The ongoing drama between the two projects built on the Cardano (ADA) blockchain escalated on several social media platforms on Monday, leaving the ADA community very disappointed.
The trouble began in April when accelerator program Cardstarter announced it would launch its own decentralized exchange, or DEX. Soon after, its founders encouraged investors to provide liquidity for the project on Uniswap in exchange for native CSWAP tokens. The platform’s developers struck a deal sometime later with a third-party DEX called SundaeSwap, marketing the deal as a “merger” last June. Per the agreement, Cardstarter will no longer develop its promised DEX, and will instead provide liquidity to existing SundaeSwap DEXs.
As reported by Reddit user “Environmental-Law768”, investors were later promised “great profits” during a YouTube ask-me-anything session for CSWAP holders on the SundaeSwap DEX. Last week, however, it was revealed that these purported profits would simply be a conversion from CSWAP to Cardstarter’s native card token ($3.14 at the time of writing), at a rate of 400:1. Holders who locked in $15M (at the time of disclosure) worth of liquidity on the platform, finding it a slap in the face, with no meaningful reward for their efforts. Charges of pulling a rug soon followed.
SundaeSwap and CardStarter both took to social media to blame the investor fallacy on each other – a lot rejection ADA enthusiast and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson K.
In light of SundaeSwap’s announcement, we share the following documents, which we think speak for themselves.
We will continue to fight for the CSWAP community. pic.twitter.com/6oM2rdcKYF
— CardStarter (@CardStarter) 24 January 2022
According to a Sunday swap statement quoted by Hoskinson, the June deal was purely a marketing and collaboration agreement. However, the SundaeSwap team admitted to using misleading terms on several occasions when communicating with users. To make matters worse, the recently launched SundaeSwap DEX is already suffering from multiple user reports of failed transactions.
During a YouTube stream on Monday afternoon, Cardano founder Hoskinson condemned the heated exchange between the parties. Hoskinson went on to elaborate that it is unacceptable for the fiduciary organizations involved, SundaeSwap and CardStarter, to represent themselves using Twitter, Reddit, Telegram and other channels of social media. “It is despicable. It does nothing more than try to abdicate your personal responsibility and damage the brand of the entire ecosystem,” Hoskinson said, continuing:
Please, guys, get your shit together. The two parties come together, agree to mediate, talk to each other, and figure out whatever you agreed to do. And if you can’t somehow avoid the mediation process, the courts are always available to you.
