Official Announcement on Creator Address GDL Swapping

Dear community members, yesterday a lot of community members raised the issue of a GDL contract creator address swapping GDL for AVAX. This information has caused a lot of negative speculation among our community. We owe an official statement to our community about this situation.

1. Gondola is a self-funded project from our founding team, @avalancheskier, @Sledge and @Whisi. All our initial developer funds are locked for 6 months, and we have no token allocation in other forms except occasional petty cash payment contingent on contributions.

2. Apart from that, the project team controls the Marketing and Airdrop Campaign Fund, which are not locked. We agreed to use Marketing and Campaign funds to stake GDL and fund future developments with those rewards

3. Since the launch of Gondola, the team had self-funded all developments, including but not limited to adding the RenBTC and DCTDAO bridge pairs, the BSC integration and User Interface revamps. This was with the philosophy of saving community funds and adding value to the GDL project

4. Our lead developer, @Sledge had misunderstood the decision and sold part of the mined GDL funds as the development fee. He compounded his mistake by doing so without informing the rest of the team

5. The rest of the team only found out about this mistake after our community let us know about this. We are sorry that this has resulted in a loss of trust with you, and we will do everything we can to fix the situation & regain your trust

6. Our correct course of action includes:

a) Asking the lead developer who made the mistake to leave the project & forego his locked GDL tokens. Development will continue with 2 members of the team

b) Taking an equivalent amount of sold funds (2072 AVAX) and returning it to GDL token holders either through an airdrop or buyback, to be decided by a poll in our official Telegram channel

c) GDL funds’ ownership is returned to @avalancheskier. We will prioritize the development of multisig in the coming future

d) Furthermore, the Gondola Team will work to regain the trust with its community by taking a much more active role including holding regular live AMA sessions, working to be more transparent, and being more active on our Telegram and Discord channels

We are sorry for what has happened and will strive to be better going forward. We hope to continue to develop our roadmap and to create value for our GDL token holder community.