Jonathon Dunford, co-founder of the ForkDelta trading platform, has announced on Twitter that he has been fired from the project by co-founder Arseniy Ivanov.
ForkDelta, a decentralised trading platform for Ether or Ether-based tokens, was developed as an EtherDelta fork after community dissatisfaction with some of the original platform’s decisions around ownership and development.
Describing the news as “unfortunate and shocking”, Dunford says that after two weeks of “very limited communication” with Ivanov, he found that his access to ForkDelta had been revoked. On asking Ivanov what was happening, he was informed that he had been “fired”.
Apparently the reason given for the dismissal was a token which “slipped by our listing process” and was later delisted. For Dunford, the “rash” decision is “very detrimental to the growth and health of ForkDelta” and he was “incredibly uncertain” about the future of the platform.
Dunford now plans to start a new exchange and thinks that several of the ForkDelta team will switch to his new project.
The news was greeted with surprise and sadness on Reddit, with one user, identifying himself as Jeremy Peng of crypto-currency manager BitUniverse, saying, “this is really sad news”, adding that Dunford had “given us a lot of advice” and that he was sure he would “make something bigger in the future”.
Though Ivanov has yet to comment on either his personal Twitter account or that of ForkDelta, “freeatnet”, an admin on ForkDelta’s Discord channel believed to be Ivanov, said that unfortunately he had “had to dismiss Jonathon from project leadership” as he had been “unable to deliver on his promises”. Though “some attempts to address the issues” it had become clear that “the situation was not going to change”.
After another user questioned the decision to block Dunford from the platform’s channels, freeatnet said that on hearing the news, “Jonathon decided to go ballistic” and had attempted to ”delete everything he could on github and post false and slanderous statements on other channels”.
Ivanov/freeatnet insisted that as far as exchange development went, “nothing changes with Jonathon’s departure”.
Other channel members suggested that “the details on the departure aren’t very transparent” and that the deletion of Dunford’s and others’ posts felt “a little bit like an dictatorship”.
When asked if there had been discussion within the ForkDelta team prior to Dunford’s firing, Ivanov/freeatnet confirmed, “no, there was not”.
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