Disclaimer - This is part of our outside perspective series. Curious Cosmonaut Research is not the author we are simply highlighting some good threads and perspectives on the Cosmos ecosystem with their permission. We also, therefore, do not guarantee their accuracy.

Author:  Aqua Team

Source: Blog

Date: March 2, 2023

*** This is intended to highlight the potential high risks of the Aqua project in its current state.

Curious Cosmonaut's Quick Summary

• They claimed there was a vulnerability in their DAODAO on Juno ahead of their 12% of tokens being shifted there.
• The attacker minted billions in AQUA tokens to drain liquidity from DEXs it was listed on.
• Founder is fully doxxed and addresses concerns and what happened as well as that they continue forward.

Our history, the attack, speculation, next steps and the future of Aqua.

Hello everyone. I (Todd — the founder of Aqua) never imagined I’d have to write such an article in the wake of the events that have left $Aqua investors, partners, teammates, community members, collaborators and more completely heartbroken.

Before I get in to the specifics, I want to say that we are deeply sorry and regretful for the negligence/inexperience in navigating DAO DAO and securing the treasury, that ultimately led to investors losing their hard earned money. We understand our words ultimately mean very little and we are determined to let our actions pave the way forward.

The Attack/Exploit

For starters, let’s talk about the attack itself. Late Wednesday night (2/22 around midnight) I was notified by Rarma to check the Juno Discord. It was there that I learned that an individual (@DAOKnight on Discord) took over the $Aqua Treasury and transferred it to DAODAO for “safekeeping.” The treasury was backed by less than $300 (We planned on launching our DAO module with staking and promoting it to our community in about 2 weeks, and didn’t know it could be exploited — our negligence) and thus 12% of $AQUA supply was transferred to the DAODAO DAO.

When the attack/exploit happened, I had just finished playing basketball about an hour away from home. I did not have my laptop near and on my hour drive home, I tried to learn as much as I could about the attack/exploit. DAOKnight reached out to me that evening/morning and we discussed his intent to protect the Juno community and keep investors safe. While we disagree with his method and ultimately wish he had contacted us about the vulnerability prior to moving it to DAODAO, we still should of been more thoroughly versed on the risks associated with DAODAO. I wont go into the specifics of our multi-hour conversation (for now) but I did indeed thank him for not acting maliciously and selling the tokens on the market. That evening (next morning) we talked until about 3:00 am in the morning. I then instructed one of our devs to make sure AquaDAO was fully secure (stake more tokens, reset parameters, etc.) while I made sure the other 8 DAOs we’re indeed fully secure and not vulnerable to the same attack. I then went to bed around 3:30–4:00 am. The next day, I began contacting our investors/community about the treasury, trying to learn more about the exploit, and began asking others if they can take a look at everything and advise where they feel we need to improve. Soon after, I was made aware of a massive AQUA token sell off on Kujira. Come to find out, Aqua DAO was indeed not secured by our lead dev and the vulnerability was taken advantage of by a malicious actor who then minted billions of Aqua tokens that he/she ultimately drained liquidity from on Kujira, WYND, and LOOP.

You can find all the associated wallets, info, and transactions here: https://tan-fan-a8d.notion.site/AQUA-Wallet-Tracking-bdf2ffa3e6654f3aae1f465e30f9f981 (Please, if anyone wants to assist in tracking down this individual’s identity so we can notify authorities, please send us a message on Twitter (@AquaOnJuno)

It is important to note, DO NOT trade or provide liquidity for $Aqua on Loop, WYND, or Kujira.

In the days since, our team has worked tirelessly to communicate with our investors, partners, the greater community and more in both web3 and TradFi. We’ve reached out for help and have received an overwhelming response from devs and community members willing to jump in and help. Ultimately, one more set of competent eyes on the tech side of AquaDAO would have prevented such an attack. We are looking to bring on more advisors and developers to help craft our next steps. If you are reading this and wish to help/advise Aqua, please do reach out to us on Twitter and lets connect.

