Clearing the air and moving onwards

Feb 5, 2022

Aloha Samurais,

the last 24 hours have been truly eventful and it was more than refreshing to reconnect with the community and observe the overwhelming responses and support. We have tried to stay largely passive in nurturing the community sentiment, as we wanted to ensure that the Discord vote is an accurate reflection and true resemblance of the community and its desire.

We are thrilled to see that the community has overwhelmingly voted in favour of proceeding and taking things further with Samurai. However, before we cover the exciting journey ahead of us and mention the things awaiting the Samurai protocol, it is necessary to first address some recently introduced misconceptions and FUD concerning the protocol and our involvement.

Our discovery and excitement of the blockchain space led to us going ahead and trying to make a project of our own. That is when we have encountered RING. A seemingly popular project in the crypto community at the time surrounded by extensive hype and excitement. The architecture and codebase of the protocol appeared to be considerably simpler to what we have executed in our contractual work and thus we wanted to see and test our competence.

That is when we launched Samurai. We truly never expected Samurai to become the overnight success that it became. We never expected thousands of people to join and a massive community to be formed overnight. Samurai was getting immense exposure and attention from all kinds of outlets and influencers and thousands of people were joining in daily. Suddenly, over night, we were in a position of immense responsibility and knew that we do not want to disappoint anyone.

In many ways, our prior inexperience and continuous desire to please everyone led to many of the shortcomings and pitfalls that are known in the context of the Samurai protocol. This is evident from our decision-making at the time — continuously changing prices of nodes, reward structures, inability to form, lead and manage a team, lack of knowledge in marketing, PR, communication, and overall management of the project. We actively watched the input of the community and pursued most of the suggestions proposed by the majority (not a great idea).

Then came the exploit, which was experienced by RING and other forks of the protocol over time, where an exploit was utilised to print an excessive amount of nodes, claim tokens and cash them out. Instantaneously, we tried to address the situation by blacklisting wallets, amending changes to the parameters in smart contract and believed to have found a viable solution. However, it did not appear to be the case and the hacker still managed to exploit our protocol, which essentially led to massive price depreciation of the KTNA token.

At the time, we actively analysed and studied the steps the exploiter took and soon understood that there is no way of moving forward without deploying a new set of smart contracts and migrating our current node holders using a centralised solution. Yet again, we listened to the input of the community, quickly brought forward a solution and migrated in a 1:1 ratio to KTNA V2. There was an abundance of aspects which were improperly assessed (e.g. liquidity arbitrage between KTNA V1 and KTNA V2), again as a result of our small team and our inexperience at the time. This led to a migration procedure which resulted in massive node price reduction and an extremely high inflation of nodes. Our first line of thinking was to apply the hot fix by conducting token buybacks worth more than 400,000+ DAI to yet fulfil the desires of the community. In retrospect, presumably not the best decision.

Furthermore, we quickly realised that the amount of nodes created at the time was nowhere near sustainable and it would effectively drown the protocol by diluting the node and token holders. At this point in time we have decided to actively begin consulting our decisions with more experienced developers and as ridiculous as it may appear, migrating again appeared to be the only solution.

Our hypothesis was that by introducing a ratio which reduces the amount of nodes, we will circumvent massive inflation, node price reduction and although our node and token holders will have fewer nodes and tokens, the protocol will be situated in a much stronger position. This ended up being somewhat true, however, different problems were encountered as a result of the shifting sentiment of node projects at the time, as it appeared that the existing model was somewhat unsustainable.

All of the internal processes heavily relied on the active involvement of me and Masamune. The structure in place at the time only worked if everyone is present and active. One would not proceed without the other's consent and approval, as during our short time in crypto we quickly understood how difficult it is to trust people in the space.

Although, this structure presented positive implications for major, meaningful decisions, it turned out to be inefficient once I began to experience health related issues as a result of the ongoing pandemic (hence the 5 day inactivity). It also appeared to be inefficient for providing information and clarity to our previous moderators, which have been actively coming to convoluted decisions and conclusions in the mean time.

It is understandable that without context many details and aspects could have been easily misinterpreted. From our “sudden involvement” in other projects, to us utilising Tornado to protect our wallets based on receiving information that someone is trying to intercept them.

Despite how these details and pieces of information have been put together and portrayed in a malicious manner, we have never shied away or discouraged anyone from publishing any kind of information. Why? Because we know the truth. Although, timely communication and organisational clarity does not appear to be our greatest strength, the intentions behind all of the decisions executed during the existence of the protocol speak for themselves. The blockchain is open and anyone can access it. Regardless of the extensive efforts one may have to misinterpret our decisions and actions, there are always good intentions behind every decision we make.

Please, do not use this information as a reason to witch hunt, attack or assault anyone involved. There were good reasons for the moderators to make the decisions they did at the time and they tried to maintain the best interests of the community. We live in the dynamic world of crypto, whereby everyone unfortunately suspects one another and we understand that often times many things can be a cause for concern. However, not with us. We have nothing to hide and nothing to shy away from, as we know we have a clean slate. Regardless, of how individuals may be upset about the previous events (many of which are out of our control) and may insist on our 'conscious' or 'premeditated' wrong doing, there is a visible abundance of history and decisions showcasing our never ending commitment and desire to make things right.

— — — —

Now that the air is clear and FUD is addressed, we can move onto the finer things in life — the future of Honour. The community vote has successfully concluded in favour of running the project and hence we will provide you with the plan and upcoming events set out for the project:

1. Hiring moderators & managers

We are hiring community moderators and a manager that will liaison between the core team and moderators, to ensure continuous and consistent flow of information. This will enable community members to remain informed and up to date with everything surrounding the protocol.

2. Nodes as NFTs

We have began to revamp the current design, architecture, and setup of Honour nodes to transition into a a node structure utilising NFTs. The NFT technology allows nodes to be fragmented into multiple pieces and thus it enhances the accessibility of the protocol.

3. RPC Endpoints

We have successfully tested the RPC endpoints on our alpha group and are reaching a stage, where the protocol will be ready to move on to the next stage of testing. We will have to scale and orchestrate the deployment of nearly 100k endpoints to accommodate for all the existing and new nodes, and doing so will require an expertise in the field of DevOps. However, after this crucial stage, the protocol will be ready to adopt and implement the infrastructure of RPC endpoints.

4. UI/UX Revamp

As previously showcased on our Twitter account, the new redesign process of the Samurai dApp has concluded and is reaching its final parts. It will be more in line with our newly established brand guidelines and image. Furthermore, we will be using various refactoring techniques, such as splitting common elements into Storybook components and libraries, in order to achieve higher dev velocity when it comes to iterating the frontend decentralised application.

We want to give a special thanks to all the community members that have been messaging us, supporting us and waited for us to come in and provide input. We appreciate you taking the time to read this. More information will be provided in our Discord and Twitter in the coming days. If you have any questions, please feel free to come to our server and ask away.