Blog Urbit leadership uncertainty and latest developments

Ryan's proposal has expired, with a quorum, and the No votes have won.  

So, for now, nothing happens.  

What has emerged since is an understanding that besides a16z's No votes and the votes of the current board, several people either voted No or abstained because they agree we need a new board but disagree that Ryan's proposal was the right one.  It tried to do too much.  

Tom has submitted a new proposal for an interim board with restrictions combined with immediate elections.  

At the same time, at the direction of Curtis Yarvin, there appeared a post on urbit.org outlining the formation of a new entity and a "deal" for the UF to fund that new entity, Hidden Tiger.  In short, there is no deal, that post was simply a negotiating draft, it was not authorized by any of the current board members, and it has been taken down.  

However, this deal is a deal that Eddy at a16z has been working on behind the scenes, the broad strokes of which are for Curtis to leave the UF and form his own for profit entity and for the UF to invest some money in it.  

Generally speaking, I don't think that there is total opposition to this deal among the devs and the community, but the terms were shocking:  the UF to give up 66% of its operating treasury for a 15% stake in Curtis' new company.  

There was a three hour call that happened yesterday with roughly 40 people in attendance, And we were able to reach almost unanimous consensus to back some proposal that is either Tom's proposal above or something very similar.  The catch is we would need Eddy's (a16z) No votes to switch to Yes for the proposal to pass, and Eddy has so far said he'll think about it.  

Where we are right now is if Eddy can't support a new board vote, then we can't do it, and our only option is whatever deal he can work out behind the scenes.