We also want to address the rampant speculation and misinformation being spread throughout CT and beyond. Before we do so, we’d like to use this opportunity to give a bit more insight in to Aqua, our structure, vision, info about the DAOs we’re curating, the challenges we have faced on our journey and much more with an aim for the community to better understand Aqua.

Why does $AQUA exist?

In our Intro Medium article, we detail why we created Aqua and what problems the $AQUA token + DAO structure can help solve: Please read this article for a better understanding of Aqua: https://medium.com/@AquaOnJuno/introducing-the-team-behind-aqua-built-on-juno-68641b87a2c2

To add some more framing around how we mostly view charity in it’s current state, please watch this Ted Talk of Dan Pallotta describing how charity is fundamentally broken and how to fix it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfAzi6D5FpM&t=505s Specifically take note of the Taking Risks section starting around 7:50.

A hybrid organization: DAO + LLC + 501c3

As mentioned in the above article a combination of the above business entities allows us to create all new incentive structures that we believe can revolutionize charity. All new fundraising tools and less bureaucracy without losing the vast majority of our TradFi/web2 networks and donor bases, benefits the $AQUA community. One such example… When its time to purchase a $65,000-$100,000 drill rig to send to Zambia or Uganda, do you want that coming strictly from the DAO treasury and diluting token holders? Or do you want the 501c3 chipping in by helping raise money via more traditional methods? Moreover, our plans to create our own drilling companies (LLCs) with those rigs allows us to generate real world revenue to bring back to the DAO and it’s stakers via token buybacks and distributions. Together, all 3 entities working together creates a foundation for Social Impact DAOs (Aqua) to scale more effectively.

• Many have questioned why Aqua has placed such an emphasis on liquidity. In short, as liquidity increases we’re able to invest more in growth. Think drill rigs (see screenshots at the end of the article), operations, marketing and more. Deep liquidity is essential to our success.
• Here’s some water wells we’ve done thus far as AquaDAO (next one is on the way)
• https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1OyasAE3-REO9-6ioyDJ0_8kOjPA3afoF?usp=sharing
• https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1Bu9gnEsp7V93fY7pZHvltyWXZO_ZlHh3
• https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10kP6ORcxRcm2-yzfZSiH9137pZWWbNC7?usp=sharing.
• https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1CUvu3kvbyPR2J8nYY8Jn4Yru9g_GHR2r?usp=sharing

Unleashing the power of Social Impact DAOs

We believe Aqua has the potential to create a blueprint for new and pre-existing organizations to leverage web3 tools for good. DAOs enable communities from all around the world to organize and enact solutions in a decentralized manner. In the same way that we feel nonprofits are bound by regulation, we believe DAOs and LLCs both have their shortcomings as well. However, when you combine all 3 business structures, you get the best of all 3 worlds. Ultimately combining all 3, makes for an organization that can truly scale their impact while taking care of their investors, teams, and communities alike.

Our Journey:

Many ask where our journey into crypto started. I (Todd) began investing in crytpo in 2017 and fell in love with it. However it wasn’t until I discovered Anchor (On Terra) that I became fascinated. Soon after, I entered the Delphi Hackathon that birthed Angel Protocol, Orion Money, Apollo and more. I wanted to create a kids savings account app that leveraged Anchors 20% yield (before Alice was created). The idea for the app was called Oasis Money (no longer found on this webpage: https://eventornado.com/event/defi-connected#home). Anyhow, it was then that I met a lot of people within the Terra community. Eventually it led to creating a proposal on Pylon Protocol to utilize their gateway fund model to issue DP tokens that would ultimately leverage anchors APY to help fund water wells. The proposal passed and we were on our way.

Below are some conversations between Woojin from Pylon Protocol and I. *Notice the Juno/Terra/Juno talks and reasoning for wanting to go multi-chain.

After Prop 16 passed on Juno, we had to make some tough decisions. We felt the community had fractured and feared liquidity would flee. Taking in to account the best overall future prospective for Aqua, we decided to pursue a launch on Terra considering our past connections there and overall more robust ecosystem and tooling.

