This article has been updated with a response from Jake Hartnell.
Stargaze, a decentralized and community-driven proof-of-stake blockchain for NFTs built on Cosmos, has announced that it has parted ways with co-founder Jake Hartnell.
In a Twitter thread, Stargaze said that Hartnell had returned 30 million STARS– given to him at genesis– to the Stargaze Foundation. The remaining co-founders, Shane and Jorge, are “100% dedicated to Stargaze and will never stop building.”
From Stargaze on Twitter:
Jake Hartnell was one of the original co-founders of Stargaze. He received a 30M STARS founder allocation at genesis that was locked up for 1 year and vested for 1 year. He also received ~25M STARS from an on-chain developer rewards fund.
Shane and Jorge started working with Hartnell in 2019, initially on a validator business. Shane and Jorge subsequently introduced Hartnell to Cosmos SDK and CosmWasm development. For two years, the trio iterated on various product ideas, and planned to launch Stargaze in October 2021.
However, two months before Stargaze was supposed to launch, Jake covertly helped launch Juno without telling Shane and Jorge. Juno proceeded to build competing products that were planned for Stargaze, such as DAO tooling, an NFT marketplace, and a name service. Shane and Jorge only found out that Jake was involved in Juno several months later on a Twitter Space.
Shane and Jorge decided to forgive and continue working with Jake, but kept running into issues, like discovering private Stargaze code in public Juno repos. Jake prioritized Juno, and barely contributed anything to Stargaze during this time except funding initial development on ICS-721 and giving some small grants to creators. His last code commit was in Oct 2022.
Recently, Stargaze community members discovered that Jake has sold $6M USD worth of STARS. This had a material impact on the price of STARS, catalyzing the downward pressure right after the airdrop, and more recently at $0.06.
Last week, Jake agreed to return his original founder allocation of 30M STARS to the Stargaze Foundation. However, he still has 24M STARS with ~8M vesting: https://www.mintscan.io/stargaze/account/stars139a4n6w6dhwv60dj2clgwm6r0q84gju28z9at0
Despite this setback, Stargaze has become the #1 NFT chain in Cosmos, doing more NFT volume than the likes of NEAR, Fantom, Tezos, and Rarible. Stargaze is also home to Bad Kids, the most iconic collection in Cosmos, and the best performing Cosmos asset of the past year.
Stargaze plans to continue building at a rapid pace with one of the strongest engineering teams in Cosmos. We’re very excited for the future, and look forward to shipping Infinity Swap (an NFT AMM), IBC NFT transfers, Ethereum NFT transfers, and Stargaze IBC Outposts. Onwards and upwards!
From Jake Hartnell on Twitter:
Everyday is a blank slate, a chance to start a new life, to learn from the past. To move forward. I’m not going away and will keep building.
I’m not a saint, but also not completely evil. Just human.
If you hate me, I hold nothing against you.
Yes, I did sell STARS a year ago in the Bull market, if I had known what was coming as far as market conditions I would have sold some $Juno tokens too. Was naïve in thinking the bull market would last a bit longer. Yet, hindsight is 20/20 though, and we can’t change the past. Such is life.
Certainly, I’ve made some mistakes. Could spend my days wallowing in them, or spend my energy elsewhere. I will choose the later.
My biggest mistake was not being able to repair my relationship with Shane. Will own that. Better communication could have repaired many misunderstandings but I was too avoidant.
I’m still hella bullish on Stargaze (which is insanely undervalued at the moment). My hope is that we can move on and still find ways to collaborate.
Will push back on this part a bit, it’s a permissionless chain. I did not work on an NFT marketplace or build a competitor (which is why Juno still doesn’t have a good marketplace).
As for DAO DAO, it was mostly funded by Juno but I did pay for things as needed. FWIW, I offered to deploy NFT DAOs in August of last year but was turned down (Stargaze was planning to build it’s own DAO tooling).
The tokenomics were what they were. Dev funds were built into the chain tokenomics, I asked for them to be updated so as to remove myself, but it was not done.
There are always multiple sides to any story, but I’m not here to defend myself. People are angry and that’s completely understandable.
NOTE: DAO DAO is more than just me, I’m not even the largest token holder. Please leave them out of this. 
Anger and hate can be directed at me.
Going forward, I still want to support Stargaze. Really think it is best to be the #Interchain NFT Hub, and my genuine hope was to see a Stargaze outpost on every chain (including Juno).
Will continue to work to support Stargaze and think about how to best make amends and repair some trust.
I did voluntarily return 30 million $STARS to the foundation to support the network. I didn’t have to do this, make of it what you will. The high road is more interesting than the low road.
