On February 9th, a new twitter account named “PROOFEXPOSED” started following a lot of people in the PROOF ecosystem and leaving comments under posts, etc.
The main message of the poster seemed to be that PROOF of Conference was at risk of being canceled, even though everyone was still currently of the belief that things were running smoothly. While I’m sure the documents exist out there still, they weren’t too juicy - they just showed that Proof of Conference was likely going to cost PROOF a substantial amount of money out of pocket that they simply don’t have to spare. I did catch this, though - the order stood out to me a bit tbqh.
Although these posts spread like wildfire in a lot of the PROOF OG refugee side-chats that have popped up over time, they were quickly deleted from the account itself with a new message posting on the Twitter account’s bio - but not before putting the idea in everyone’s head that PROOF was facing more troubles than we already could see from the outside looking in.
Officially Canceled
After a couple short weeks of speculation, the PROOF team came out and announced what at one point was almost unthinkable - Proof of Conference was being canceled due to lack of interest, confirming the “leak” as valid.
While certainly an absolute nightmare from a public relations and optics perspective, as long as anyone’s flights and travel are refunded by PROOF (definitely am interested to hear if this applies to you), it was probably the right move considering the dearth of tickets that were sold and the lack of interest. With price points way too high for their own community members and a struggling project trying to keep afloat in the space overall, there simply wasn’t enough demand.
The community was understandably upset, as Proof of Conference has been heralded for a year now as one of the most important things being executed on by the team.
The disappointment seemed to catch the eye of Kevin Rose, who started to try to get into it with community members by posting and deleting responses to tweets.
Between the cancelation of the conference and a CEO going off on community members, people hit the markets and have been flooring Moonbirds and passes ever since.
Summing It Up
While the Proof of Conference cancelation was massive egg on the face for PROOF, it ultimately seems to be yet another example of the team putting themselves in impossible to win situations. Many of you know me as one of the biggest early supporters of PROOF out there, but over the months I’ve also started to distance myself as I no longer believe in the team’s ability to execute on what they promised. In web3, community is really the only thing that matters, and at this point I don’t know if PROOF will ever regain the community’s trust.
That’s it for today - I hope you have a great week!