By Sam Thapaliya
Compiled by: TechFlow
The purpose of this tweet is to set the record straight following a recent Coindesk article describing my early involvement with the Movement project.
Before Movement was founded, I met with Cooper offline at Vanderbilt and proposed incubating a project based on Move, which eventually led to the creation of Satay, a yield aggregator that I funded and helped get off the ground.
When Cooper moved on to found MVMT Labs (before Rushi joined the team), he relied on me for advice and help on everything from fundraising to token economics to emotional support. I worked closely with Cooper to get the Movement project off the ground.
When Rushi joined Movement and took charge of the technical team, the vision for the project began to really take shape. I gradually stepped back from my role as a close advisor to Cooper to focus primarily on Go-to-Market (GTM) efforts. This led to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) issued by @vannacharma, which was negotiated and signed by Cooper. As the project approached the Token Generation Event (TGE), I once again worked closely with Cooper, particularly advising him on the upcoming airdrop proposal.
Cooper tasked me with finding a data science team to audit the airdrop dataset based on testnet usage, as the Movement team realized that the dataset they were relying on did not even accurately reflect actual testnet usage.
Due to the numerous issues with the dataset, I suggested to Cooper that the rewards be split equally among all airdrop participants. However, during this time, Cooper insisted that a specific set of 75,000 wallets receive the highest percentage of tokens per wallet.
You can find these wallets at https://move-token-tracker.vercel.app and observe their distribution. These wallets are almost the only ones that successfully claimed and bundled over 60 million $MOVE, which happened during the Move token airdrop on December 9. From the heat map below, you can see how these wallets were bundled and quickly sold after claiming the airdrop:
During the claiming process, when we realized the problem with these 75,000 wallets, I again suggested to spread the rewards evenly to reduce the impact of Sybil attack (fake account) bundling and dumping. However, Cooper chose to increase the claiming fee, which resulted in almost no other users being able to claim the airdrop rewards except for these 75,000 wallets.
After the airdrop had already begun, Cooper adjusted the claiming fees, but he did not increase the claiming fees for the 75,000 "core-galxe" wallets accordingly to control the impact of Sybil behavior.
When users were unable to claim the airdrop because the claim fee was higher than the airdrop amount, this caused most users to choose to postpone and wait to claim the airdrop on the fee-free L2.
The problem is that L2 did not go live within 30 days as planned, leaving many users in trouble.
The narrative currently circulating is false. Cooper asked me for help nearly three years ago, and I invested a great deal of energy and time in helping Cooper, Rushi, and the team make MVMT a success. In return, I was publicly attacked and lost many opportunities and social capital.
Over the past three years, I have invested a great deal of time and effort in helping MVMT get off the ground. As of now, I have not received any compensation, and MVMT clearly has no intention of honoring the agreement to pay me the token rewards I deserve.
