RChain Blues
Working on RChain was fun for a while, but I am no longer be comfortable with the RChain Cooperative's business practices.
I am inclined to keep my distance until I see
- quarterly financials on time ("no later than 20 days after the quarter ends" per IOB 1 from the 2018 annual meeting)
- the board carry out IOB 4 member participation in governance
- timely board agendas and minutes
- some details re Barcelona
- this open-source cooperative divest any significant interest in a proprietary audio codec license
The story of how RChain's CoinMarketCap rank fell from 30 to over 200 in 2018 would take more energy to tell than I have just now, but to emphasize why something as supposedly mundane as quarterly financial reports has me so uncomfortable...
I assumed since I got involved in Nov 2017 that any organization that had raised $30M from investors would have someone keeping books, so that producing a balance sheets or cashflow statements was a one-click task... I assumed that people were busy and they just hadn't bothered to click that button and share the results.
I should have known this was yet another case where the web reflects reality.
In the board meeting of July 23, 2018, when they decided to spend tens of millions of dollars on a proprietary audio codec, they did not know how much money the coop actually had, according to Meredith at the Oct 2018 annual meeting.
Some new board members were elected and tried to improve corporate governance, but one by one they reached a point of diminishing returns and moved on to other things.
After the April Barcelona incident, one member put it this way:
... it became near impossible to responsibly put one's reputation on the line for this project.
I attempted to steer member engagement in a useful direction in a Special Meeting 19A process; it was a long-shot and not much resulted from it, but I did manage to get over 100 members on record thanking those who had served on the board since the October annual meeting, trying to right the ship:
Whereas Barry Cynamon, Mark Pui, and Kevin Goldstein served with distinction on the RChain Cooperative board, let us thank them for their service.