Resignation notice from Ben Perez and Dermot O’Riordan as directors of PNF

Announcements Foundation
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After a hell of a journey over the last twenty months of planning, onboarding, and leading the foundation, we, Ben Perez and Dermot O’Riordan, made the difficult decision to resign as directors earlier today. Separately, @JackALaing resigned yesterday as a director.

We understand that this news may come as a surprise to many in the community. We have always been transparent and open with you all — and we intend to maintain those principles now. Here’s the context.

Over the last few days, we have learned that Grove, the founding team behind the protocol and the largest gateway, has immediate plans to submit a major proposal to the DAO to structurally recentralise the project under its direct control. Grove’s leadership team has made it clear that they intend to pursue this path and that they have the support of a number of other key stakeholders. As you all can appreciate, this introduces a significant risk of forking the project and undermining its overarching goals.

This path of re-centralisation is at odds with our strategy to grow through the community and as such our stewardship of the foundation, and this values-based approach, is to end.

In November 2022, we set out a bold vision for PNF: “to evolve the Foundation into a more active entity that will support and coordinate a fair ecosystem for all Pocket stakeholders, with the ultimate aim to provide the DAO with the resources it needs to unlock its true potential.” We believe we have advanced this vision and delivered measurable impact for POKT Network. We are grateful for the trust and support that all of you have shown us. On a personal level, it is frustrating for things to end this way. We love this community, and we have put a lot of ourselves into this project.

Now, with no mandate to lead the foundation, our roles shift from leaders to temporary caretakers. As a result, it is time for the DAO to coordinate around who they want to lead the foundation next, and how they want them to do this. We are on hand to help with any transition and to support as needed through this next period.

To help ease the transition, we have appointed @shane as a temporary director, given that his current role straddles both the protocol team and the foundation and he has assurances from Grove that he will be retained in the future. He will be legally responsible for taking actions in the best interests of the Pocket Network Foundation and the project as a whole.

So long, and thanks for all the fish. We return to join you, our community.

@b3n and @Dermot

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Thanks for your contributions over a difficult period.

@Dermot can you give us your thoughts on how the negotiations with Tier 1 CEXs will be transitioned over? I assume you were leading this initiative, and had been building the personal relationships to do so.

Given how mission critical this is for all our bags, a clear path to a strong transition and confidence in a T1 listing shortly post Shannon will be appreciated by all.

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It’s really sad to see you go, I personally think that many of your long term objectives were correct and also that you managed to pull some successful changes in the ecosystem.
To name a few, the Sockets and retroPFG were nice additions, not perfect, but I think in the right direction. Also your proposals for the new voting system was a very interesting system that captured many of the community desires (as random as they can be).

While I don’t think that PNF was flawless (you have heard my complains many times), I would not consider you as a failure. I have seen growth in your skills at managing the foundation and I would have loved to see what the end result would have been.
Mostly I have always regarded you as transparent and open.

Sadly the only metric that the crypto space seems to notice is price, and measured by it we are failing. Price cannot be logically “pumped” in the current state of the POKT Network (namely relays volume) and what is left for us is to play a game that cannot be played by something as slow as a DAO.
So, in reality what I see failing and actually leaving right now is the DAO.

Best of luck and I hope you stay in the community!

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Sad to see it get to this end…

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Hey @Dermot and @b3n ,

It is undoubtedly disappointing to see you both resign. The Foundation faced the challenge of managing an underwhelming treasury alongside high expectations from the community at the start of the Foundation. Despite this, the team achieved remarkable deliverables such as wPOKT, RetroPGF, Sockets, and Gatewayverse with Nodies. While there were arguably some wrong decisions, they should not overshadow the incredible accomplishments that were made.

Next steps to help move forward: What does the current Q2 budget/accounting look like for PNF? Does anyone have a rough estimation of it?

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Thank You

I echo the appreciation voiced by others in this thread. After a lot of trial and error, PNF created ingenious and workable ways to encourage community contributions: Quick Grants and RFPs (formerly Sockets and POPs), Bounties, and Maintainer Roles. Whoever takes the reins of PNF should preserve and iterate on these mechanisms, as they are essential for incentivizing meaningful contributions to our network and for growing our community.

The proposed changes to our voting system (CREDS) may be shelved for now, but no one can deny their innovativeness or that they contain significant and necessary improvements.

I truly hope that Dermot, Jack and Ben remain active in the DAO. Pocket can only benefit from their skills and talent.

Who’s in Charge of What

Now that you have resigned, what caretaker powers, if any, do you exercise? Can you dispense DAO funds needed to cover completed work that was previously approved by the DAO - just as you’re disbursing the retro PGF grants? Or has that role shifted to Shane?

What are the exact terms of Shane’s appointment as temporary director? At what point does that appointment expire? Can you please publish the decision empowering him, if there is one?

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