Below you see chats with Bruce from Apollo (Farmer’s Market Launch) and Dozzin from ATLO.

We we’re also working with Valkyrie Protocol to host an IPC launch.

Next, with multiple platforms secured for launch, we were ready to hit the ground running. And then UST collapsed along with our treasury. We all know what ensued. Soon after, I reached out to Wolf/Lobo and he welcomed us back to Juno. At the time, the vast majority of our treasury was in UST.

As you all know, the Terra collapse wreaked havoc on the entire ecosystem. It was then that we had to re-evaluate our terms with our original consulting/dev firm (we had some disagreements prior so we had begun to talk to others devs). Honestly, they were great to work with but we had disagreements around pricing/equity that ultimately led us to search for new developers.

In some of the Recent Twitter Spaces, people asked to see a few receipts, docs, etc. Here’s a couple from the dev side:

In that same time period we applied for the Terra Development Fund and were ultimately granted about $22k.

Then we had a dev team back :)

In the months after, we focused on picking up the pieces + focusing on bringing our TradFi partners and collaborators to web3.

From NFT sales such as the AquaNauts (that came with $Aqua tokens and more) to drilling more wells, creating new partnerships and more, we were back on track and eyeing a September/October launch on JunoSwap.

Around that time, we began to see some of the writing on the wall with JunoSwap. We were made aware of WYND and predicted that soon JunoSwap would be sunsetted in favor of WYND. In that time period, we had reached out to Dove on Kujira and mentioned that we would like to airdrop tokens to their community. We had seen them launch their new chain and noticed the tenacity of their community and their devs ability to ship quickly. We wanted to be a part of that and get $AQUA in front of more eyeballs before we began trading.

You can see part of that process in the DMs between Dove and I here:

The original plan was to launch trading on FIN after JunoSwap, but the Kujira community, with Aqua tokens in hand created a proposal to begin trading the $AQUA/$USK pair. Neither Dove or our team wanted the token to begin trading yet (referenced below)

With that began the liquidity bootstrapping/fill the order book phase to price Aqua. Because neither team wanted it listed, neither team promoted the pair (virtually no one knew of it) and very few orders were placed, the price tanked far below presale prices because many dumped their airdrop and we had to live with the results in the meantime while we waited for a full launch with external LP rewards over on WYND.

Throughout this entire process, we had created all the other DAOs via DAO DAO and were bringing their teams up to speed. Again, Aqua is the blueprint for all those to follow and at the same time $AQUA accrues value from each of the DAOs (via token allocation %) due to our curation process.

We were also making progress on our launch pad (AquaPad -think web3 Kickstarter for teams and individuals looking to raise money).

Around that same time (the gap between JunoSwap and WYND) I took out a personal loan and a subsequent business loan to make sure that Aqua was indeed fully funded through launch + had liquidity for trading pairs, pay devs, and more. People often ask if I have real skin in the game. Again, this is my passion and life’s work and willing to do whatever it takes to make Aqua a success. You can see those loans below:

Next Up was our launch on WYND (the team was always great to work with). On January 29th WYND listed both Aqua/WYND and Aqua/JUNO pairs and trading began. With highly incentivized pool, our goal was to attract $100k in liqudity as our initial liquidity milestone. As you can imagine with a project like ours in its infancy stages and looking to scale, deep liquidity is essential. We got off to a great start and are extremely thankful for our community who supported the pools on WYND.

On February 16th our pools/farms were launched on LOOP. (The Loop team has always been amazing to work with and we’re thankful for their support). We were making steady progress towards our next goal. We had both Aqua and Casa trading on multiple platforms, were building liquidity, beginning to reveal new partnerships and much more.

And then the attacks happened. The days since have been a whirlwind to say the least. We’ll comment more on the speculation that has transpired in the days since below. For now, lets stay focused on the next steps.

