When Hodling Fails

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Koinos Group has officially gone out of business

Back in March I covered the story about Koinos. If you don't know anything about it, you can revisit that post. In short, former Steem devs created Koinos and the main group "Koinos Group" which has been responsible for chain development, strategy etc. is now officially out of business. Since I have been with the project for 5 years, it's a bit rough to know that the project hasn't worked out. Sure I lost money, but seeing 90% of the community and devs leave over the years hasn't been easy. Me and others are now left with a bag that is essentially worthless and the future is all but clear. Yes, Koinos in itself apparently isn't completely dead...

The community has now taken the chain into their own hands. The fate of Koinos rests in the hands of a half a dozen community devs and a couple of hundred hodlers it seems. Will that work out? I am highly skeptical. Hive was in a similar situation when Justin Sun attacked the chain. But Hive survived and thrived because we had a large community, community as well as core devs, the Hive fund and good listings. Koinos doesn't have any of that essentially. If there is a turn around, it will take years to play out. The other question is, why would anyone be interested in the chain? There isn't an ecosystem to speak of and moreover there isn't really a unique use case for the chain it seems.

The narrative of a "free to use chain" was flawed from the beginning and misleading. And now after 5 years there are also dozens of chains that are feeless or close to it. Having smart contracts on the main layer has also been rightfully questioned and it seems that this was a weakness rather than a strength.

I guess it was all an interesting experience. To see how a project was formed, how it was (not well) maintained and ultimately failed. To see the fake hype generated by the community and devs, to see the wrong decisions that were made and to see it all slowly ebb away. There wasn't a single point of failure, but rather the accumulation of many.

I guess the only thing that remains is to go down with my bag (I managed to sell around half), since selling now doesn't make sense and then there is always that 1% chance of a come back (probably more like .1%). This was one example when hodling actually failed - so be careful what bags you hold.

Here is the official post by the team:

Koinos community,

It has sadly come time for Koinos Group to begin winding down our operations. We have been working with the community to make this transition as smooth as possible. The launch of the Vortex bridge is a massive step forward for Koinos and demonstrates the resolve of the community to take their destiny in to their own hands. Parts of the transition are already underway with some more to come. Our market making agreement came to an end on the 13th. As such, we expect KOIN may be delisted on CEXs. This is the exact reason why Vortex is necessary. We are transferring domains and github ownership to the community to maintain the code base and websites. We are planning to bring down our nodes by the end of the month. If you are participating in the Koinos Group Fogata pool, please withdraw your VHP and move it to a new pool. We will keep our block producer running until the end of the month at which point the pool will stop receiving any returns.

Many people have asked about the Koinos Group tokens and what will happen to them. There are about 10 million KOIN/VHP that is not committed to anything. But due to the nature of our investment agreements, those tokens belong to our investors when Koinos Group is dissolved. It would be illegal for us to give them away to other entities. However, without getting into specifics, Koinos Group did incur taxable gains during our market making. In order to minimize our bill to the IRS, we may need to sell KOIN cheaply to offset those gains with losses. In that event, we will sell KOIN to prominent developers and community members at an extreme discount (a true going out of business sale). We will only sell this KOIN to prominent developers and community members who have demonstrated their resolve and promise to use these tokens for the growth and development of the Koinos ecosystem.
As many of you know, Michael and I are moving on to a new endeavor, but we still want to see Koinos succeed. We are rooting for you and are committed to doing everything we can to support the community during this time of transition.