So I have an interesting question: should you forgive a project that has made an egregious error?

 

I think about this question constantly. After all, projects are really just people doing what they think is best. 

 

But is that a sound investing strategy? What is the threshold at which you should never believe or trust a project again? 

 

I think this also gets into the territory where investors lose their way. They become too forgiving, to their own detriment. They fall in love with a project so much that it ends up being some sort of Stockholm Syndrome. 

 

As such, I think the natural answer here is to find a balance. It’s seeking to hold projects accountable for their actions and missteps. At the same time, also knowing when to consider them again, or hold through the FUD. 

 

I can think of a few examples. 

 

When I was covering Raiblocks rebranding into Nano, I learned of a possible partnership with a project called Dadi. But, a few weeks later, it was revealed that Dadi had stolen their whitepaper from another project.

 

Nano immediately went about distancing themselves from Dadi while Dadi went into damage control, but the harm had already been done. 

 

Now, having spoke to members of both teams, I think it’s a good example of how one wrong move can be so devastating in this nascent industry. The Dadi team member was especially incistant that the project was doing good work, and that the whitepaper slip-up was the result of a contractor and poor reviewing of the whitepaper. 

 

But do they deserve to be considered as a project worth investing in?

 

How about Oyster Perl?

 

I covered how Oyster nearly died in October when the company’s sole owner, known as Bruno Block, allegedly made off with roughly $300,000 in the token.

 

It was not a good look. 

 

The current CEO, William Cordes, discussed how they are in the process of a private investigation that will likely end with a lawsuit. 

 

Suing your token’s creator for stealing funds seems pretty damning, does it not?

 

And yet, Oyster is in the process of rebranding. 

 

Their new protocol, Opacity, seeks to rebuild trust in the project. 

 

Essentially, Opacity is a competitor to Siacoin, but based on IOTA. Files uploaded via Opacity are stored on the IOTA Tangle. This means that redundant duplicates are stored throughout the network topology of the Tangle, therefore mitigating the threat of data loss. Nodes running the Opacity Protocol perform Proof of Work to guarantee that the Tangle retains the data.
 

So, as Oyster tries to move past their worst day, the question to be asked is will it be enough?

 

I think, in both my examples, these projects are showing that there’s only one correct response when you make a grave misstep: hard work.

 

If a project is willing to persevere and try to rebuild trust, that’s something great to see. 

 

It still might not be enough as crypto investors are a fickle bunch. But, if they can prove they they deserve to be reconsidered, then maybe they deserve it.

 

Do you have any projects that you think need to be reconsidered? Let’s discuss them in the “crypto-project-talk” discord chatroom!