I have stepped back for a bit, and I’m currently exploring Kadena as the most promising alternative so far. Early days.
I would say that the structural problems I noted in my last post on this are still there. The security issues, the node centralisation, the environmental haphazardness, the constraints on scalability, the conflict of interest and commercial loopholes at the top, the several more vectors of sytemic centralisation, the political distortions of voting power distributions and following protocols. The inflationary pressures and diving value pose a more serious threat IMO than the bare numbers imply (Community Proposal: Assessing node inflation based on token price - #25 by bjoernek), precisely because of the huge vulnerability of ICP to insider manipulation, where the people that lose are the same boutique investors who lost to market manipulation at the beginning.
At least it’s not just me saying this now, and the community seems less inclined to pushback than when I made the point that the evidence for early market manipulation to the benefit of Dfinity around genesis.
Where there have been development is on the legal side. The case against Dfinity was torpedoed by the exposure of unethical (not certain if illegal) and definitely dishonest shenanigans by opposing counsel. It turns out, as many here suspected and argued to me (from faith more than evidence) that there was a nefarious, compromised agenda behind the lawsuits for defrauding investors.
Ava Labs, a rival crypto basically colluded with a crypto-focused litigation lawyer (Roche) to sue its competitors at one remove. The goal was not necessarily to win the lawsuits, which was a bonus, but to expose commercially sensitive competitor secrets via legal discovery, which the shadow crypto partner could exploit. Dfinity managed to secure a leaked audio of Roche boasting about this, and the law firm leading the law suit on behalf of the early ICP investors alleged to have been swindled by Dfinity and a couple of VCs, immediately dropped out (September). The hearing on Dfinity’s Motion to Dismiss, which contains its defence and explanations, was postponed.
Alas, this says nothing about the actual victims in all this, or at least the claimants, who were exploited by Dfinity’s competitors weaponising their grievances. They have been left without legal representation, but not because the accusations were found to lack evidence or grounds. As I said in my posts, and people are realising more and more, the data to conclude a) market manipulation, and b) Definity insider benefits, is not from an article or a lawsuit, but from all the publicly available numbers that any reader here can verify without intermediaries.
In fact you can now read Dfinity and Williams’ defence.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/60120124/62/valenti-v-dfinity-usa-research-llc/
And for all the true believers… it’s not good. Far from providing evidence against early insider trading, they base their defence on the fact that even if true, the case is not prosecutable on the basis of the prosecution’s strategy.
“even if the allegations in the Complaint are taken as true, it fails to state a claim under Sections
22 12(a)(1) or 15 of the Securities Act”.
The document, in an equally legalistic way, says Williams himself did not sell tokens then. But it acknowledges that right when everyone was locked in, the earliest investors and ex-employees could buy and sell freely at peak prices. The fact that this money could still find its way to other pockets, including Williams, is not addressed. Remarkably, in their motion to dismiss they cite a speculative article that likewise makes the point of privileged training by a few at the start.
Their point is that what happened may not have been fair, may not have been honest, but, it might not be prosecutable under the law as a class action lawsuit. If they win this lawsuit, it won’t be because they have been absolved from the charge of insider manipulation and profit, but simply because such manipulation and profit is not covered by a specific securities law.
The reason why they haven’t mounted a stronger defence or denial, is because it’s the nature of distributed ledgers to make flows transparent, so there’s no hiding or questioning the clearly unethical facts. Whether they are prosecutable or not.
And the same people at the top then, are largely at the top now.