The Financial Times (FT) news outlet published an article[1] Wednesday, Apr 25, detailing allegations levelled by several people against IOTA[2]. According to FT’s report, some members of IOTA’s team have resorted to threats of legal action or violence when dealing with critics of their project online.
When asked to comment on the report, Ralf Rottmann, a member of the IOTA Foundation’s board of directors, told Cointelegraph that he “joined the Board of Directors just recently and [is] not personally aware of any of the alleged incidents”:
“What I do know: IOTA Foundation continues to win renowned corporate partners and advisors, who all carefully vet whom they partner with, which to me speaks for itself. Also I’ve never personally witnessed any IOTA Foundation member to intimidate anybody. There have been heated debates on twitter, but that goes with the territory as you clearly know. Would love for Cointelegraph to focus on the progress and positive!”
The FT article details the response by IOTA to a study last fall, conducted by the MIT Media Lab and written about on Medium[3], that alleges the researchers found a vulnerability in the IOTA’s hash function - written by IOTA developers - that would have allowed for forgeries of IOTA signatures.
The apparent vulnerabilities have since been removed, and the IOTA team has since spoken out that the vulnerabilities would not have allowed for forgery, as their Coordinator would have stopped it - IOTA’s “tangle” system, as opposed to a Blockchain[4] system, is not yet decentralized.
According to the FT, when a writer for Forbes covered MIT’s research[5], the IOTA Foundation board of directors’ member Dominik Schiener sent message on Slack that “she needs to be slapped.”
