Our Story with Stakeborg

For a very long time many community members have requested us to share in detail what happened with Stakeborg, and the reasons why this relationship was broken. The team did not want to share this information because they felt that it was simply not a nice story to share. However, to start a new chapter in the history of Swingby, it is important to disclose this situation and to be fully transparent.

We are a team of developers that relied strongly on our external advisors and unfortunately our founders made the decision to outsource most of our key non-development functions. Stakeborg was an important investment and marketing partner and our marketing activities were mainly left to Stakeborg, while external advisors were engaged for business development and financial related functions, the core development team focused on building a product that was robust, fail proof and relevant.

Relations with Stakeborg started to sour when Stakeborg started to accuse the team of employing tactics to keep the prices low (which would not make sense for any point of view). The team disclosed all their crypto holdings and their activities, as well as countless explanations to why this was simply not true. Even though all the effort to clear their doubts, Stakeborg stuck to their beliefs.

Soon after, Stakeborg came back again to insist that they wanted to buy out the entire team’s token holdings at a very negligible amount. The proposal was not feasible given that Stakeborg had no plans on how the development would continue after the buyout (e.g. how the tech and dev team would remain or work together with Stakeborg’s team (if they had any) on the project) and that internally, the team was split on what the value should be.

As Swingby tried to find solutions to improve the situation and collaborate to make the relationship a success again, Stakeborg stuck to their ideas. They still requested to buyout the team without any development plans and lowered their offer price instead. They continued thinking the same even after it was shared with them that some of the team members were not willing to go ahead with their extremely low offer price.

The team is committed to continue developing the project and to make sure it becomes a success with or without the collaboration of large companies. The expenses and maintenance costs of the whole infrastructure is always present, and from time to time some tokens will be sold. If this was a rugpull we would not have continued to develop and would have exited like Stakeborg did earlier.

Stakeborg probably no longer holds any tokens with Swingby as they have indicated many times that they are upset with the outcome. To us however, Stakeborg was a great partner during the better times and we still hope that perhaps someday our differences can be set aside for the better of the project.

Why DAO?

Ironically, the idea came from Stakeborg themselves when we were discussing about the buyout. At the same time a few team members decided that it would be a great way of realigning objectives and finding new talent that could help reset the direction of the project that was marred with many bad decisions made as to non-dev functions. We still have a strong development team that is constantly working on developments and technical issues.

At the same time, this would help Swingby to be better engaged with the community and to work toward full transparency with the community members that have stuck with us. DAO community members have certainly given many great feedback and suggestions that the dev team have spoken on internally but unfortunately not really engaged and deliberate further with the community on. We also regret that our initial fumbling with the DAO meant that many of our community members were not pleased with how certain proposals were made and that communication is still seriously lacking between us and the community but will strive towards improving that going forward. We will be releasing further information on how we intend to better engage and work with the community while working with a team of experts who would guide us along the way.

It will take time for us to better some of these issues and we hope you will stick around as you have to date.

Going forward

SkyPools — why delay? When?

Launching both the DAO (on short notice) and SkyPools together was no easy feat. As you can see, we have failed in launching the DAO smoothly at the expense of not engaging the community well enough. SkyPools is supposed to be a very important launch for us and with our track record of not getting compromised (security wise), we wanted to keep it this way. This meant intensive auditing, checking, testing, discussions at the dev level and stepped up weekly long dev calls to troubleshoot etc.

While we have delayed this multiple times, this time is final and our launch date is going to be March 29, 2022. Keep this date in mind, Swingby folks!

Roadmap going forward

We’ve found it cumbersome to commit to specific timelines, and we’re looking for more participation from the community in development matters now that Swingby has become a DAO. On this note, if any developers would like to join the team (either part-time or full-time), we’re hiring and can make arrangements for regular payments — subject to DAO approval.

Our team’s current targets, and areas for which we’re seeking talent, are as follows:

• SkyPools Launch
• Chaos Node Deprecation
• SkyPools Expansion / “Swap Mining” Initiatives
• Layer 2 Integrations (Watch This Space!)

These will be introduced as DAO proposals in time to come and we welcome any feedback on any other proposed changes to the roadmap too

This has been a very long and heavy post but we hope that it has addressed some if not most of the concerns that you guys have. Thank you for sticking with us to date and for believing in us. We understand the anger and frustration for the lack of communication but we will strive to do better.