Hello community,

Further to the entire upheaval that fireice has created here is a summary of events during the past month.

We hired fireice to create an ASIC resistant algo and to “buy” his ECC library code. Actually he did that by himself by offering to “sell” to us his library on our Github https://github.com/sumoprojects/sumokoin/issues/79 and by appearing on our telegram channel.

Upon hiring him he started acting strange, trying to use our community to attack Monero and saying strange things about some shady connections he had in public. Unfortunately we didn’t pay attention and continued to work with him. His first interest was to approach the mining community of the coin (as proved later he was planning to use their power over the chain in order to take over the coin), asked us for the key images of the premined wallets (which we happily offered, we wouldn’t do it if we had something to hide) and asked us for the GitHub password as insurance that he will get all the money he was asking for. We still had no doubt on his true motivation and gave him all.

Days were passing by and he was gathering info to attack the coin. He found out that the rest of developer names were not those he thought. We have a dev team in Hanoi to help developing the coin. They have all real names (Hoa, Tuan, Cuong — please don’t try to find out who they are because there are thousands of people there who have the same names and we don’t have intention to reveal any true identity). As they are rather limited at English communication (like most of devs there) I presented for them in public. Fireice found out that Sumoshi, Haruto and Bill were actually me in most of cases. He presented this in his first press release. However, he was OK with that fact when he worked with us and it was his idea to let them “retire” while he was going to have his own dev team (that never really happened).

Back to a month or so after we started the coin, community began questioning about the premined coins and we found that we should escrow most of them to avoid dumping. We started with a spreadsheet (download a copy here) with details what to lock into 7 wallets so that to release less than 15% of total circulating coin supply each year only. 7.8M (out of total 8.8M coins) would be sent to 7 wallets in locked transactions (1M left should’ve been held for PR, exchanges and all possible investments). As you may know, when you send coins, it takes the nearest possible amount larger than the amount of coins to be sent, splitting it to the number of coins you want to send and the rest (change) will return to original wallet. We didn’t aware that in a locked transaction, the change would be locked too, i.e. never came back to sending wallet until the lock released. With such mistake, we ended up to escrow coins in only 3 first wallets and assumed that all the coins would be back to the dev wallet in 2020.

Because all the wallet seeds are stored in offline, secured papers, we’d never restored them until fireice asked for key_images. We handed him them and explained about the mistake to avoid any misunderstanding. He took that, said nothing, and used his knowledge to attack the trustworthy of escrowed wallets later, as you all already knew, instead of informing us to correct information.

Then, upon admitting that he had trouble with the law and could be “lifted” some day (we are not in position to judge his innocence) we decided to reconsider our stance towards him, offering him 30% of the premine and asking him to develop any feature he had in mind on his own. He reverted by asking to bring a partner of his on board and that he also needed domain name access for extra insurance (obviously it was part of his big plan to take over the coin). We refused and paid him in total about 10K SUMOs which he gladly took, left the project and set in motion the takeover he was planning.

We don’t know what he is going to do, probably more attacks with all possible means he has, maybe with help of a pool owner and some old members (only about 10 out of 2800 members followed him now). But we will stay with original blockchain and keep all your funds secured.

We will continue to develop the coin as before. We would like to thank the community for the support and we will do our best to gain your trust back. I will be back to the job I love most: coding, after all of this drama being settled down. Here are some tasks we want to complete in the next few months:

Web wallet (by the end of June) Official Android wallet (by the end of August)

(FYI, Multisig wallet code is still under testing until it works reliably to release out)

P/S: We are still not really sure what to do with the 400k SUMO in change back to dev wallet (and unlocked along with the 600k in escrowed Wallet 1 at height# 153600). There are several options for the coins now:

Continuing put them to escrowed wallets as planned Airdropping them Burning them Using them to get more exchanges

So, we’ll need a community voting for final solution.

P/S 2: 100k change back to dev wallet in 2019 will be put into locked wallets, so will be all coins back in 2020, as planned at the original spreadsheet (Note: any coins left after locking into 7 first wallets will be escrowed in another wallet, Wallet 8, for another year). We’ll publish all information about the process and make sure no mistakes would happen.