Clarifying My Early Involvement in the Movement Project

Recently, Coindesk published an article describing my early involvement in the Movement project. The purpose of this tweet is to clarify the facts.

Author: ++Sam Thapaliya++

Source: Sam Thapaliya X account

Compiled by: ShenChao TechFlow

Recently, Coindesk published an article describing my early involvement in the Movement project. This tweet aims to clarify the facts.

Before the establishment of Movement, I met with Cooper at Vanderbilt University and proposed to incubate a Move-based project, which led to the creation of Satay. Satay is a yield aggregator for which I provided funding and assistance to get it started.

When Cooper started MVMT Labs (before Rushi joined), he relied on my advice and help in various aspects, from fundraising and token economics to emotional support. I worked closely with Cooper to launch the Movement project.

After Rushi joined Movement and took charge of the technical team, the project's vision began to take shape. I gradually stepped back from my role as Cooper's close advisor and focused primarily on go-to-market (GTM) efforts. This led to the memorandum of understanding (MOU) published by @vannacharma, which was negotiated and signed by Cooper.

As the project approached the token generation event (TGE), I worked closely with Cooper again, 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 relied on did not accurately reflect the actual usage of the testnet.

Due to issues with the dataset, I suggested to Cooper that we distribute the rewards for all airdrop participants evenly. However, during this period, Cooper insisted on allowing a specific group of 75,000 wallets to receive the highest token allocation per wallet. You can find these wallets at https://move-token-tracker.vercel.app and observe their distribution. These wallets were almost the only ones that successfully claimed and bundled over 60 million ++$MOVE++ tokens, which occurred during the Move token airdrop on December 9. The heatmap below shows how these wallets were bundled and quickly sold off after claiming the airdrop:

During the claiming process, when we realized the issues with these 75,000 wallets, I again suggested distributing the rewards to mitigate the impact of Sybil bundles and selling. But Cooper chose to increase the claiming fees, which resulted in almost no other users being able to claim the airdrop rewards.

After the airdrop had already started, Cooper adjusted the claiming fees, but he did not correspondingly increase the claiming fees for these 75,000 "core-galxe" wallets to control the impact of Sybil behavior.

When users were unable to claim the airdrop due to the claiming fees being higher than the airdrop amount, most users chose to postpone and wait to claim the airdrop on a fee-less L2.

The problem was that the L2 did not go live as planned within 30 days, leaving many users in a difficult situation.

The current claims circulating are incorrect. Nearly three years ago, Cooper sought my assistance, and I invested a significant amount of time and effort to assist Cooper, Rushi, and the team in making MVMT a success. In return, I have faced public attacks and lost many opportunities and social capital.

Over the past three years, I have dedicated a considerable amount of time and effort to help MVMT get off the ground. To date, I have not received any compensation, while MVMT clearly has no intention of fulfilling the agreement to pay me the token rewards I deserve.