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Bug #22

Updated by didi almost 8 years ago

Synereo is/was a very ambitious project, aimed at building a fully decentralized Blockchain platform with attention economy builtin, suitable for a large scale social network.
[Here's the whitepaper](https://github.com/synereo/synereo.github.io/raw/master/whitepapers/synereo.pdf)

Some days ago deep conflicts inside the Synereo team became public. The 2 founders basically split up.
It's an interesting case study in order to learn what circumstances can lead to failure.
The culmination of the conflict has been publicly streamed and is [available on YT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLrvV2YKbZg) (> 3 hrs!)

The trigger

It displays a toxic mix
of the conflict seems egos, different viewpoints, lack of mutual respect, missed schedules, funding issues, issues related to have been the failure to use [Special-K](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synereo#Special-K) as technical foundation for the project.
Over time it became
complexity and debt, lack in clear that the newer [RChain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synereo#RChain) concept was more promising.
However there emerged disagreement about the priorities of the project (general platform vs social network app) and about how to use the gathered funds.

The long discussion was moderated by Andy, a main investor.
The final, accepted, proposal was to split off an RChain project which gets full autonomy and (co-)funded by Synereo based on a to-be-established milestone plan.
governance structure, etc.

In the aftermath of this event, articles were removed from the Synereo Blog, e.g. [this](https://web.archive.org/web/20161007133524/https://blog.synereo.com/2016/09/29/standing-on-the-shoulder-of-giants-synereos-full-tech-stack-explained/) and [this](https://web.archive.org/web/20161007133532/https://blog.synereo.com/2016/09/22/the-synereo-tech-stack-2-0-explained-rholang-special-k/)

[Opinion and discussion on Steemit](https://steemit.com/synereo/@ervin-lemark/synereo-divorce-story-news-from-december-12th-2016)
[Insightful Comment of a leaving team member](https://medium.com/@eeik/brokechain-an-apology-to-the-synereo-community-from-one-who-walked-away-8243720ceecf#.rnvpt3duk)

The departing CTO heads http://rchain.coop/ which may continue [RChain](https://web.archive.org/web/20161018221037/https://blog.synereo.com/2016/09/05/meet-rchain-the-first-scalable-blazing-fast-turing-complete-blockchain/) development if funding can be achieved.

Would be a pity to see this project die. But even if, the research done so far may go into Ethereum. There was already collaboration in the development of Casper ([link](https://blog.synereo.com/2015/07/23/ethereumsynereo3-2/))

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