FT: Multiple Online Harassment Allegations Against IOTA Team, Foundation Board Member Says He's Not 'Aware' Of Incidents

The Financial Times news outlet published an article Wednesday, Apr 25, detailing allegations levelled by several people against IOTA. According to FT's report, some members of IOTA's team have resorted to threats of legal action or violence when dealing with critics of their project online.

"What I do know: IOTA Foundation continues to win renowned corporate partners and advisors, who all carefully vet whom they partner with, which to me speaks for itself. Also I've never personally witnessed any IOTA Foundation member to intimidate anybody. There have been heated debates on twitter, but that goes with the territory as you clearly know. Would love for Cointelegraph to focus on the progress and positive!".

The FT article details the response by IOTA to a study last fall, conducted by the MIT Media Lab and written about on Medium, that alleges the researchers found a vulnerability in the IOTA's hash function - written by IOTA developers - that would have allowed for forgeries of IOTA signatures.

The apparent vulnerabilities have since been removed, and the IOTA team has since spoken out that the vulnerabilities would not have allowed for forgery, as their Coordinator would have stopped it - IOTA's "Tangle" system, as opposed to a Blockchain system, is not yet decentralized.

According to the FT, when a writer for Forbes covered MIT's research, the IOTA Foundation board of directors' member Dominik Schiener sent message on Slack that "She needs to be slapped."

Tim Swanson, the director of tech advisory firm Post Oak Labs, told the FT in reference to IOTA's response about the reported vulnerabilities found by MIT:."Once you start threatening independent research teams that do vetting and verification...you're not just creating ill will, but you're actually creating an environment in which security researchers no longer feel safe to provide independent verification of claims which benefit society as a whole."

TheNextWeb is hereby blacklisted by the IOTA Foundation and we will not proceed with our planned arrangements with them.

IOTA February 21, 2018 Sønstebø said once on Twitter - ironically - that he is "Unprofessional" to the media, more recently tweeting more than a week ago,.

Swanson also told the FT that he deleted a retweet of an article criticizing IOTA due to feeling "Intimidated" after receiving Skype messages from a member of the IOTA team about his retweet.

During an interview with Cointelegraph this January, Sønstebø spoke about the future of IOTA, highlighting "The fantastic team that [they] have put together and continue to put together, having world-leading developers and advisors is vital to the project, and something a lot of projects think of as secondary, but the execution is everything."