Open Letter to the ROOK Community

Governance Process
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As a holder of $ROOK tokens, I want to express my concerns arising from the discussions that have taken place within the community in recent weeks. After the post made by IconiumBCV (KIP: Improve ROOK Token Model), greater attention was sparked within the community regarding the current situation of the ROOK token within the protocol. This has led to various discussions among members of the community, and the effect has been, in my opinion, positive. In addition to benefiting from a slight rise in the ROOK token, the community has become active in pushing the team to focus on a necessary update of the project’s tokenomics. An example of this is the second proposal made by @rhizobtc (KIP Draft: Rook DAO Acquisition of ROOK). While the community has demonstrated a proactive demand for change, the team, and in particular the CEO @hazard, has had a rather questionable attitude.

In the past few days, two proposals were voted on:

  • KIP-42: Extend KIP-26 Through Q2 2023 (Extend the leadership)
  • KIP-43: Q1 and Q2 2023 Labs Budget Request

The voting results clearly show a part of the community that is not satisfied with the results obtained by the leadership.

The proposals have gained viral attention on Twitter, and particularly, the focus of the outside world is on the community’s dissatisfaction with leadership that has access to substantial budgets but fails to deliver meaningful results. This has resulted in a negative market reaction in terms of the price action of the $ROOK token.

Following this, there has been a large influx of new users on Discord, and while this should be a benefit for the project, the CEO’s reception has been questionable, as shown in the attached responses from the public Discord.

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Honestly, I believe that the responses provided by the CEO represent a red alert for both the current community and external observers who are monitoring what is happening within this DAO. This attitude reminds me of something… Terra’s Meltdown and the Humbling of Do Kwon

The opinion of both the community and the market is clear, and such an attitude from a CEO who describes the governance token as valueless and insults the community by calling them a bunch of stoned individuals who do not understand the mechanism of a governance token and the protocol itself is neither professional, useful, nor promising for the future but instead is just creating a toxic environment.

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I think my response will focus solely on the accusations made at Hazard and to set the record straight on the screenshots provided. All other more concrete discussions are better held in the referenced KIP’s on the forum.

While the tone and some things said by Hazard were not professional (no argument there), the discord has become a hot spot for self-proclaimed RFVoors who (many) were armed only with the knowledge of a single tweet by a CT influencer. Many of these individuals were not even Rook holders.

Many community members and labs members practically begged for many of these individuals to take the time to learn about Rook’s technology, governance processes, protocol, and people; however, most of these new individuals did not take any time to learn and would ignore resources shared with them. I could share countless screenshots of wildly toxic behavior and ones where they clearly state they are arrived to simply redistribute the Treasury. Many of Hazard’s statements you highlighted above were after countless efforts to inform them and ask them to be constructive. None of these comments were in response to well-thought-out, professional, and constructive feedback. In summary, these are taken out of context in a very big way.

One thing I want to really emphasize is that not all of the individuals I am referencing fall within this camp of people unwilling to learn. Lastly, I think open letters in general are a great idea and should be leveraged more. I salute you for caring enough to post this and present it in a way that is professionally written and structured.

In summary, Hazard is not the one to create a toxic enviroment; he was responding to toxic individuals creating a toxic enviroment

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Appreciate the feedback, however these screenshots seem pretty cherry-picked tbh. If you have been watching the discord for the past few days, you are well aware there has been a lot of productive, civil discussion between the team and community around all proposals you mentioned.

As Matt stated, many of these new users came with the express goal of distributing the treasury for an easy risk-free 2-3x. Tokenholders who have been around for a while will note that we hold 3 calls with the community per week, including a status update summarizing development progress every other week. What we are building is not a simple uni fork, it’s groundbreaking tech which is very R&D heavy, and we’re building it from scratch. These kinds of development cycles take a long time.

The burn rate point has also been addressed numerous times by the team in the community discord, and hazard himself has stated there is a plan to heavily cut salaries particularly on the ops side. Ironically, this change can’t be implemented without KIP-42 & KIP-43.

I would again urge any new members to please take some time to read about how our governance process works, and spend some time in the discord talking to team members and older community members about the project and it’s development progress. It’s disheartening to see so many new people come in and immediately accuse this of being a “slow rug” with a team of crooks based on a tweet without taking even a few minutes to learn about the project

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