To my partners: I am sorry

I have previously explained what happened here and have sorted out compensation here.

I am addressing this post to those I consider my partners: Reserve Protocol, Virtuals Protocol and Solana. But it is also for the community.

To them: I wanted to use this post to reiterate how deeply apologetic I am. I am ashamed about my decision making leading up to the events. If I could take back everything I did leading to these events, I would. But I can’t - and all I can do is make things right and do my best going forward.

My thank you to the community. I am grateful to the community who have been vocal about my subsequent transparency about the mistakes made, and compensation efforts. Thank you for recognizing my corrective actions, although I should not have put you in that situation in the first place.

But that is not enough. I realize my mistakes harmed others, including my partners. The community is concerned about me losing relationships with my partners. That is not what concerns me: If I lose the relationships because of my past actions, I understand and accept that. They say “to err is human, to forgive is divine”. But I am not looking for your forgiveness here, just some understanding and time & space for me to do my best.

I am still trying to build the best DeFAI platform out there. And I still hope to be able to collaborate and work with the teams in Reserve Protocol, Virtuals Protocol and Solana. I hope my actions going forward will do you proud.

I am not trying to justify the bad decisions I made, but I wanted you to understand how I ended up here & how I am making things right going forward. I had fair launched the original $DTF token on PdF. To try to make it work, I was always reliant on grants and donations. The truth is that I was always in the mode of “need to pump the token, so people can feel good and donate more to help the project grow”. I was always working with the team to develop and grow this product. And also very worried about getting funds to keep it all going.

I wanted the chance to carve out a proper budget for the platform, but without affecting the original holders of $DTF. I wanted to give them something for their loyalty (and I am still committed to rewarding them).

At this point, I want to single out a person who helped me a lot with funding and product guidance, but he has chosen to remain anonymous. However, I want to be clear to everyone about how this anonymous person helped me:

When I was running out of money to pay salaries, he stepped up. He sent me funds to help pay for this, no questions asked.

When I needed help to raise capital, he helped me put together the materials that helped me raise a runway of capital for product development.

When I needed help on product direction, he helped me with it. As background, I had first heard him speak at a conference and his thoughts on DeFAI infrastructure were what resonated with me. He wasn’t even aware about $DTF until January, when I reached out to discuss what we were building.

When I launched $FRNX and everyone got rugged by the KOL scammer, he still believed in me making this right and he loaned me funds to compensate my community with 120% on realized & unrealized losses.

However, when it came to marketing, it was something that he was uncomfortable with, as he was very infrastructure-focused. We had a few chats about this - difficult ones I must admit. He felt that because we had raised capital (and he would provide any additional capital needed), we didn’t need to do a token launch and instead just focus on building a product with early revenues. He felt strongly that since we had raised at a certain valuation, we needed more traction to justify any listing.

Together with the KOL manager-scammer, I chose to ignore this advice. Instead, I used the initial revenues we were generating as proof that we should push ahead. I used that as a justification to accept all of the KOL manager-scammer’s recommendations & actions. Of course now I know what the KOL manager-scammer was up to: He kept trying to push ahead so he could orchestrate do a pump & dump, he kept pushing me to get tweets from my partners that back my project. I will not shy away from the fact that my CTO and I also made mistakes here. I am sorry for that.

I really screwed up. I totally screwed things up.

I’ll be honest with you all. I was completely at a loss and my mind went blank as I tried to explain what had happened. Many of my initial ideas were misguided, because I had never faced a situation like this before. Fortunately, I had this anonymous supporter to turn to—someone who was absolutely instrumental in helping me set things right. I have since come to trust his judgment on everything.

Some examples:

We tried changing the tone of the messaging to be more corporate-speak. His reply: Straightforward honesty is better.

We were wondering about how to calculate compensation. His reply: Don’t quibble over small $, when the reputational impact is immeasurable. When we were wondering about how to calculate precisely, he is the one who said, “Just pay out at least 1 SOL to everyone who suffered a loss”. Yes, even some people who lost less than US$1 (1 dollar), you are getting 1 SOL in compensation. As it stands, we will end up paying out more than 1.2x in compensation (more than what we initially promised).

We just received some messages from platforms offering to promote & list us. His reply: Listings don’t help. Product development & revenues help.

I am confident and will keep BUILDING and will make sure we bounce back so not only he can be proud again, but also my community and partners.

He told me to focus on a few things, which is what I am doing now:

Transparency with the community over my mistakes and how I will fix them.

Execute a compensation plan that will, in the end, pay out more than 1.2x of all realized & unrealized losses.

Focus mainly on product development & revenues. Don’t be seduced by those promising marketing magic.

Follow through on token buybacks, staking and airdrop commitments.

UPDATE (12th March): The loan has now been fully repaid using funds from our treasury.

To my anonymous supporter: When everything went wrong, you could have walked away, you didn’t. I won’t ever forget that. I commit to you that if everything works out, you will have a share of the best DeFAI platform ever.

To my partners: I am truly sorry for what happened. I will be super-focused on product development going forward, and I still hope to work with your organizations in the days ahead & hope to BUILD great applications in the DeFAI space.

Thank you,

MemeIndexer

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