Crypto717 I fully agree with your sentiment, but I'm unsure of whether launching on many different chains was a mistake - that is an inherent characteristic of Xen being an "unstoppable" movement. It's mainly the other points you brought up - the projects that Jack has decided to work on are atomizing communities because they are so distanced from the Xen token itself, and he's gaslighting everyone into thinking it has something to do with Xen.
Take for example, this developer, who originally had plans to develop on Xen, but changed his mind after VMPX:
The initial design of [project] was actually including Xen but then so this is kind of the
thing that pissed me off, and this is not a personal attack on Jack, like I think Jack is absolutely awesome person just in general, but after the way he launched VMPX, it just kind of rubbed me in the wrong way where there was $7 million going into minting to run a useless do work function that just sparked up the gas fees for everybody and that money went nowhere he could have just burns in he could have just sent that 7 million to a buy and burn contract completely decentralized and buy and burns in off the market none of that just pure economic waste and creating a second token and now from from a tweet I saw he's also creating three new tokens: Xenium XenBlocks and super blocks and I'm like come on dude. So at first design I actually wanted to implement Xen into [project] that then if I'm going to pretty much dedicate my entire life to something I don't want it to be dependent on for example if if [project] gets massive adoption and Jack decides to launch another token and gets all the attention away from Zen which indirectly would take all of the attention away from [project] it's just that's a risk that I was not willing to take because [project] is not a hobby project like it's a very serious thing...
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dSbaRRpHhQ&t=3991s
Take note of what he said. He takes his project seriously, and the idea of integrating it into Xen when the founder is playing around with GPUs and ordinals like someone with uncontrolled ADHD could not have been more unappealing.
It doesn't help when his yes-men like SimpleWaters parroted on yesterday's twitter spaces "Jack doesn't owe you anything", when Jack clearly has a massive influence over whether developers want to onboard or not. Jack is obviously the face of Xen, and for him to give the public the impression that he's goofing around creating shitcoins left and right is doing a disservice to not only himself but to the community at large by dissuading serious/ambitious developers from the ecosystem. I honestly threw up in my mouth a little when Jack touted about fair crypto at the end of it when everyone knows he's winging it with VMPX and XenBlocks. "All roads lead to Xen." This is called gaslighting. He's making shit up and has no idea where it will end up, he just wants an excuse to do whatever he wants without impunity. Just like XenKnights, 333 auctions...same story same avoidance of tweets that bring them up. And the community just takes it up the ass. Time and time again. How much longer are we going to put up with it?
And to the inevitable reply "Xen is a community project, go build stuff yourself": let's be real here, not everyone is or can be a builder in this ecosystem (want proof? Compare the average salary of a software engineer to the national average), and builders' time and resources are limited. The best most people can do is point out where the problems are to point builders in the right direction, and yes, this is absolutely helpful, see https://x.com/razvancostin14/status/1713824201226829988 .
Yes, Jack can do whatever he wants. You can do whatever you want. But if the Xen ecosystem is to have the value in the future that we all want, we have to keep the captain accountable for steering the ship in the right direction. Hell, it doesn't even have to be in the right direction, just not in the WRONG direction.
It's time to call a spade a spade. Right now, the center of the Xen ecosystem is not fair crypto or first principles. It is the unpredictable, irresponsible whims of Jack and his growing list of abandoned side projects. This incongruence is the core of the issue - it is why the community justifiably feels lost. Jack is NOT just a user, his words and actions have enormous influence and they should be wielded responsibly by transparently and unquestionably representing first principles. That is, if we want anyone outside looking in to take fair crypto seriously enough to risk their own capital on it.
I hope to avoid a future where someone has to ask, "Where did everyone go? Where are all the builders?" and another answers, "Oh, well people kind of got sick of half-finished projects, shitcoins that were made and promised utility and never were, and the cult-like behavior of his yes-men where if you question anything Jack does you'll be burnt on a stake."
But even with that future, who cares because number go up, right? Well, I'd say it's the difference between being ranked #100 versus #3 in market cap. Why? Because the fair crypto narrative matters. The problem is that Jack isn't sticking to the script, and the resulting bad optics are damaging the ecosystem's reputation.
