On September 25th, Kristy-Leigh Minehan, the author of ProgPOW, has resigned as CTO of Core Scientific to avoid any potential conflict of interest.

Minehan stated that she believes ProgPoW is crucial for ETH when transitioning to ETH 2.0, and she must avoid any professional associations.

“Today, I announce that I have stepped down as CTO of Core Scientific. I believe that ProgPoW is of such importance to ETH’s transition to ETH 2.0 that I felt removing any potential conflict or professional associations was important.”

The Core Reason of Minehan Resignation from Core Scientific

Programmatic Proof Of Work (ProgPoW) is an upgrade program extended on the current Ethereum algorithm Ethash.

It is designed to minimize centralization by increasing the competitive edge of graphics cards. This is intended to increase the efficiency of GPU mining.

Since Core Scientific is involved in several brokerage GPU partnerships, the community believed that Minehan’s position in the company compromises her best interest for ETH.

However, Minehan has stressed her intentions that she is focused on ensuring the ProgPoW gets implemented on Ethereum and thanks Core Scientific for accepting her decision.

“I look forward to helping the community find answers to the questions raised around ProgPoW, and I am extremely thankful to the amazing team at Core Scientific for being supportive of my decision.”

Chief Administrative Officer of Core Scientific, Matthew Bishop, commented about Minehan’s departure stating that the decision is from her own due diligence and she had planned to “fully dedicate herself to ProgPow.”

Gordian Knot Surrounding ProgPoW Implementation

ProgPoW has only been tentatively accepted for the second phase of Istanbul hard fork. Through all that mist of hesitance to accept the program, hardware and software audits have weighed in their opinion on the agenda.

ETC Cooperative Executive Director, Bob Summerwill, believes that the whole ProgPoW proposal should be discarded.

“Given [Minehan’s] public and Core Scientific associations and complete lack of discernment about those associations, it just looks very risky to me.”

The team working on the ProgPoW project, which they have named it IfDefElse, comprises of 40-odd developers who are anonymous. These developers have not signed contributor licensing agreements which, according to Summerwill, are “necessary to protect Ethereum from potential future lawsuits for unrevealed patent claims, trademarks or copyright claims.”