Remediation for GAME/CCN/Debo (hereinafter referred to as “Burn Prop”), discussions are being held to burn our assets while missing the points to be considered. In this statement, we would like to summarize the information necessary for all Juno community members to make a factually accurate decision and share our assertion of what we think about it.
- Summary of Burn Prop
- Missed points about Burn Prop
- About Whale Drop Compromise
- Conclusion
- Juno started to be developed with the core team's philosophy of creating a community-driven smart contract platform without authority centralization.
- Stakedrop was implemented based on that philosophy.
- Exchange was not eligible for the stakedrop
- CCN has CEX-like characteristics and should have been excluded from the stakedrop.
- All Juno CCN holds should be confiscated because they were sent against the original philosophy.
- The lack of a constitution to realize the philosophy of Juno and the core team
- Criteria of the stakedrop
- Is Juno Whale an exchange?
- Is it possible to confiscate the asset from entities that are not in line with Juno's original philosophy?
- Has the survey of not eligible validators for the stakedrop been conducted?
- Who is responsible for Stakedrop's mistakes? Who should be responsible for eliminating the disadvantages caused thereby?
- Is it the truth that they just want to confiscate the whale's assets by making up a convincing reason?
- Is "Code is Law" or "Governance" absolute?
- Are we a harmful entity for the community?
Juno's philosophy is stated in this medium as follows.
Juno aims to provide a sandbox environment for the deployment of such interoperable smart contracts. The network serves as a decentralized, permission-less & censorship-resistant avenue for developers to efficiently and securely launch application-specific smart contracts
In order to realize this philosophy, it is essential to have some clear and reasonable mechanisms and rules in place, and the core team is necessary and responsible to prevent the community from becoming chaotic without clear mechanisms and criteria for decision making. However, the current state of the Juno community is disorderly and chaotic without criteria for decision-making and factual information. A more rational and reliable policy or rule on which to make decisions are required.
We have put a draft proposal on the need to create an official constitution as the first step for the Core team to take in such a situation.
If you are interested, please refer to Create an official constitution including the vision of the Core-1 team.
Based on the philosophy above, stakedrop is on two conditions: 1)Set up a whale cap which limits to 50,000 Juno per address, 2)Exclude the address of the Validator operated by the exchange and the address delegated to it.
In Prop 16, it was alleged that Juno Whale had gamed on stakedrop and violated the rule of "up to 50000 Junos per person and entity". But now, these allegations were found wrong.
At least there are no objective facts to suggest that we have cheated. Also it turned out that someone who manages Juno’s official Medium has rewritten the expression “per address” to “per person and entity” when Prop16 has come out.
In Burn Prop, Prop 16’s logic was considered weak to confiscate Juno Whale assets and was changed to "Juno Whale is classified as an exchange".
So, in general, is Juno Whale an Exchange?
Generally speaking, they are buyers and sellers in Exchange, and they trade with their desired price. A transaction is closed when it matches their demands, and the Exchange takes a commission from it to make a profit.
What kind of service was Juno Whale’s CCN?
CCN service doesn’t have sellers in the customers but only buyers. Clients buy voting power (VP) for staking but not ATOM. This VP cannot be withdrawn as ATOM until a predetermined lock period has expired. CCN also holds regular study sessions to allow clients to learn about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cosmos from the issues of centralized finance.
The link below includes the photos of the meetups we held. We have held more than 500 meetups in a year. Sometimes it was held two or three times a day.
Through study materials published in our service, CCN have shared important concepts in the crypto world with clients who are non-crypto users and help them eventually manage everything on their own.
Besides, we always recommend to the participants of meetups who know well about cryptos to purchase ATOM by themselves in Exchange for staking.
We stopped taking new clients in September 2021 because an exchange in Japan started listing $ATOM and people in Japan can buy ATOM through the exchange. Also the lock period ended in December of the same year, and now 95% of client assets are managed by the clients themselves.
This is not an “Exchange” that you call.
We are not an Exchange, and our service is fundamentally different from the Exchanges that aim to trade. None of our clients would have thought of us as an Exchange. This is because our service is far from it.
It is correct to say we are close to the custody entity, as it has been doing such work for clients.
So was the custody entity on the stakedrop exclusion criteria list? In our research, we couldn’t find any defined specification like that in the materials before the stakedrop was published.
So obviously, we differ from a traditional Exchange in many respects (clients buy voting power and can't sell), and have not violated the original stakedrop conditions.
The majority of Juno community claims that the assets should be confiscated from Juno Whale because of the violation of “Juno’s original philosophy,” even though it was not stated to target the custody entity at the beginning.
We don’t think judging anything by ambiguous criteria is correct. If we allow their claims, they may punish any unwilling existence by the unclear basis of “going against the philosophy.”
