To me, this seems to be the biggest mis-step by the team; focusing on some anonymous partners while ignoring community developers.
I’ve heard Bux say a couple of times that the growing network will need data from big players in order to provide sufficient demand for network growth, which I don’t agree with.
I expect a healthy ecosystem of apps among a keen community that grows organically could pretty quickly accelerate and become substantially bigger than anything a few partners will contribute. A fun ecosystem of innovative distributed apps would also have many beta participants telling others how cool this new network is, leading to rapidly expanding reach.
But while I think this is / has been a mis-step, I hope & expect that it will change with the developer program that Jim will be leading.
Also, it may have been necessary to delay a big focus on community development etc while the number 1 priority of the team was getting the basic network functioning at a larger scale, and letting the API to mature sufficiently. If this is the case, it may be more of a communication issue than a mis-step.
We’ll see how it plays out, but I hope your view that the team is losing focus on making the network ‘for everyone’ is proved wrong.
Regarding ERC20, I don’t see it as a betrayal of any core principles, but do see the network as hobbled / incomplete ahead of the native token being up and running.
I guess we’ll see in time if you’re right or overly negative / suspicious… and I certainly hope your suspicions are not well founded & the Native token becomes a core focus once the network with ERC is up and running (or even before!).
Your efforts over the years have been amazing, and it’s a shame to see you stepping back. I hope a time comes when things become clearer & you feel everything is aligned for you to engage again.
