Sirius Labs has posted a statement to their hackathon discord channel about their decision to change the payout structure of their hackathon. It reads a little bit like they didn’t really know what they were getting into when they decided do this and thought maybe that for $100 000 they would be able to in on the ground floor of something truly groundbreaking and revolutionary but also ready to go to market. I think that was a bit naïve, and that angel investment does not get a VC firm a finished product ready to start producing revenue. If that was their plan, and it sounds like it was, then they were doomed for fail from the beginning. Read it below for yourself.
They put a lot of the onus onto Chia Network, but from what I can tell by their statement they didn’t really know what they were getting in to. And I don’t think they know what they have done here. First, they had an opportunity to get into DFI on the ground floor, for cheap. I don’t think anyone else will get the same deal. Second, they ensured that no one will ever work with them again. You can’t trust this VC to provide funds they set aside, which is a real thing that happens to new companies and can be devastating.
Either way, I don’t think this clears anything up. I think they wasted theirs and everyone’s time. If they were to have strict requirements for various prize categories, those should have been shared ahead of time instead of the general guidelines we got. Also, and this is minor, I asked about comprehensive security reviews of the applicants, which I was told would be done by Certik. From what I can tell, a couple of Certik engineers were part of the judges panel but that’s not what I had asked. No security review is conducted by watching a PowerPoint presentation and I suspect the Certik engineers would not claim to have performed a security review of these tools.
