In November 2022, Knowable joined as a bootstrapped, independent team of three to help launch Namada:@spork.Knowable & @almostFitz initially, and later @CryptoDruide. It was a big opportunity, and we’re grateful to the Anoma Foundation / Heliax founders for it. After nearly 3.5 years, and with no hard feelings, Knowable is leaving this role. A big and sudden change in direction from October, when we were excited to propose this future for Namada: A New Phase for Namada - Product-Market Fit (PMF)
But why?
There were political issues that kept blocking a much-needed Namada mainnet upgrade and twitter awareness that spanned months, with no end in sight. Issues that put Borderless ( Borderless Private USDC ) on hold, strained Namada’s partnership with Polaris / Osmosis, and kept Namada out of the spotlight while other privacy-focused projects prospered in otherwise uncertain market conditions.
In November it became clear that in order for us to continue growing Namada, we would need to assume the Anoma Foundation’s Namada responsibilities, including hiring the Namada dev team. We put everything on hold to work on negotiations with the Anoma Foundation from Nov into Dec, but were unable to succeed together. In retrospect that may have been a good outcome, because ecosystem isolation has rapidly become the bigger problem.
Namada’s insurmountable challenge
Currently, Namada is rooted in the IBC ecosystem, which has unfortunately remained isolated from where the users are. Polaris and Osmosis appear to have stopped using Namada’s shielded pool, and Namada’s access to USDC through Noble seems uncertain as Noble exits from Cosmos. Namada’s core github commits dried up in early November, Namadillo UI work ended in early December, key longtime devs were laid off throughout December, and now the NAM markets are drying up and closing. Heliax has committed to maintaining Namada, but in its current state we don’t think this will be enough to overcome the ecosystem isolation hurdle, which would require substantial investment.
Knowable’s commitments
Knowable has been 100% committed to Namada, with contributions across multiple domains, including operations, strategy, community building, tooling, ecosystem funding, and governance ( Profile - Gavin - Namada ). We’ve felt accepted by cofounders Christopher, Awa, and Adrian as peers, even early on, with invitations and support to attend all of their gatherings, and so much more. The Heliax team accepted us, made us feel welcome, and worked closely together. Personally, I can’t thank @cwgoes enough. 
To have @Veildev aboard was incredible–great experience working together, looking forward to more of it. The Namada community accepted us and enthusiastically supported all of our efforts in many ways. @Daniel’s unstoppable. The ways that @preto @zenodeapp @Rigorous have saved our collective butts cannot be counted. @mother0x’s been gone a while, but not forgotten. @bengtlofgren too. @brentstone, @chris, sugo, @Fraccaman, @Zach, @jurevans, Murisi, Fatemeh, batconjurer, Mateusz, Marco, Dominik, Pedro, Mike, Deigo, @tomas, so many Anoma folks, many advisors–too many names to mention. (I’ll probably wake up in the middle of the night sweating, realizing in horror that I didn’t mention your name. 
) There’s a lot of history here that we’ll remember fondly, and relationships that are sure to continue.
Knowable’s Namada-based Borderless efforts will end, but Borderless will live on in the Ethereum ecosystem with Armada (https://armada.wtf).
Knowable’s validator will be deactivated on March 5. We’re unbonding all NAM, and below you’ll see why. We’ve been migrating our infrastructure to Heliax’s stack, the only thing remaining is the infra for the metrics dashboard we made: https://metrics.namada.net. All tooling we developed can be made available, if not already: Knowable · GitHub .
Luminara, our ecosystem funding entity, will no longer be doing PGF work, and the legal entity will be dissolved. This is how 2,891,000 NAM was allocated: returning the Luminara genesis NAM - Google Sheets . Around March 10, we will return the remaining 52,379,111.75 NAM (of 55,270,111.75) to the community via Namada’s PGF address: tnam1pgqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqkhgajr
https://namada.help and https://namada.community will be available, if @adrian / the Anoma Foundation would like to take responsibility for them before end of March.
If there’s anything else I’m forgetting, please let me know!
What about PGF?
Namada and NAM’s decline has been hard for everyone. In particular, it’s worth noting the work of:
- TuDudes ( Copy of TuDudes Core team PGF allocation - Google Docs ), who have supported the full infra stack for three different Namada networks and so much more
- TNSO ( Namada Wallet mobile. Key management open source ) and their mobile wallet, https://namadawallet.com
- the many (!) infrastructure providers who have run and maintained ibc relayers, masp indexers, namada indexers, RPCs, testnet validators, and the entire stack for the testnet as well
- the Support Squad ( Call for volunteers! Shield Support Squad 🦑 ) and key members of the Namada community who have tirelessly helped everyone and contributed in numerous ways
To my knowledge they have received nothing or almost nothing for doing this, and many have tenaciously continued their work. There are others who did receive PGF, like the explorer service providers, and Kleomedes, who received a token allocation from Luminara for https://namadata.xyz. We think they have also done far more than what they’ve been materially credited for.
In fact, we have a list of names ( Namada community airdrop - Google Sheets ), since Luminara had planned two further PGF initiatives (which were disrupted in November): Contributor Airdrop V2 - Google Docs
Though Luminara is winding down, there is likely somewhere between 2 - 4% of the NAM supply that Knowable and individuals like myself do not intend to sell. No promises, but if it’s not too challenging, I think we’d like to try pooling and distributing to the 54 contributors on that list, and we hope that others will follow suit (eg. XAN airdrop; Armada airdrop). If your name is on the list, please make sure your addresses are up-to-date, and please check your messages from @CryptoDruide on Discord.
What now for Knowable?
Knowable was prepared to grow Namada. Our responsibilities had grown, and we were prepared to assume the founding team’s responsibilities as well. We had the strategy and relationships lined up to do it. But we have learned that while great power comes great responsibility, it’s not necessarily the other way around. Despite the amount of responsibility we took on, we simply did not have the power to overcome the constraints.
We’ve learned to respect markets, to balance being effective with being innovative, and the existential need for token alignment. It’s a ubiquitous problem in crypto: power must come with enforceable accountability guarantees so that the community and market participants are not at such a disadvantage.
We still believe in the thesis (more than ever): Privacy Thesis: Table Stakes for Blockchain Adoption – Knowable – ecosystems, not monopolies
And we still believe in the asset privacy infrastructure opportunity: https://armada.wtf
On behalf of Knowable and Luminara, wishing you way more than luck,
Gavin Birch
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thanks for being so engaged and thoughtful. your meming is unrivalled 