Our Next Steps

With a few days to reflect and countless conversations with teams, developers, community members and more, we’re currently charting our path forward. Reece (he has been great to and helpful always) helped gather the snapshots that we’ll soon utilize to airdrop Aqua V2 tokens (currently unnamed) to previous Aqua Holders, Founder’s Club members, presale participants, and liquidity providers across platforms. We also need to make sure Aqua v2 is bulletproof and investors are protected. We’ve had many members of the community reach out to help and we’re seeking advice and opinions on our best next steps. What we will say in the mean time, is that we will have more experienced eyeballs looking over the security of our DAO on DAO DAO and make it a priority that our community stakes to the DAO asap upon launch.

A couple weeks before our launch on WYND, we tried to locate the DAOs and couldn’t find them on the latest version of DAODAO. Below are screenshots of our conversations with Jake Hartnell and community/DAO DAO members. We we reaching out to begin preparing for launching our staking/rewards module set to launch 2–5 weeks post launch on WYND. Again, our inexperience here led to negligence and ultimately the vulnerability that led us to the attacks. We believed our best path forward was to place an emphasis on our liquidity milestones first and then begin our operations as a DAO with the launch of the governance and rewards module.

In the days since the attack, we have also read through Jake’s paper on Dao Security and best practices: https://medium.com/@dao-dao/best-security-practices-for-daos-59484932377f + have began a series of conversations with the community on what they feel are best security practices. Seemingly, ourselves and the entire Juno Community need to learn more about potential and unknown attack vectors on DAOS: https://twitter.com/pupmos/status/1630657943636172801?s=20

As we continue to take in more feedback and bring more people on board, we’ll ultimately release our plans for the relaunch of Aqua.

Addressing speculation and misinformation:

My parents raised me to “turn the other cheek.” I often tell my 4 children to ignore the noise and stay focused on the work. I also tell my wife that ultimately the truth will prevail and to let your work speak for itself. I still believe all those things to my core.

The reality of the world that we live in, and that Aqua operates within, is that we are generally quick to judge and slow to verify. With the advent of social media came cancel culture and widespread anonymity. It has also created an environment where its common to attack ones character, share sensitive information, and make threats with little to no consequences. Knowing this, I still felt it was best to be fully doxxed and wanted to set a precedent in crypto for projects with a charitable component involved. Even after 4 death threats, my home address being sent around, multiple partners identities being uncovered and contacted, multiple friends identities being circulated, I still feel it was the right decision.

In an effort to provide more transparency and ultimately let readers decide for themselves what is true/untrue, we aim to provide more context and nuance for claims made against us as an organization and against me personally.

Where to Start?

As mentioned Aqua is an LLC + 501C3 + DAO.

The 501c3 is still waiting for full approval. In the U.S. once you have the EIN, you can begin operating as a nonprofit while awaiting your approval letter.

As we were getting ready to launch the 501c3 and begin more traditional operations and get the LLC operating with its 1st drill rig, Aqua DAO was attacked/exploited.

What was an attack/exploit on Aqua, then became a full on investigation of my personal history prior to Aqua. The following addresses some of the most common questions, criticisms, misinformation, accusations, and lies I’ve seen over the past few days. We’ve stepped back, with advice from others, to not necessarily engage with the madness that CT can be at times, with the intent to gather ourselves and speak when we’re ready.

So while we’re at it, let’s dive in. Considering no one reading this post actually knows me in real life, has never worked with me or my teams in the field, and only know a tiny bit about Aqua, let’s give everyone some more information… so that they’re not going off a few twitter accounts’ opinions, guess work, and biased views (more on that below).

Who am I?

I’m Todd Sondgroth. I’m 34 years old. I have a beautiful wife and 4 children. My faith and my family are everything to me. To those who KNOW me in real life, know I operate differently. I’m either with my family or working, period. Everything I do is geared at optimizing my time to be able to be present for my wife and kids. On the business side, I’ll do just about everything I can to get clean water to as many people as possible as fast as I can… while delivering value to, and creating opportunities for, our investors and community. I’ve been this way for years. I am that guy who will run through brick wall after brick wall if that’s what it takes to get the job done.

My journey in to charity world started when my wife (then girlfriend) and I began going to church. Months later, she said we’re going on a mission trip to Honduras. That was a life changing trip! It changed how I viewed the world, was baptized and more.

