IOTA Foundation Scrambling to Quell Fears Amidst Board Dispute

The IOTA Foundation is seeking to quell fears of a major dispute among senior management after a transcript of a discussion between the founders and the Board of Directors was released to the public.

A statement said that after a period of uncertainty over IOTA founders Serguei Popov and Sergey Ivancheglo’s access to the Foundation’s Board of Directors, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been established, thereby giving them access.

As a German-registered non-profit, the IOTA Foundation had to act within the confines of the law, meaning changing its statute is doable “only by a supervisory board resolution,” the statement claimed. IOTA’s Supervisory Board had not yet gathered, despite Popov and Ivancheglo awaiting for Board of Directors’ access.

The statement indicated that the “circumstances lead to a situation, where two of the IOTA founders have been ‘waiting for board seats’ for more than four months.”

The statement added:

“Unfortunately, sufficient priority was not given to this open issue, and there was a failure to keep the missing board members informed about progress.”

Tensions were near boiling point under the status quo, resulting in Ivancheglo demanding beleaguered board chairman Dominik Schiener to step down from his post. The statement goes on to say that “Sergey Ivancheglo has since stated that asking for Dominik to resign was an emotional reaction to the situation, which had built up over months. The situation did not feel fair to him, being an integral member of the team behind IOTA as we know it today.”

Both the Foundation and Schiener have been up against a lot of criticism over the past year. In April, a scandal was uncovered after Schiener relayed to an independent security researcher that she “needed a slap. And the month after, University College London severed its ties with IOTA, explaining that it was “inappropriate for security researchers to be subject to threats of legal action for disclosing their results.”