It is clear that the power is centralized on Wolfcontract and the core team, who have an influential voice in the community. Prop16 has passed by the majority, even if the allegation differed from their facts. It is contrary to the original philosophy of preventing the concentration of power.
Blockchain was designed originally by the philosophy of protecting the wealth to be plundered by those in power. This means Wolfcontract or the core team should also be considered one of the concerned powers because of its influence.
Setting a precedent of asset confiscation could continue to pose a potential fear for the future development and close its prospects of Juno’s community.
The precedent of confiscation will discourage VCs, Exchanges, custody services, and individuals with large assets from entering Juno’s ecosystem.
Therefore, we must set multiple processes and make it more carefully to judge such a severe problem.
If the argument is that Juno Whale is like Exchange, and that confiscating our assets is a justified action because it goes against the community's philosophy, then don't we need to make sure that there are no other entities like us in the first place?
Just to our confirmation, there are funds and venture capital-like entities present in the CosmosHub Validator on 2/18/2021. There were numerous other exchanges besides Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Huobi, Coinone, and OkEx where $ATOM could be traded.
Stakedrop's condition was to "exclude addresses of Validators operated by exchanges and addresses that delegate to them," so exchanges that do not operate validators and centralized custodial services that do not operate validators are not excluded. They are not disqualified from Stakedrop simply because they did not operate a validator.
More strictly speaking, if we follow the condition of "exclusion of addresses of Validators operated by exchanges and addresses that delegate to them," could not addresses that delegated to GAME or DEBO also be subject to asset forfeiture?
Why is this discussion not being made and only Juno Whale is being excluded?
Is it the truth that they just want to confiscate the whale's assets by making up a convincing reason?
Prop16 contains such sentences below:
Risks of doing nothing
- High risk to on-chain governance (already has half of the quorum)
- Potential of buying validators with delegations in order to bribe them >away from acting
- Whale gamer can single-handedly wipe out the entire DEX liquidity in 10 >min or less (Should his funds be unbonded)
- Fear in the community on a daily basis
Additionally, Wolfcontract has repeatedly insisted on Twitter to community members that “there is a risk that the whale can significantly drop the Juno price” and “the whale have actually done so.”
We believed that the true intention was they just wanted to confiscate the whale’s assets by any means. This is clear that they have changed the reason and submitted a new Prop to confiscate our assets after they understand Prop16 will cause other problems.
Can these behaviors be justified? Is Juno a place where people can confiscate others’ assets for arbitrary reasons?
If the proposal “Stakedrop Remediation for GAME/CCN/Debo” is really about adhering to the philosophy and restoring fairness of the stakedrop, rather than judging an entity the community doesn't like, shouldn't they consider other entities as well?
There are other entities who got Juno stakedrop against its fairness. Did the community investigate them well also?
Who is responsible for Stakedrop's mistakes? Who should be responsible for eliminating the disadvantages caused thereby?
In the first place, we think that this series of problems occurred because of the inadequate investigation by the core team to exclude entities that are not in line with their philosophy and unclear rules that should have been defined in advance.
Suppose some have suffered from disadvantages due to the mistakes and actions of the core team. Shouldn't the core team be responsible for reasonably eliminating those disadvantages?
Currently, there is an unreasonable argument that we are responsible even though we never receive the stakedrop fraudulently. We just managed our addresses in a decentralized manner from a security standpoint and at least meet all the criteria that are publicly announced. Again, is it really the right thing to do, such as the way they've repeatedly made untrue claims and unfairly defamed us in order to confiscate our assets? At least until now, there has been no apology from them for their wrongdoings.
Takumi Asano is still being accused by many people every day as the one who has been deceiving people though CCN. But the core team has not done anything to take responsibility for their misinformation and to restore our honor at least until now.
“Code is Law” is the most fundamental law for maintaining order in cyberspace, advocated by Lawrence Lessig. He advocated it because of the disorder of cyberspace. That is an ideology valuing a virtue in cyberspace that all speech and ideas couldn’t be censored, free from all regulations. But a lawless disorder environment promotes radical thoughts and violent remarks, and prevents secure commercial transactions. At this point, he thought he could solve the problems by forming orders in cyberspace in a programmable way. That is “Code is Law”
It is the responsibility of the developer of the incomplete code to execute it in cyberspace if it causes a problem.
Traditionally, blockchain has been developed by those who specifically support the idea. Especially in Proof of Work, codes and protocols are considered absolute and designed to provide incentives to prevent their state from being changed.
The Proof of Stake protocol, on the other hand, could be highly influenced by the community, as the governance is also part of the code. In short, codes and protocols are not absolute in PoS, but they require more prudence and completeness in its governance.
The precedent that facile governance can easily rewrite the state of the blockchain can disrupt the chain itself.
