AnnouncementI have some sad news today. It appears that our lead developer, nio, has left the project. The reason I say 'appears' is because we can only assume this is the case due to the extended period of time since the core team have heard from him. nio didn't give any indication he was going to leave, and I had already paid him the 2 bitcoin personal bounty from myself, so IMO we definitely had an 'agreement' that he was going to act as ORA lead dev. The truth is nio hasn't really been communicating in any meaningful way on project specific discussions for a long while now, and this is obviously an untenable situation for ORA, and something had to be done.
nio was semi-active through August and into September, but since then he has gone quiet, with just an occaisional brief post on oraforum.org, but nothing detailed involving ORA tech direction itself. He was supposedly working on the ORA website which he told me would be ready in early October. Then he indicated he was going to be busy through to mid November with other committments. As of today we can see that nio hasn't done anything to the website, and hasn't logged into his accounts on BTT or oraforum.org for many weeks. The other ORA founders and I have been discussing the situation privately for a while, and we have decided that it is time to move forward with the tech side of ORA, otherwise we risk the project stalling, and possibly failing due to this extended period of inactivity. I really wish there was another option, but for the sake of the project it is time to face the reality of the situation - nio is gone, and ORA is without a lead dev.
We all hope that nio is OK, and if later on he wants to contact us again and participate in the future of ORA he would be most welcome.
@nio, if you are able to return the 2 bitcoin bounty that would help the project attract a new dev. I'm not sure of your circumstances now, but I am working on the assumption that you weren't a scammer, so I hope you are OK, and I wish you well in the future!
So here we are ... ORA has a (small) committed team of founders, and a specific target that we're ALL very excited about ('NXT monetary system'), but we don't have a lead dev anymore. To date we have tried to conduct ourselves in an open and honest fashion without excessive hype and false promises, and I know I speak for the other guys when I say we are actually quite relieved to have reached the deadline we set amongst ourselves for making this decision regarding nio. It was starting to feel like the ORA founders were keeping a 'secret', and that wasn't what we wanted, but we did all want to give nio as long as we could to 'come good'.
Over the last 4-6 weeks it was becoming more and more obvious every passing day that nio was most likely gone, but in a 'starfish' nobody is the 'Boss', so nobody has been in a position to 'fire' anyone either. After this amount of time it seems obvious what has happened, and it is time to put this 'out there' for everyone else to process. We have obviously lost quite a bit of momentum during Sept, Oct, Nov waiting to resolve this 'situation' with nio, but now it is done, and I'm relieved to be able to move on, but still a little sad & frustrated at what has happened.
I always got a good vibe from nio, so personally I'm worried that maybe something has happened to him, or maybe he scammed me, and my character 'spidey senses' need re-calibrating. Both explanations are quite upsetting, but tomorrow is a new day, and it's time to move forward.
Feedback welcome
ORA is hiring, lead dev position available, 5% stake available!