Written by: shushu
The Ethereum ecosystem has just experienced a reversal in the past two days, but the Ethereum community is not calm. Former team members of the zkRollup project Scroll and the co-founder of Movement, which just finished the test network and announced the airdrop, quarreled. Scroll accused Movement of code plagiarism, and in turn, Movement said that the Scroll team behaved improperly and damaged the reputation of the Layer 2 ecosystem. At present, the official members of the Scroll team have not officially responded.
Why do people fight openly?
The argument started in someone else’s comment section. @enshriningplebs said, “We made up the concept of “postconfirmations” to issue our tokens before the mainnet launch.” @seunlanlege replied jokingly, “Oh, so it’s only cool for researchers at the Ethereum Foundation to make up some objectively meaningless garbage protocols? What a double standard.”
Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movement Labs, added, “Yes, only Uniswap and Flashbots are allowed to do this because they are aligned with Ethereum’s interests (I love their architecture, by the way). As for the thousands of buzzwords we created for those useless EVM L2s, that’s much more ethical.”
Then, Toghrul, a former member of the Scroll team, responded directly to Rushi’s irony by saying, “Stop being so high and mighty, okay?”
"Let's talk about the buzzwords created by EVM L2?" He believes that the new term "postconfirmations" is essentially just a name change for "preconfirmations", and the name change was made because they were ridiculed when they called themselves "Fast Finality Rollup". What's even more outrageous is that they themselves don't understand whether it is an optimistic Rollup or a sidechain. These two architectures are contradictory.
Toghrul mentioned that he had raised these issues in a panel discussion, but the other party responded that "no one uses them, so they can't be considered original", which made people full of questions. He also said that the entire code base of Movement was almost forked from Aptos, with only minor changes. On the other hand, those so-called "useless EVM L2" have produced many widely used core technologies, such as Polygon's invention of Plonky2, Arbitrum's universal fraud proof based on Wasm, and Movement can't even add EVM support.
Rushi showed no mercy and asked directly, "High and mighty? Are you kidding?" and then began to list Scroll's crimes one by one.
1. After taking advantage of the community for many years, they launched a predatory incentive plan and ultimately passed the burden on to ordinary investors.
2. The team had been selling secondary market share for several years before going online.
3. The rest of the team was forced to buy in at a $1.8 billion valuation, while senior leadership was selling at the same time.
4. You can even directly allocate the airdrop to your own wallet to cash out.
5. Designed the most predatory token economic model with the goal of harming every community member.
To express Rushi's anger directly, here is his original text for readers to feel:
“Today, almost no one wants to call themselves EVM L2 because of what you did. You delivered the worst product, the entire community and ecosystem are full of resentment towards you, and now it is obvious that you are bored. I will not comment on technical matters, that should be solved by researchers. You have been "pursuing" me for several months, and I have remained quiet and respectful. Technical arguments are one thing, and I believe we can improve, but you have crossed the line. If you want to debate with Franck on Spaces, go ahead. Otherwise, please improve your own chain and stop making it look like a complete scam.”
He added, “I have respect for some members of your team, but Scroll and you are arguably one of the worst players in this field (even at least 6 of your colleagues - half of whom have left - came to apologize to me and expressed regret for your behavior).”
“In the past two months, a quarter of your team has applied for our positions. There are a lot of people I really like over there, so I feel a little bad about that, but please don’t use the word condescending to describe me, haha.”
Finally, Rushi said, "I am actively searching for "Scroll scam" and learning more about it. @toghrulmaharram don't bother me, haha."
Scroll Controversy
Earlier this year, Starknet sparked public outrage over the term “electronic beggar.” Coincidentally, Scroll also made the same mistake. Its senior researcher Toghrul Maharramov directly called the other party an “electronic beggar” when “confronting” with the user, and even used malicious words such as fxxk when posting a post mocking the user for trying to get an airdrop.
On September 15, World Liberty Financial, a crypto project under the Trump family, announced that Scroll co-founder Sandy Peng became a consultant for the project, which was considered by the community as an example of the Scroll team's ability to maintain relationships within the circle.
