Sergey Ivancheglo, one of the co-founders of the IOTA project and a former member of the IOTA Foundation board of directors, has confirmed that he has quit the project and crypto entirely. During an ask-me-anything (AMA) on the project’s Discord group, Ivancheglo, who goes by the name Come-from-Beyond within the community, confirmed that he had quit and sold his entire MIOTA holdings following a bust up in the summer that saw him leave his position with the IOTA Foundation.
Seeds Sown in June
Ivancheglo, who was responsible for announcing IOTA to the world in October 2015 through a Bitcointalk post, released the news on Twitter as well as through the AMA, stating that he wanted to work on other projects in the non-crypto space following more than four years helping build IOTA. In that time, the group has had some notable successes, in particular signing deals with Jaguar Land Rover and Bosch, as well as being accepted by WordPress. However, a divergence of opinion into the future of IOTA seems to have caused some friction recently, all of which came to a head in June this year when Ivancheglo quit his position on the the board of directors at the IOTA Foundation, stating at the time that, “I no longer believe that the IOTA Foundation is the best setting for me to realize what we set out to create back in 2014 and 2015.” This rift has apparently caused Ivanchelgo to consider not just his position at IOTA but in crypto in general, further adding that “my use of free speech has repeatedly been leveraged in unfair attacks against the IOTA Foundation, something I am very tired of.”
Today is my last day of working on cryptocurrencies. I don’t own personal cryptocoins anymore. My projects use #IOTA which is the best distributed registry technology to date.
— Come-from-Beyond (@c___f___b) November 7, 2019
When is a ‘Charlie Lee’ not a ‘Charlie Lee’?
Responses to the news compared Ivanchelgo to Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, who famously sold and donated all his Litecoin holdings in 2017 when the price was $320, just $80 off the all-time top, before the crypto bubble burst. This scenario is vastly different, however, given that IOTA is light years away from being at a tempting place to sell and Ivanchelgo is stepping away from the project entirely following a months-long public separation of views with the other driving forces behind the project. He will still continue to work on Qubic, a quorum-based computational protocol that utilizes IOTA, and Aigarth, an AI-software built on top of it.
