Controversy erupted this week when the team behind Elastos (ELA) were accused of using code from other projects with no attribution. This is of course not illegal in any way, but as much of the unattributed code was changed in small ways and moved around to different directories inside Elastos’ code repo, some say the Elastos team might be trying to pad the numbers on how much progress is being made on the project.
One of the newer projects in crypto and launched only this February, Elastos is a very ambitious project, aiming to create a decentralized Internet where every user retains much more control over their assets and personal information than is feasible with the current Internet.
It also aims to give Ethereum and other dApp platforms a run for their money on scalability by introducing a large number of side chains, so that the mainchain does not get bogged down under heavy load and only has to include the most important changes made on side chains.
Unattributed Code
Crypto is built on open source. It is fundamental to space. And intertwined with that, so is the ability to fork off other projects. Whether a community is split on how a protocol should develop, as with Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), or whether a new project starts off with an older project’s code and then develops it in a different direction from there; as Stellar (XLM) did with Ripple (XRP), forks are common in crypto, and there is no stigma attached to them. But that assumes you are upfront about it.
Like Tron (TRX) at the start of this year, Elastos is now being accused of using large amounts of another project’s code and passively trying to pass it off as their own by not indicating where it came from. The accusations concern code from Distributed Networks Architecture (DNA) by Onchain, the company behind NEO.
The Community Fires Back
The criticism is entirely overblown, however, according to the Elastos community. It may be true that Elastos’ code borrowed heavily from other people’s code at the beginning of the project, but as with Stellar and Ripple, Elastos is diverging from DNA more and more by the week.
Also, the core aspects of Elastos’ architecture are found nowhere else and is being written entirely in-house. It is therefore fair, at most, to say that Elastos should have been more clear about which snippets were taken elsewhere, and should perhaps not have stripped the history, but the vast majority of the project is original work.
Like every other alt in 2018, Elastos has bled over the last months, but compared to its January ICO price, it has only gone down 55% in dollars, and if you invested with ETH you are 135% up!