We then went to El Salvador a couple months later on another mission trip. Again, a heartbreaking account of the conditions countless human beings have to endure. *Note the women washing their clothes in the river below.

We then found ourselves in Tijuana, Mexico a couple months later on another mission trip. Again, a life changing trip.

Within 5–6 months, I had been on 3 international mission trips and was determined to serve and make an impact. My girlfriend and I (now wife) we’re signing up for all the mission trips the following year when the pastors brought us in to the office and said we couldn’t go on any more mission trips until we were married. With that, I decided to begin my own trips. I named them Transformation Trips. I wanted to make sure that anyone could join our trips if they wanted to help. I didn’t care their religion, beliefs, etc. If you wanted to help, you were welcome.

Soon after I led my first trip to the same community pictured above (a retired city dump in Tijuana, Mexico). One of our missions was to install a water filtration unit (this has been a passion of mine for a long time) at the community center where the entire community could come get clean drinking water for free. We’d go on to gather donations to pay for any increase in the water bill.

From there I went on to create my organization, Change a Heart and lead about 25 international service trips in the coming years. Everything from helping build 20 homes, water wells, you name it. Locally we did a lot with the homeless (friends living outdoors) food drives, etc.

Let me rewind one minute. Before I started my org, I helped raise $10,000 for local homeless organizations through my first of many “Sleep Outs.” Video link here: https://www.ksbw.com/article/carmel-valley-man-goes-homeless-on-purpose-to-raise-awareness/1341593#

Posting this article (below) in reference to our friends at Sunnyside Reapers mentioning my job as a bartender and the comment “what kind of bartender starts a nonprofit?” Well, I did and I’m proud that we’ve helped millions of people to date through our work. Being a bartender allowed me a lot of flexibility to be with my young children and the ability to operate my nonprofit and serve others at the same time. Again, the speculation and abstraction run rampant and are magnified online in Twitter Spaces and more, especially when there is no context or push pack because you’re in an echo chamber. Yes, I was a bartender (reference below article).

https://www.montereycountyweekly.com/blogs/food_blog/why-baja-cantina-server-todd-sondgroth-left-his-job-to-go-homeless-in-the-bitter/article_a74f4b50-61ef-11e3-8f93-0019bb30f31a.html

Years later, I began building small portable shelters for the homeless that we placed at local churches, named Light Houses. Again, video link here: https://www.ksbw.com/article/carmel-valley-man-builds-portable-homeless-shelter-2/1336875

During Covid, one of our initiatives was to give cars to homeless women. You can see some of the work below.

Pictured below are some photos of one of our many transformation trips where we took teams down to Tijuana, Mexico to build homes for families in need (hence Casa DAO connections).

this is a video detailing Transformation Trips and showcasing some of the work: https://youtu.be/fStjITJCuWQ

Also, while we’re at it, here’s a video I made for donors who contributed to one of our water wells in Zambia (Before AQUA). You can see Burgess (on the Aqua team here in these videos as well). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIUer1cQV70

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the actual WORK we have done over the years.

Overtime, however, you begin to see that the structure, rules, and regulations of the nonprofit sector + the overall sentiment around overhead, costs, etc. are what truly hold orgs and teams back from scaling their impact. For a better framework of how I view this issue, please refer to this TedTalk of one of the most successful charity fundraisers we have seen, Dan Pallotta: https://youtu.be/bfAzi6D5FpM

This video addresses many of the issues Aqua has set out to solve for the charity sector. At times, as an organization, we weren’t afraid to test some gray areas to see how donors and volunteers would respond. We’d test different incentive systems to see how people would react. It became quite clear the incentives and funding structures had to be transformed. That then became my focus. As I grew more interested in crypto, I quickly discovered that in its highest form it liberates the oppressed, brings people together, and is another form of expression and creativity. It became clear to me that we needed to bring charity in to web3 in ways unseen before. THAT is when I decided to start my journey (above) that eventually became Aqua.

