I wrote a four part article on the new token STA. Recently I've received a lot of messages about who is the founder/who is behind the token. This may be related to online campaigns trying to say the founder is x person or y person (usually x person or y person is a known fraudster or other charlatan) in hopes of causing a price dump: to buy cheap or just mess with the token, or just in hopes of hurting the project. Two points before we even get into that:
1. The contract and project itself are now out of the founder/creator's hands, it is a decentralized automatic contract. So the question of who founded it is actually not important. This is barring some backdoor in the code that would allow the creator to regain control (but the code is available on Github and no back doors have been found and it is currently being audited by a third party)
2. A founder doesn't matter in a decentralized world, see: Satoshi Nakamota. Satoshi is the supposed founder of Bitcoin but no one knows who he (or "they") are. It could be one person, ten people, they could be from Argentina they could be from America. The fact that the founder isn't known is actually a POSITIVE to Bitcoin as it does not have a figurehead to judge or pretend to lead the movement, it is owned by the people now. I personally think it is better if we never know who founded Statera and it becomes a new decentralized tool that has no "leader".
So who is behind door number one?
But just to put some of this FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to rest, let's do the minimal amount of research anyone who started spreading rumors should've done, we have really only one thing that is officially "Statera" and that is Stateratoken.com so let's look at who owns Stateratoken.com:
The name servers of Stateratoken.com point to: NS1.MYWEBSERVER.CO.ZA. The domain ".za" is the country code for South Africa (.ca is the country code for Canada, .it Italy, etc.). So it seems to be centered in South Africa.
The Organization Named is "Scott Botha," who is Scott Batha? He is the founder of the "digital asset company": The Burn Token which was what Statera was before it was Statera (Burn Token owners got airdropped the new Statera token). As you can see from the linked article Scott is seen as a leading blockchain entrepreneur in South Africa and is on the board of the South African Digital Assets Partnership (SADA, a Venture Capital Firm).
So a founding board member of SADA which is currently working to raise $10 million in funding and investing in over 60 projects over the next three years seems to be closely linked to Statera (is Statera one of their first investments? We don't know.)
Scott is also a blockchain architect at Digital Rand (huge project, check it out), founder of the Lothlor Token Fund, Enterprise Architect at Capulet Fund, Director of Technology at SADA, and much more. Dude is legit.
You might be interested to check out my "What the whales are doing with STA?" post and check out whale number six, they had one of the largest, and early, purchases of STA: 1.9 million STA bought for....Digital Rand (interesting, no? A SADA buy, another South African firm buying, a Scott Botha buy?)
Sadly, that is where the breadcrumbs stop. This sadly is not a fortune 500 company with a building address and financial reports, although they did put out a financial report. So, can we definitively say who the founder of Statera is? No. Can we certainly say who "controls" it? Yes and no. If the audit checks out and the public code doesn't come up with any flaws it is owned by every holder of STA. Can we say that all evidence is pointing to it being legit, and possibly VERY legit (being linked to a man who is linked to multiple companies, projects, and venture capitalist firms)? Yes, I can say that.
Long story short, Statera is not "started by" or "owned by" your favorite YouTube con artist, failed bitcoin scam spokesperson, or shopping network host. Sorry to disappoint if you were hoping for fireworks.
