Open in app Shared Stake 2 Followers About The SharedStake Story by Kairos Shared Stake 1 day ago · 6 min read (Hopefully Part 1/1) UPDATE: Added some conversations with Ice Bear as proof of my claims w.r.t. Chimera’s behavior and our working relationship with him I met my co-founder, Chimera, at an Ethereum hackathon in Canada several years ago. I met Ice Bear by sifting through a stack of resumes to find the only person who could solve my favorite interview question. I previously worked as the CTO of a blockchain startup which was trying to pivot into DeFi. There, I hired Ice Bear as a frontend engineer, and although he was more of a data scientist, he was able to pickup Vue.js in a matter of 2 days and make his first PR within the week. I hired Chimera as a part-time contractor, partly out of sympathy to help him pay his medical bills after he broke his teeth from a Xanax-fueled accident. He joined me as the second Solidity engineer on the team. For both Ice Bear and Chimera, this was their first job in crypto. Together, we anonymously launched another DeFi protocol in 2020. Later that year, I started working on an idea that Chimera had for what would later become SharedStake, an idea we initially thought would be worthless but fun to work on, since there were already many planned ETH2 staking pools. We initially called it SharedDeposit. What would later become vETH2 was initially named BETH, short for Beacon Chain ETH. When I launched the SGT token with Ice Bear (since Chimera was off on an island somewhere with bad internet), Chimera accused me of trying to power grab and insisted I transfer half the token supply to him, which I gladly did. When our multi-signature wallet was created, we had both agreed to transfer 95% of the tokens held in our deployer address to the multi-signature wallet, for better decentralization of power. While I almost immediately complied with this, Chimera NEVER transferred his tokens to this wallet and thus began shifting the balance of control over the protocol towards him. In fact, he continued to force me into scenarios in which I would have to spend tokens and ETH from my deployer address while he fought to retain as much as he could in his own deployer wallet. “Lol you think I’ll rug pull my own project?” Chimera continued to consolidate his power grab over the protocol when he created the vesting contracts for all three cofounders to vest their tokens over a 2 year period. Since the owner of the vesting contract has the ability to change the recipient of the vesting shares, we all agreed that the ownership of the vesting contracts should be transferred to the multi-sig wallet controlled by myself, Ice Bear, and Chimera. Chimera NEVER complied. This compounded the mistrust both Ice Bear and I had in him since close to the beginning. Furthermore, he asked me for many personal favors — $7500 for his legal fees, a small BTC loan, and allowing him to sublet my apartment for $100/night. For some of these he promised to finally give up ownership of the above to the multi-sig wallet, but again he RENEGED on his promises and continued to retain outsized control over the protocol. In fact, he never even paid back his personal debts to me. Essentially, he could revoke the tokens of any team member at any time and put all the funds in his wallet. Not to mention, he controlled the ETH2 validators which hold ~$30 million dollars of Ether. A few days ago, Ice Bear and I spoke over the phone to discuss our concerns around the increased centralization of power held by Chimera, especially since he continued to break our trust. This was especially concerning as he had recently withdrawn 106 ETH from protocol “admin fees” (over $250,000) at the time and kept it in his personal wallet, instead of sending it to the multi-sig wallet or splitting it amongst the co- founders. He began spending the money, and refused to send it to the multi-sig wallet, claiming it was his to spend and that we had never agreed on any sort of split. He claimed later it was for “infra costs” but I know for a fact our infra did not cost more than around $1000 a month. So, Ice Bear and I decided to take advantage of a vulnerability in our vesting contracts to make sure that if Chimera turned rogue and decided to revoke our vesting tokens as leverage over us or for the purpose of putting them in his own wallet, we had a “backdoor” through which we could take back the tokens which were rightfully ours. N.B. K here refers to Chimera’s IRL name, not Kairos In light of Chimera’s past actions, it’s not hard to see why we did this since he had lost all trust and good will. Chimera asked me recently to start doing all reimbursements before we add more people to the multi-sig and so I complied, reimbursing myself for some expenses including but not limited to: smart contract deployments, website and G suite costs, some GCP costs for the month Chime’s card declined, and clothes/banners/stickers/transportation for the event we had sponsored for SharedStake. He called me later to dispute this transaction and we got into a verbal argument. At approximately 1:30am ET, I looked on Etherscan and I saw that Chimera had broken the Timelock contract which was supposed to have locked up 4 million SGT for 2 years, and had transferred the funds to his personal wallet. I feared for what might happen next. Sure enough, I saw him transfer ownership of the other team members’ vesting contracts to himself. If his beef was with me, why revoke Ice Bear’s vesting shares too? and if the transactions were for legitimate purposes, why not inform us before executing them? It was all very suspicious, and so I frontran Chimera’s attempt to revoke my shares, and sold a percentage on the market, about 90,000 SGT — the rationale being that if he was about to dump 4,000,000 SGT on the market, everything I had worked for until now would be rendered completely useless, and that I had to get out with what I could. I also immediately informed Ice Bear so that he could do the same. The 90,000 unvested SGT have since been returned to the DAO via Ice Bear. It’s important to note that while I only sold tokens allocated to myself as the founder, Chimera not only sold 20% of the entire circulating supply (not HIS tokens), but he also exploited the Saddle pool, causing heavy losses to vETH2 holders. SGT was always a speculative governance token, but vETH2 was not supposed to break peg like this and its holders never signed up for this kind of price volatility. They are the real victims, not me or Ice Bear. About Help Legal Get the Medium app
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