The APIS

I know everyone is eager to hear project updates from us. Regretfully, this is not the update we, and likely you, were hoping for.

Communication has been lacking, partly because of the original dysfunction of the company's founding. While other founders wanted to control community management, in retrospect, it was not well managed.

As many of you may know, Shain and I bootstrapped and built the APIS project in Q1 and Q2 2021, and in recent months, we developed several potential product offerings. We were in the final stage of delivering our blockchain data product to our first customer, a well-known blockchain gaming company on Binance Smart Chain.

Understanding the circumstances around the project's founding is critical to understanding its current state, so I will brief you. Shain and I were propositioned by two of the other founders in Q4 2020 to collaborate on a small application. In September and November 2020, Andrew joined us to co-author a whitepaper with me, and we realized we had a project with significant potential. We designed an early roadmap and began plans to achieve it while building out the foundations of the project.

In March 2021, the project raised funds directly to another founder's personal Binance account. Unbeknownst to Shain and myself, an entirely different plan was formed: to create a "pump-and-dump" fire listing on the exchanges the other founders had insider access to, and use our whitepaper to raise funds and execute it. They withheld development team funding for the first two months after the raise while they were attempting this, and we still don't know the full story behind it. However, both the other founders’ exchange connections fell through, and they were caught with few options to execute their pump-and-dump strategy. The other founder provided no visibility, but after weeks of arm-twisting, deposited some funds into the multi-sig wallet. We can only speculate what she was doing with the funds during that time.

Shain and I, unfortunately out of the loop during Q2, continued to build a development team and execute on the roadmap. Our budget was exceedingly tight, we built the product lines and expanded on the offering with a lean team. Now, we can provide real value to dApp developers, especially with the aforementioned data product, which we think has strong market demand and fit. However, during this time, not all of us were building. One other founder rented an office during the pandemic and moved funds into marketing and website development projects that never materialized — we still have questions about her use of those funds. Shain and I paid our small development team from our meager budget, and sometimes our own pockets when other founders blocked funding, and have a paper trail to show the honest work and all our transactions.

Two days ago, we learned that the other team members no longer intend to fund the development team, and intend to remove us from our roles as CEO and CTO.

We promised to run APIS as an open source project, and we will open source it. We welcome whoever takes over to continue wherever we leave off. We will maintain a .dev version because the developers no longer have access to the .io domain, for free. We have no access to the theapis.io domain, so ALL emails from [email protected] or [email protected] are not from us. Beware of frauds.

We tried our best to not only build valuable products, but also protect the treasury funds being misused (we own 2 out of 5 keys). We will keep the keys to continue safeguarding this against misuse, but we do not have the majority, and if the funds are transferred away, or the 3 other keys signed the transactions, we have no way to prevent that.

At the original time of writing this, the APIS Treasury still held $3,074,876.17 USD (0x4c2586114957720A3e57f76b2c4F6D5ddFfB0d06). As of today, December 22, 2021, the other founders have liquidated the treasury, without input or involvement from Shain or myself, to an address that Shain and I do not control.

Our intention was never to rug or run, and we have not. We have open-sourced the project sourced on GitHub as promised. To the best of our knowledge, the treasury is controlled by Vanessa, Kevin, and Andrew. We hope you all continue to let your voices be heard by them, and advocate for the best deployment of those funds and the project resources.

Sincerely,
Calvin Pak and Shain Lafazan

Initial release
Created Base platform and APIs, set up infrastructure--running our own Ethereum and Bitcoin nodes on mainnet and testnets, created ETH_RPC and BTC_RPC support, added wallet support and started designing unified interface for blockchain access APIs, etc.