To avoid this problem and conduct governance properly, we believe it is necessary to establish a constitution that will serve as a standard for community members to make decisions.
Therefore, we have submitted the draft proposal to the community to define it clearly.
However, our sincere proposal was assumed to be a stalling tactic of the bad guys, and to date, almost no discussion has occurred. Without establishing a constitution, rules, etc., a reckless attempt is being made to burn emotionally anyway. We do not believe that this current situation is orderly at all; is Juno really under an orderly governance? Or is it simply under lawless governance?
Many Junonauts have blamed us every day because Wolfcontract regarded us as villains regarding Prop16. However, most of the arguments to blame us are based on untrue facts. We have published the article twice and repeatedly stated that it was wrong. However, misunderstanding still considerably remains because our impact on the community is less compared to Wolfcontract.
We would like to ask the Juno community again to re-realize who we are.
“Are we really a harmful entity for the community?”
Indeed, we have sold a little of our Juno so far.
Precisely, during 162 days, from October 1, 2021, the mainnet launch, to March 11, 2022, the submission of Prop16, we sold $6.5M and provided $2M of Juno-ATOM Liquidity by request of WolfContract. Averagely, we sold about $0.05M per day.
If you only look at the number, it’s maybe not small. But, if you calculate it based on all Juno we manage, which is $100M in the past price when the Prop16 was submitted, the daily selling amount is only about 0.05% of what we own.
If you currently own $10,000 JUNO and only sell $5 JUNO per day, do you think it is overselling?
We are willing to support the project in the long run; we didn’t sell most of the assets and even re-staked half of the staking rewards.
Considering the general risk, the price may go down 1/3 or 1/10 after a month; And we also may have encountered situations like Prop4 or Prop16 in which the assets would be confiscated.
If we didn’t think about Juno and just tried to maximize our profits, we could have quickly sold all of our Juno to the market a long time ago.
Some of the stakedrop receivers would have sold all the Juno immediately without thinking of the market.
However, we didn’t sell most of our JUNO and didn’t take any destructive dump actions to destroy the market.
There was a day like January 8, 2021, when we sold a little bigger amount. But we provided Junoswap with more liquidity than the selling. While we know nothing about what rewards will be distributed from Junoswap, we spent $2 million for it to boost the Juno community.
From the mainnet launch to the present, why has the price continuously risen even though we sold?
If we didn’t care about the liquidity, would it be the price like the present?
In addition to our consideration not to destroy the Juno market without dumping, we voted “Abstain” on Prop4 and Prop16 to maintain neutrality.
https://www.mintscan.io/juno/txs/9F0A14D49288C0B6B97F73920DFF6676C0A5F7A17AAFEB8BCFB76D6AC6295F3D
https://www.mintscan.io/juno/txs/BC2DDD77054B64234CCA86E4347269924BCE717D637C1B651FA5AAF7567B6199
Furthermore, considering the long-term development of Juno, we insist that what Juno needs now is a positive and clear philosophy and rules, and we’ve proposed to establish the constitution.
Why would we do it if we did not think about Juno at all?
Please calm down and think carefully about what we did. Have we ever acted hostile?
We are not the enemy of Juno. We, as long as, like all of you, are members of Junonauts, who look forward to Juno’s prosperity for the long term.
We are presenting a draft proposal below that addresses the community's concerns. We will not go into the details of the proposal, but we believe that it is a more realistic proposal that will benefit everyone involved in the Juno community, rather than a burn solution that will undermine the immutability of the blockchain and cause significant negative consequences in the future. We hope that you will take a neutral look at our proposal and make a rational judgment about our claims. Here is the starting point of the discussion.
We have made statements twice in the form of an article like this.
However, those statements were never introduced by Wolfcontract or the core team, who should be neutral. Instead, the information was desperately spread by the validators and some community members who sympathized with our thoughts, but it still could not be delivered to everyone in the community. Thus Prop16 was passed with “YES” based on the misinformation.
This means the existence of Wolfcontract and the core team in the community is absolute for now.
Fortunately, Prop16 was a signal proposal and didn’t force the upgrade. It didn’t make changes to the chain immediately.
However, Burn Prop this time is different. Again, they are trying to eliminate us by using the vague “philosophy” to define us as we are an exchange.
This is such a hasty proposal that could indeed prevent Juno’s long-term development.
The problems with Prop16 and Burn Prop revealed the sloppiness of Wolfcontract and the core team rather than the whale itself. Therefore, we would like to ask all community members to calm down once again, believe nothing, validate the evidence based on the fact by themselves and make a decision.
Also, we would like to ask for your help so that more people can read this article. It doesn’t mean we ask you to vote NO or NO WITH VETO without any thought, but we would like more people to see what the truth is and examine the problem properly.
In the end, we would like to thank all those who support our activities. Thank you.