Fast Forward

Aqua gets attacked and a whirlwind of speculation, accusations, defamation, misinformation, half-truths, death threats, security issues and more all arise from a couple people on twitter doing what people on twitter do (again, it’s the world we live in and where we’re at as humanity). Throughout my life, when my community or partners are in need, I’ve asked, “how can I help?” Overtime, I’ve learned that’s not how all people respond in tough times. Some wish for your downfall. Some want to kick you while you’re down. Many don’t seek truth. Again, my faith and my foundation ultimately leave me in a place where I can whole-heartedly forgive the actions and words of others.

With that said, I have the responsibility to our investors, supporters, teams, partners and more to clear the air the a bit. So, below you’ll find just a few of the accusations casted at Aqua and I with our rebuttals via more context, nuance and information.

Lets talk about:“The Video”

Over the course of our work (again, we’re talking about all PRE AQUA), we’ve made hundreds if not thousands of videos. Many are made by me. Many are made by team members, volunteers, community members and more. Videos are made for events, initiatives, fundraisers, and more and posted on many different youtube and online channels. Some are posted online via social media, some are used for event invites, some used for thank yous. Many of the videos we have made have used 100% of our own content. Many have been a mix stock footage, media footage, partner content, and more. The video below was cherry picked and used to imply that AQUA uses fake video and that somehow we are not legitimate. Lets give some more context for everyone…

So the actual Video in question was made for an event that we call “The Water Walk.” Individuals sign up to raise money while carrying a 40lb water jug 3.7 miles (the average distance traveled to get clean water in Africa, Haiti, etc.). The goal being to SHOW people what its really like and use the funds to drill more water wells. Part of what we did was produce a video illustrating for our volunteers what a day in the life of these children looks like and had them watch it before they signed up.

Here’s a news article talking about one such “Water Walk.” https://kion546.com/news/2018/03/24/group-walks-from-carmel-valley-to-san-juan-bautista-to-bring-water-to-haiti/

The actual video for the Water Walk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiQnoRUZRmo

Here’s some pictures too:

Also, notice the SAME pattern here with our Food Delivery Service videos below. When Covid hit, I created a direct-to-doorstep food delivery program (for free) for our tri-county area. Overall, we delivered well over 1,000,000 meals, partnered with local farms, companies, and more + had 90+ delivery drivers, 2 hubs for operations, and much more.

This 1st video: https://youtu.be/osOVvwOKTgM mixes some news coverage clips with stock video in addition to actual footage from our deliveries. It was made for our delivery drivers/volunteers to say thank you and to show them what we had accomplished at that point.

This video: https://youtu.be/AQJGUcM-tko is a self-made 100% original video for the same initiative. Again, these videos have different purposes. Context matters.

Bonus: Here’s an article about our food delivery program: https://www.kron4.com/features/kron4-heroes/volunteers-help-thousands-of-people-a-week-through-food-distribution-program/

Next Up: “Scrubbed” photos

So once again, the claim is that we either stole or grabbed our pictures that we uploaded on Google Drive (from ACTUAL AQUA WATER WELLS) from FaceBook somewhere. Context = We receive our pictures from most of our partners through FaceBook messenger, download to a laptop or iPhone, and then upload the unedited/unfiltered photos and videos to Google Drive for everyone to see, share, etc.

We then went on to share ACTUAL screenshots from our partner and on-ground team lead (and Aqua team member) Burgess here:

These are screenshots between Burgess and I over time. Detailing everything from trying to send him a better camera/phone to vehicle issues, new wells, etc. Again, even after some of this was shared the claims remained up to be seen and circulated all over twitter.

Next: EcoStake Claims

I want to 1st say, Tom from EcoStake has been one of the very few people who I have had full trust in thus far when it comes to our journey. He has been helpful, supportive, transparent and great to work with at every step. We wanted to make sure we thanked him and give him an extra little shout out when we drilled a well that was heavily supported by EcoStake, so we had both vinyl stickers and t-shirts made. However, somehow that gesture was taken and twisted to imply wrongdoing/inauthenticity on our part (there’s more screenshots of course but these will suffice).

