Bitnation decides to begin its crowd sale now and set up a multisig later.
By Alberto Mata
Revealed on October 28th in an interview with Bitnation leadership, Bitnation begins its crowdsale before setting up a multisig wallet. The funds are going to a single key address owned by Bitnation CEO Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof. Tempelhof was interviewed by Andreas Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, and Adam Levine from the Let’s Talk Bitcoin (LTB) team in Episode #157. Andreas and Stephanie asked why Bitnation chose not to set up a multisig wallet for securely managing company funds, and instead launched their crowdsale. “Well mainly because we told everybody we were doing it at this stage, right…[and] the funds are secured. They are on hardware that has never been connected to the internet in an Armory wallet,” replied Tempelhof.
Tempelhof followed up the LTB episode with an update saying, “a multisig address [has] been set-up on 3 cold storage devices held by 3 different persons, according to the original 2-phase plan.” However, Tempelhof claims that they could not use a Counterparty multisig wallet to receive crowdsale funds because the multisig feature is undergoing security audits. Instead, Bitnation will receive crowdsale funds to the single key address and regularly transfer funds to multisig storage.
Some concerns with Bitnation’s internal governance were raised on October 13, 2014 when the crowdsale was just launching. David Mondrus (Advisor), Nathan Wosnack (Chief Communications Officer), and Matt McKibbin (communications partner) resigned from the Bitnation team and published their resignation letters on Bitcoin Magazine in an article titled Why We Won’t Be a Part of the Bitnation Crowdsale (3 letters from the former Bitnation team). There were concerns with the Bitnation company culture being “offensive” because it drove Bitnation team members to exhaustion and even the hospital. All three former Bitnation team members had concerns about the illegality of accepting funds from US investors. Lastly, the lack of a legal entity associated with Bitnation, the lack of a solid business plan, and unethical behaviors of Bitnation leadership were all mentioned in the open resignation letters.
Photo Source: Bitnation Online
