TON Foundation - some build, others manage budgets

I took a week off and pondered what's happening with the money at TON Foundation. The meme republic hasn't been revived, I see no new hires, and there's no advertising in the US. The only activity is TON Core releasing updates to speed up the blockchain.

As I sat and thought about how this happened, we all knew TON was a big money pit; it's no secret. But no one seemed to question where exactly it was happening. After digging through Everscale and TON chats, I concluded that one of the biggest money drains is through RSquad.

These are the folks who worked on the jUSDT bridge, Tonseer oracle, TON Teleport for BTC, Trustless Bridge for EVM, TON Node on Rust, and TON Pay. I might have even forgotten to mention something.

All these products were created at the behest of TON Foundation. Out of all the projects, only one was launched, and it has a mixed reputation, yet millions of dollars were spent, each time announced as something new.

The story with TON Node on Rust is particularly interesting. It's an Everscale node developed by the EverX team (almost all node files are © 2019-2024 EverX), then RSquad forked it, added a couple of modules for TON - and voila, they earned millions.

Now I understand why there's a struggle with TON Core. While some are doing genuinely useful things for the blockchain, others are getting millions for code that no one will even use.

It seems there's more to it, and someone in TON Foundation is overseeing all this and getting hefty kickbacks. For those unaware, a kickback is when, say, TON Foundation pays millions for TON Teleport to RSquad, and they, in turn, return a percentage to one or more members for securing the contract.

This has happened before with grants at TON Foundation, where their own projects received funding, while real projects got no support. People were fired, the grant program was relaunched four times (the last time by Max Crown), and in the end, there's nothing, not even money.

Why keep such a contractor who only produces subpar work, yet continues to receive new tasks? It means some member of TON Foundation won't let them be replaced. And why should they? The money flows right into their pocket, no questions asked.

Meanwhile, Anatoly Makosov supports developers from his own funds (not for the first time), and AI projects, which are much needed, receive a mere thousand dollars instead of proper funding.

So who is this villain in TF, embezzling money behind everyone's back? Crown? Stotz? Or is there someone even more influential?

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