You can clearly see our communication about the sticker, funding, etc. in the chats between Tom and I.

Next: That $MIDDLE wasn’t secure before listing on LOOP.

We were also accused of $MIDDLE not being fully secured prior to trading on LOOP when indeed it was (mintscan above).

What’s really upsetting is that in the following days, members from Middle Ground and several other DAOs + orgs have been contacted (I have screenshots too and wont expose cell phone numbers or who called them, etc.). Just a disclaimer, all of the teams we are working with to bridge over in to web3 had/have plans to eventually introduce themselves on their own schedules/terms. There’s been next to zero respect for privacy in all of this. Privacy that I promised them until they were ready to introduce themselves, their projects, their previous organizations, etc. Prior to launching Aqua, we had MANY challenging conversations around privacy, doxxing, contact info and more. Part of those conversations revolved around people expecting near 24/7 access to you, having to spend much more time on Discord/Twitter, and expecting investors from all over the world to find your personal social media accounts (and family members), follow you, ask you questions there vs the appropriate channels. All of our partners and on-ground teams have seen what’s been going on this past week with me on a personal level. To say the least, none are motivated to fully doxx and many have requested that I clear the air and ask others to stop trying to contact them. So please, be respectful of their wishes. These are great people doing great work and they don’t deserve to be harassed.

Next Allegation: Illegally issuing tax-receipts from my previous non-profit.

Again, much of the focus of this entire ordeal has been on my personal past before Aqua. As explained to many, I personally wanted to move full time in to Aqua and was pretty tired of working in the traditional nonprofit world because the very shortcomings Aqua set out to and is determined to solve. Full disclosure, I personally wanted to completely stop Change a Heart. In January, advisors, family and friends all suggested that I make sure it stays active. So, I filed some paperwork with the state in January and we’ve started the process to making sure it’s fully recognized on both a state and federal level.

We have been accused of illegally issuing tax receipts to those who joined the Founder’s Club via fiat last March. After another call with the IRS this morning, they indeed ensured me that that is LEGAL (and that the claim is false) because we are currently federally designated and recognized as a tax-exempt organization. However, on the state side, we may have to pay taxes on donations that came in from California based donors (we’re looking in to this). So the “wire-fraud” comments that we heard this morning and the illegal activities comments are false and misleading. Our team is also working on submitting the 2021 and 2022 filings to bring everything up to date.

Bonus: We also had some people asking to see a couple checks

Here’s some screen shots of a WhatsApp conversation with a drill rig supplier we’ve been working with to receive quotes in preparation of when we create a DAO proposal to buy a drill rig and send it to Zambia or Uganda. Again, a MAJOR reason why we had a focus on liquidity… not to rug investors as many have claimed over the past few days.

Final Thoughts… for now

There have been many more claims about me, Aqua, and our partners that we most likely wont continue to address. We understand that even this article will be picked apart, abstracted, and speculated upon. Again, that is where we are at in humanity and something that is out of our control.

For AQUA, we will stay focused on the work (more pics/videos coming too of our latest well) and give everyone a full breakdown of our next steps in the next week. As stated above, we’ve been working with our community, developers, and more to retool, address our mistakes and ultimately ensure that Aqua is bulletproof pre-launch of Aqua v2.

I do want to again say sorry to our investors and supporters. That has been the hardest part of all of this on a personal level. I also want to say sorry to the greater Juno community for any unwanted attention or drama this has brought upon you all. For us, obviously we have to learn, improve on all fronts, and be better. We’re committed to that.

I’ve never been in a position where thousands of people can speculate on my character, life and work before. It has been challenging hearing people do that for a week strait. However, on a personal level, I can’t let it break me down and will continue to be the shield for our team/s. I’m focused on Aqua and ensuring we rebound and ultimately get back on track quickly so that we can continue to serve people in unimaginable circumstances while delivering value to our investors.

Moreover, I hope this finds you and your loved ones healthy and happy. Have a great day/night.

Talk soon!

Todd from Aqua