In October, Scroll became the first pre-market trading project on Binance and announced its token economics. However, this news aroused doubts from the community, accusing Scroll of having too low an airdrop quota and Binance Launchpool of having too high an allocation ratio, which was obviously a show of goodwill to Binance.
According to the data, the total supply of SCR is 1 billion, and the initial circulation is only 190 million, accounting for 19% of the total. In the token distribution, airdrops account for only 15%, while the ecosystem and growth account for 35%, and the Scroll DAO treasury accounts for 10%.
Even for the 15% airdrop, only 2% will be circulated during the TGE, and the remaining part will be gradually unlocked within four years. In contrast, Binance Launchpool allocated 5.5%, and the TGE circulation ratio of this part is as high as 2.5%, and the remaining 17% will also be unlocked within four years. This design makes the initial circulation ratio of Launchpool much higher than the community airdrop.
In addition, the Scroll Foundation accounts for 10%, core contributors account for 23%, and investors account for 17%. The tokens of core contributors and investors will not be unlocked until one year after the TGE, but the ecosystem, Launchpool, and Scroll Foundation account for a large proportion of the initial circulation. This distribution mechanism amplifies the weight of Binance and large institutions, while the interests of the community are greatly compressed, which deepens the community's doubts about the design of Scroll's token economics.
The community used K-line to show Scroll what uniqueness means, and even Scroll's project logo was ridiculed by the community.
On the one hand, Scroll is very good at upward management, but on the other hand, it seems to be unable to cope with community management. After the dispute between the former team members and Rushi broke out, from the community's perspective, Movement is clearly in the upper hand in public opinion.
What the community thinks
Leo Wong, founder of Movement ecosystem DEX WarpGate, said that the attack launched by Toghrul not only lacked technical basis, but was also full of malicious intent. While he blamed Movement's terminology or architecture, Scroll's predatory behavior was self-evident: internal selling, exploitative token economic models, and community farming with false promises. These actions not only made Scroll infamous, but also tarnished the concept of a fair blockchain ecosystem.
“If there are technical criticisms of Scroll, please let your researchers and engineers raise them in a respectful manner. Recourse to personal attacks and public smear campaigns only highlights your lack of confidence in your platform and practices. The blockchain industry relies on collaboration, transparency, and trust, not petty vindictiveness.”
Developer Andrew Capasso said Toghrul's reframing of Scroll's criticism as an attack on him personally was an attempt to evade responsibility for the team's collective actions. He believes Toghrul is still fussing over the minutiae of words and doesn't realize that the real issue is the moral damage Scroll has deliberately caused to the community.
“Whether you like it or not, this undermines your credibility. Responsibility and integrity are more important than technical details. You are not an unknown developer, but one of their strongest PR warriors. Continue to be stubborn, and the Scroll logo will be branded on you forever, haha.”
KOL Enmi Wei-Chou said, "I won't judge whether it's right or wrong. There are some takeaways from these two conversations that I think everyone needs to know."
1. The "halal era" where you could raise money by simply aligning with a certain ideology is over
2. Please spend your money on people who really know how to do public relations with the retail community. Those who don’t know how to talk can shut up.
3. In the cryptocurrency circle, as a project owner, you are wrong and retail investors are right. Don’t compete with retail investors in investment research capabilities.
4. It’s best to treat yourself as a retail investor and spend some time playing with their favorite things
5. Brainwash the VC, not yourself
Some people also told Rushi that this was a completely malicious debate. "Toghrul's technical comments have nothing to do with Scroll's poor community management. This is a good mobilization for those who have been victimized to publicly support you, but you must realize that this is not a "public technical discussion in good faith."
However, Rushi believes that his response post has nothing to do with technical issues, but only points out that Toghrul's attitude towards him and the Movement team is full of malice and insults. "I have remained silent before because I can handle it myself, but I will never tolerate any insults and harm to my team."
