DigiByte founder Jared Tate says he invested around $500,000 and more than 10,000 hours of his time developing the project. Tate called on the DigiByte community to take a more active role as he announced his retirement after 9 years.
According to various reports, DigiByte founder Jared Tate quit the project after his investment of around $500,000 turned into $500. Tate started the project in 2014 as a fork of Litecoin.
However, the DigiByte founder recently tweeted about his financial woes after spending nearly a decade of his life developing the project.
DigiByte Founder Walks Away After Nearly a Decade
Tate revealed that he contributed around $500,000 of his own cash to the creation, promotion and prototyping of DigiByte. After putting more than 10,000 hours into the project, he said he has been working four side jobs to support his home.
Tate acknowledged that despite his enormous contributions, he only has 500 in DigiByte (DGB) now. At the same time, he acknowledged his responsibility for the situation in one of his tweets:
“I don’t blame anyone but myself for getting myself into this situation. I trusted the wrong people, made some bad trades, and had the wrong priorities for the job.”
He expressed his determination to bounce back from this setback, while urging the DigiByte community to step up and become more involved in moving the project forward.
He informed the community that he still believes in DigiByte’s long-term potential and vowed to never give up, even as he indicated that he would be taking a substantial break from working on it.
However, he stressed that others need to shoulder more of the burden and actively participate in moving the project forward.
Jared Tate’s decision to step back from his extensive involvement with DigiByte stems from his financial situation, but he also expressed frustration at the lack of support.
“I can no longer afford to spend endless days or weeks [doing] things, only to be ridiculed/attacked and not compensated in the process.”
DGB Price Plummets 95% in 2 Years
DigiByte, an altcoin that shares a codebase with Bitcoin, is a fork of Litecoin. It is a Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency that focuses on high performance over decentralization.
His goal is to reach a speed of 280,000 TPS by 2035, but this will be difficult to achieve without a proper team of developers.
With no funding rounds conducted after its initial seed round, DGB tokenomics remain straightforward. It has a fixed supply of 21 billion coins. It is important to note that 105 million pre-mined DGB tokens were allocated to reserves for development purposes.
Right now, DigiByte’s circulating supply is 16.3 billion, its market capitalization is valued at just over $140 million, and it has lost 95% of its value in two years.
The current price of DigiByte (DGB) on CoinGecko is $0.00859. Its current all-time high was $0.1781, set in May 2021.
The token has seen a 7% increase in the last 24 hours and a 6.54% increase in the last seven days.
By Marina Meza
