Cosmos Founder Rebuts Recent Allegations, Calls Work “Godly”

Founder of Cosmos, Jae Kwon, has hit back at Zaki Manian’s accusations that Kwon diverted resources and attention away from the development of the IBC protocol and towards Virgo, a side project that runs hand-in-hand with Cosmos. 

Zaki Manian resigned as Director of Tendermint Labs after his relationship with CEO Jae Kwon was impaired following prolonged discontent with the way the project was progressing.

In a Twitter thread from earlier this month, Manian accused Kwon of compromising development on the IBC Protocol to focus on a new side project called Virgo. Manian made a variety of accusations, including religious discrimination and behavioral side effects of running several personas.

I’m going to call this statement what it is, a huge lie.https://t.co/EYHtiwxBmr

What Jae is doing isn’t decentralization, it’s a transparent attempt to evade responsibility for Jae’s neglect and negligence to the Cosmos project.

— Zaki Manian (@zmanian) February 3, 2020

Kwon addressed these accusations on GitHub, claiming that Manian “said with scorn that he is God manifest.” Kwon’s eerie response and his obsession with divinity, as evidenced by the post, has been outlined as a cause for concern by several notable influences in the space.

Kwon noted: “When I was defending my right to express what faiths I have, I was told I was in fact repressing all of them (employees).”

Taking Manian’s thread and Kwon’s recent rebuttals, the heart of the issue seems to be with Kwon’s devotion to his faith and calling his work with Tendermint and Cosmos “godly.” 

Zaki Manian was given responsibility for the IBC Protocol, a proposition with which he was, claims Kwon. But the former Tendermint director threatened to quit the company and take the development team with him, as per sources close to Decrypt. 

Kwon also directed his ire at Tendermint’s director of security, Jessy Irwin, who has been a vocal critic of his methods. 

“This isn’t just about neglect of the project– the core engineers working on Tendermint, SDK + IBC have faced repeated episodes of retaliation, harassment, bullying, and discriminatory behavior. The abuse stems from the very top,” said Irwin, commenting on Manian’s accusations against Kwon.

Sunny Aggarwal, a core developer at Tendermint, made his stance on this situation public through social media:

“Jae (Kwon) has barely been involved with Cosmos development for a while now. Most of the dev team has taken necessary steps to isolate themselves from Jae’s distractions.”

Another interesting takeaway is Kwon’s claims that he is poised to step down as Tendermint CEO, in a move he described as “removing the CEO position” in a separate post. Manian deemed these to be “lies” in a move that Kwon describes as “distracting.”

Recent events and statements from those closely related to Cosmos and Tendermint seem to point towards Jae Kwon as the catalyst for recent obstacles.

Cosmos intends to become the central point for the advent of blockchains, acting as the main facilitator of interoperability between various blockchains.

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